The Kindbody Story: E5, The Baby Project

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2:01Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News. This series features conversations about pregnancy complications and loss. Please take care while listening. It's October of 2023. I want you to meet Kendall. She works the front desk at one of Kind Body's Chicago clinics. Her title is patient coordinator. And that week I was on mail duty. So that means that you have to go, you have to open up all the mail. You have to distribute it where it goes for the doctors. And so I opened it and we do peruse them. Like we do have to read them Because if we don't read them, then we don't know how to trickle it up or what to do with it.

2:46This part of the job was usually pretty mundane. But on this day, a letter addressed to Dr. Angie Beltzos, Kindbody's chief medical officer, stopped Kendall cold. Kendall isn't her real name. Like others in this series, she asked us to give her a pseudonym when speaking about the company. So I read this in the office and my jaw hit the floor because I was like, what do you mean? What do you actually mean we're doing this? Kendall couldn't hide her disbelief. Her coworker immediately noticed. And she was like, what are you reading? And I was like, dude, I literally looked at her, I don't know what the f*** I'm reading.

3:34because I was so taken aback by this letter. And so I gave it to her and she was like, Jesus Christ. And I go, what am I supposed to do with this? What am I supposed to do with this? The letter was sent by a woman who said she'd been an egg donor. And she was writing to warn Dr. Beltzos about the man she'd donated her eggs to, a billionaire named Greg Lindbergh. The woman had donated her eggs to Greg back in 2018, and she had the procedure done at a Chicago clinic which was then run by Vios, a fertility chain that Angie Beltzos founded before it was acquired by KindBody. I asked Kendall to read the letter.

4:18Hello, Dr. Angelina Beltzos. This message pertains to your patient, Greg. I am one of his egg donors that went through Vios in 2018. The woman then references a phone call she says she made to Dr. Beltzos back in 2020. I called you to disclose the truth regarding my egg donation experience at Vios. I informed you that I had undergone the egg donation under duress and had been deceived by Mr. Lindbergh, who had failed to fulfill the promised compensation for the egg donation. The woman calls the entire egg donation experience, quote, completely unethical and traumatizing. And she references other women who she says were also pressured to do things they were uncomfortable with.

5:00The letter goes on to say that Lindbergh continued to have more children from other donors and surrogates after the woman reached out to Dr. Belsos. And that during some of that time, Lindbergh was in prison for bribing an insurance commissioner. Mr. Lindbergh currently has at least five or more egg donors involved in different clinics across the USA. The number is increasing. In 2022, Mr. Lindbergh managed to recreate twins through surrogates while incarcerated in a federal prison, indicating that his family is continually expanding through the helps of these fertility clinics. Over the last six years, Lindbergh has had nine children with the help of donors and surrogates.

5:44Documents I've reviewed show that three of Lindbergh's babies were born while he was in prison, and two of them with the help of Vios and later Kindbody. I've also seen surrogate contracts that Lindbergh electronically signed from behind bars, which listed Dr. Beltzos as the designated medical provider and Lindbergh as the sole intended parent. In February of 2022, Kindbody bought Vios and the clinic continued to play a crucial role in Lindbergh's baby project. Out of the six additional children Lindbergh went on to have since that time, three of them were born through surrogates treated at Kindbody.

6:25The letter continues with the woman saying she and other egg donors are concerned that Lindbergh is lying to them about what is happening with their eggs. The woman says he originally promised to tell her when he used her embryos and whether any children were created. But she says she doesn't trust him to be honest about that. She ends it by writing, I sincerely hope that you took my phone call in 2020 seriously and kept ethics in mind and that you have not assisted Mr. Lindbergh in his efforts to create additional children. Sincerely, the patient. So the letter, addressed to Kindbody, painted a disturbing picture of what it suggested the company was taking part in.

7:08Kindbody said that it didn't acquire Vios until years after the first stages of Lindbergh's baby project. It declined to comment further for this podcast. Dr. Baltzos didn't respond to interview requests. From Bloomberg and iHeart Podcasts, you're listening to IVF Disrupted, the KindBody story. I'm your host, Jackie DeVallos.

7:36You've heard how KindBody is a fertility chain that operates like a startup. Much of its funding came from venture capital and private equity firms. And its push to expand quickly, to open more clinics, to bring in more patients, and to make more profits. Its founder, Gina Bartesi, compared the company to a rocket ship to the moon. And she once suggested to a group of employees that they would make so much money, they'd each have their own private jets. But the move fast and break things mentality is a dangerous game when you're talking about IVF. And women's bodies, their embryos, and their hopes of creating a family are all on the line.

8:18In the previous episode, we heard from women who felt KindBody pushed them into procedures they didn't need. Now, we'll hear about KindBody burning through cash and taking on patients that other clinics were hesitant to treat. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Public. Public is an investing platform that offers access to stocks, options, bonds, and crypto. And they've also integrated AI with tools that can assist investors in building customized portfolios. One of these tools is called Generated Assets. It allows you to turn your ideas into investable indexes. So let's say you're interested in something specific like biotech companies with high R &D spend, small cap stocks with improving operating margins, or the S &P 500 minus high debt companies.

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10:51Let's get back to Kendall. She's the Kindbody employee who was working the front desk in a Chicago clinic. She was holding this letter that was sounding the alarm on a billionaire, Greg Lindbergh, and what he called, quote, the baby project. She had never met this woman who wrote the letter and had never seen Lindbergh in person. But Kendall does remember when Lindbergh's name first came on her radar. I remember I was trying to collect payment for one of the services and I couldn't collect the payment. And they're like, oh, do this, this, this, this, and this. And I was like, okay, well, I did that.

11:27So I had to call my manager. And then my manager was like, oh, ha ha ha ha, we do it this way because he's in prison. And I was like, that is so weird. Kendall said some things were off. Lindbergh's assistant coordinated appointments for egg donors and surrogates. This was widely known at the clinic. She remembered one day when one of Lindbergh's surrogates checked in for an appointment. I would do my normal greet for, hi, welcome in, can I have your first and last? And I just remember she wouldn't make eye contact with me. She kept saying everything, but she was looking down. She wasn't trying to, not connect, but she wasn't trying to, like, involve herself.

12:17And the assistant was doing a lot of the talking, too. This wasn't how it usually worked. Normally, the intended parents would come with the carrier, and if the partner is available, they come. But it was just all very strange. Just strange behavior, strange how we danced around the loopholes. It was almost like everything was catered around him. Lindbergh built his fortune first through his private equity firm, Eli Global, which bought businesses in a wide range of industries. medical coders, travel firms, a seller of sports collectibles. But it was buying up insurance companies that made Lindbergh a billionaire.

13:01In 2020, a consulting firm pegged his net worth at as high as about$1.5 billion. Over the past several years, he's been convicted in federal court twice for bribery. And he pleaded guilty in a third case in November of 2024 for money laundering and fraud. These charges stem from a$2 billion scheme to funnel money from his insurance companies to use for his personal benefit. Right now, he's facing as much as 30 years in prison. By contrast, Lindbergh's baby project didn't seem to break any laws. He made a plan to have as many as 50 children through a web of egg donors and surrogates. I pieced this together by reviewing thousands of pages of company documents, legal, medical, and financial records.

13:53I also conducted dozens of interviews with Lindbergh's former employees, clinic workers, ex-girlfriends, egg donors, and surrogates. Lindbergh sent egg donors to clinics in California, Illinois, Nevada, and Barbados. But the majority of his donors and surrogates, at least 11, received treatment at the clinic in Chicago that was run by Vios and then Kind Body. A clinic in Los Angeles, not related to Kind Body, also did a lot of fertility procedures on Lindbergh's behalf. I wrote about this baby project in a story with my colleague Sophie Alexander that was published last year in Bloomberg Businessweek.

14:36Lindbergh participated in interviews for the article, but in the months leading up to publication, he cut off contact and filed a lawsuit against me and Sophie in state court in Florida, alleging defamation, slander, and interference in his business relationships. After the article actually ran, he sued us again, this time in Florida federal court, making more or less the same allegations. In May, he asked the state court to dismiss that case, saying it was largely duplicative of the federal case. And then in August, the federal court dismissed all of his claims against Bloomberg and me and Sophie.

15:12I should also note, I reached out to Lindbergh again while preparing the series and told him what I was planning to report about him. And he didn't respond. Back at Kindbody, Kendall was stunned by the egg donor's letter. So she took this problem to her superiors. I'm going to bring it to my manager and her higher up, her manager. and so I brought it up to them they had me scan it over to them and it was basically like okay well we'll handle this now were you expecting what kind of reaction were you expecting shock and awe definitely shock and awe but there was no shock and there was no awe like it was just like another day run of the mill for them they were just like oh yeah totally And I was like, this is huge.

16:03And I go, should I present this letter to Dr. Beltzos? And I remember my manager specifically telling me, do not give it to Dr. Beltzos. And so I was like, what can be done? I spoke to the woman who sent the letter to Dr. Beltzos. She was one of Lindbergh's egg donors. She didn't want to be recorded for this podcast for fear of retribution. But she told me that when she spoke with Dr. Beltzos in 2020, the doctor suggested she should watch YouTube meditation videos and relax. I reached out to Dr. Beltzos last year before my investigation was published, and again for this podcast. She has not responded to any requests for comment.

16:46The woman also told me that the letter she sent in October of 2023, the one Kendall saw, was also sent to other leaders at Kindbody, including Gina Bartesi. No one replied to her. Gina Bartesi declined to comment for this series.

17:05I wanted to know more about how Lindbergh's baby project was seen by other fertility clinics and doctors. In the course of my reporting, I learned that Lindbergh had actually been denied treatment at another fertility clinic. It happened when he first embarked on this quest in 2018. He went to Duke Fertility Center. Lindbergh was upfront about what he was doing. He wanted to have four surrogates pregnant at the same time. He told the doctor at Duke that he had already arranged for a woman to be paid$1.5 million to donate her eggs. And one of his assistants would carry the first baby. According to three people who were involved in the baby project at this time, the doctor refused to treat him.

17:50They said she was troubled by what she heard. But I wanted to know why. She wouldn't talk to me, so I interviewed more than two dozen doctors, embryologists, and psychologists. I wanted to understand what a fertility clinic is supposed to do when something like this comes up. There are some enforceable guardrails on who can donate eggs. The FDA requires fertility clinics to collect a donor's medical history and test for infectious diseases. The rest is left up to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, or ASRM. It's an industry group for fertility clinics. They craft guidelines on what to do or not to do for themselves.

18:31So essentially, they're self-policing. And these are just guidelines, suggestions really, not hard and fast rules. For example, they strongly recommend that the egg donor undergoes an extensive psychological evaluation, which probes into everything from work history, financial stability, and a history of mental illness. Experts say a proper evaluation can take anywhere from an hour to several sessions. And it should take longer if the donor knows who she's donating to. One of the goals is to see if she's being pressured into donating. Dr. Julianne Zweifel is a psychologist specializing in reproductive health at the University of Wisconsin.

19:14I met her last year at the fertility industry's biggest annual gathering. Dr. Zweifel served on the ethics committee at ASRM for six years, so she's seen her fair share of complicated cases. She said that when she counsels her patients, she's trying to gauge whether the woman donating her eggs is making a well-informed decision. One of the big things you're also trying to make sure isn't going on is a level of coercion, either overt or assumed. But that doesn't mean you really want to do it. But are you in a position where you can say no? If somebody can't say no, it doesn't really feel like a free choice any longer.

19:55There isn't a cap on how much egg donors can be paid for their eggs. Most donors are paid somewhere between$8 ,000 and$25 ,000. Lindbergh was paying his donors as much as$1.5 million. Doctors I spoke to said this would be a major red flag because for some donors, that amount of money is kind of impossible to pass up. Another thing that Lindbergh wanted to do was to have multiple women pregnant at the same time. Dr. Zweifel said this should have also raised concerns. She stressed that a doctor's responsibility is to all of the patients, the donor and the surrogate and the intended parent, not just the one paying the clinic fees.

20:39A surrogate's needs need to be carefully considered, too. Because the process of carrying someone else's child isn't just physically taxing. It can also be emotionally complicated. If you have multiple donors and multiple surrogates at the same time, there might be a tendency to treat them like things. We have to treat the carrier as a human who could be harmed. And I don't want carriers to be harmed. And intended parents, I'm really trying to get a sense of, are they going to respect this person? Do they see them as a whole human? They're not just an, I never use the word oven. Oven is a piece of equipment.

21:21You know, this is a person. There was another problem with Lindbergh's baby project. His first surrogate was his assistant. She had worked for him at his private equity firm. You can't have an employee of yours be your carrier. Because that is coercion. because she will feel she can't say no, right? Because now she's at risk of losing her job. Lindbergh was able to do what he did. Because without regulation, America's fertility industry is a marketplace where almost anything is possible if you have enough money. When it comes to third-party reproduction, we're in a really weird, sticky place. That's Dr.

22:00Brian Levine. He's a founding doctor at CCRM New York. It's part of a big chain of fertility clinics that is owned by private equity. And the reason it's weird and sticky is because it's unregulated and unchecked. There is no national registry in America to know how many times someone has donated eggs, nor how many times someone has donated sperm. And yet, even to Dr. Levine, Greg Lindbergh stood out. I've never had a patient say to me, I want to get three surrogates pregnant in one year. Never seen it. Never had it happen. I've heard of it, but I've never actually had that clinical experience.

22:38What Lindbergh wanted went beyond anything Dr. Levine had encountered in his career. Multiple donors at the same clinic. Surrogates who were employees. Payments that dwarfed normal compensation. But the system has no mechanism to stop it. There's no laws. It's an unregulated space. There's laws by the FDA, the Puna Drug Administration. There's laws of reporting by the CDC, the Center for Disease Control. But when it comes to who has the opportunity to work with a surrogate, it's very clear that it's up to the discretion of the treating physician. Lindbergh's efforts might sound extreme, but he's taking part in a small but high-profile trend, wealthy men having a large number of children to fulfill their reproductive ambitions.

23:27Elon Musk, who has fathered at least 14 children, has repeatedly warned about population collapse and urged more people to have more babies, calling it, quote, the biggest danger civilization faces. Then there's Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram, who said in a June interview that he has fathered over 100 children by donating sperm. As long as the IVF industry remains largely unregulated, there's little to stop the next billionaire with a baby project from finding a willing clinic to help. Dr. Levine says Greg Lindbergh's baby project at KindBody pointed to institutional failure. A lot of things just kind of went through holes.

24:11And the holes just lined up in this one scenario where the person went from checkbook to baby. And I will argue that leadership starts at the top. And so if that was pervasive in this clinic, where it happened with multiple individuals, even though they were all assigned to one intended parent, I would argue that there was a dangerous culture that occurred within that clinic. And I would worry about the other outcomes that have happened there as well, that aren't being reported to you. For the woman who tried to sound the alarm with her letter, going through the courts wasn't going to yield the accountability she wanted.

24:47She felt the clinic bore some responsibility because, after all, she was a patient too. She'd warned Dr. Beltzos multiple times, but there were no consequences for Lindbergh. Kendall, the kind body employee who opened the letter, was frustrated that the clinic wasn't doing anything. She told her superiors. She told her colleagues. And so I was like, what can be done? And I was talking to my other coworker who was well aware of the situation. And she goes, we just don't do anything about it. We just don't just leave it. And I was like, no, that's not right. What struck me was like reading that letter, I was like, this woman is in pain.

25:28And I can't imagine her experience and what she had to go through. According to Kendall, Lindbergh wasn't the only patient that Kind Body was accepting that other clinics were hesitant to treat. Like women in their 50s or patients who were considered too overweight to be eligible for IVF. Working at Kind Body, we were like the dumpster fire. That was our motto. Like, you would come to us if everyone else denied you because we would put you through. Kindbody framed this as a point of pride. By their telling, they were expanding access to anyone who wanted to have a baby. But to Kendall, after everything she had seen, this wasn't out of compassion.

26:10It was out of greed. I just saw over and over and over again them pushing through these geriatric patients that were not getting the results. And then every single time they just change protocol to say, oh, next time it will be it. But then you have some patients that are going through 21 rounds being older. And they're just told, oh, next time. Oh, next time. But no one's having the real conversation and being transparent with these patients. There was women in their 50s and men in their 70s. At this age, the chances of getting pregnant are lower. So these older patients often ended up spending more money on IVF than people in their 30s and 40s.

26:56There was so much that fell in between the cracks. Because again, it was kind of like, get them in, retrieve, transplant, get them out. Like that was it. And I do think a lot of it got lost in between, you know, just because so many people are coming in. But we're not looking at, I don't know, we're not keeping the morality compass in mind. Like, I do think a lot of times morals were thrown out. And just the price tag was what was making the doctors keep going. I do have people in my life that were looking into fertility. I said, do not go to Kind Body. So this is the thorny situation that the IVF industry finds itself in.