The Journey, Episode 3: The Industry

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3:23and then he pulled out a gun and I mean, it was kind of like a standoff. The sheriffs came. Our clients are actually very feisty so he actually got into physical fights with those workers. It seems that Gwo Jun was using money to control Sylvia. That company was very much going by the time we got there. But like hidden in the house. Very much hidden in the house. What are the thoughts going through your head in terms of what's going to happen to baby girl. This was a lot. It was a whole lot. I wanted to be safe. I wanted her to be safe. These were pictures of Sylvia in the same exact outfit, the same leather jacket, the same outfit to the T.

4:11You just can't say, oh no, that's not me. It is you, you know what I mean? She's like, look at this. She's all, can you imagine? I go, what do you mean, can I imagine? That's the lady we had the baby for.

4:33When I die, like, that's what I want to be remembered as. Like, oh, you know, Olympia had a kid for somebody. She changed this couple's life. That's just always been my thing.

4:46Olympia Belmonte had wanted to change someone's life for a long time. But it wasn't until she was in her 30s, with three kids of her own, that she was able to act on this desire. I was like, I'm not getting any younger, and I was like, let's just do it. I was ready. I met up with Olympia in a park by her house. As her kids played nearby, she told me how she found a surrogacy agency just outside L.A. County, and signed up to be a gestational carrier. The agency required her to share a lot of personal information. Photos, employment history, medical records from previous pregnancies. But she wasn't told much about who she'd be caring for.

5:27She wasn't even sent a profile. All she knew was that the intended mother was also in her 30s and didn't have any kids. As the date of the embryo transfer approached, Olympia got a last-minute call from the agency. The IP was wondering if she was willing to carry twins. And I was like, huh, I don't know. Like, first of all, if she wanted twins, she should have said that from the beginning. That's how I feel. Like, don't ask me literally on a Friday afternoon when you know that my transfer is Monday. This was a big ask. Twin pregnancies are considered riskier. It was kind of like being cornered.

6:10If I corner her here, she's going to say yes. The chances of me saying yes are a lot higher than me saying no. Olympia wanted so badly to make the intended mom happy. And then I started thinking, man, like, poor thing. She probably doesn't have kids, and she wants two already. She's probably trying to secure two kids because she doesn't want to have an only child. All these things went through my mind, and I was like, all right, I'll do it. Like, I wanted to help somebody. I wanted to make a difference in someone's life. This is even a bigger difference. Like, I didn't just give you one, I gave you two.

6:48The transfer was a success. But as the twins kept growing, Olympia rarely heard from the intended mom. My family would ask me, hey, Mija, so do you talk to her? Does she check in with you? And I was like, eh, occasionally, like, you know, it's here and there. At just 31 weeks, Olympia went into labor. She messaged the mother frantically. I said, we're waiting for you, Sylvia. Sylvia, as in Sylvia Zhang. That was the supposedly childless woman who'd hired Olympia to carry twins. I don't know, I was so stupid. I was like, she probably wants to see them come out, you know, thinking like a mother.

7:29I was like, she wants to be there. So I told my husband, you can't go in with me. I wanted her to be a part of it. Sylvia had come to the hospital earlier that day, but when doctors suggested the birth wasn't imminent, she left. She returned in time for the C-section, clad in her leather jacket. Olympia felt some wrestling around as doctors pulled out a tiny boy and a tiny girl. I remember, you know, they have like this huge sheet in front of you, and I remember hearing the babies crying. Two discordant wails. Sylvia stood by Olympia's bedside, stroking her hair and whispering into her ear. She kept telling me that she was super grateful.

8:11Thank you so much. I'm forever grateful. And she kept kissing me on my forehead. And I was just, I was crying. I know for a fact that tears were just coming out of my eyes. I thought it was like a really beautiful thing. The twins were two months premature, so they were rushed to the NICU. Olympia tried to look at their faces. She knew she wouldn't get to see the babies again. So she asked a nurse if she could say goodbye. Not that I want to hold them. It's just kind of like a closure thing. And one nurse said, I will take you. And she was like, but with the conditions of like, no phones, you're not holding them.

8:49And it's like a quick thing because I can get in trouble. And I was like, OK. And she took me in there. I just got to see them in their little incubator. The boy was wrapped in a blue blanket, the girl in a pink one. I was like, oh man, these two are going to be so loved because they didn't come easy, you know? I was just like, for sure, these two, they're going to be somebody one day. And I brought them into this world, and that's like the best feeling ever. After Olympia was discharged from the hospital, she figured she'd hear from Sylvia soon. But that evening, when her phone rang, it was the nurses.

9:32They call me and they're like, hey, so this is our first time dealing with a surrogacy. How does it work? Because mom's already gone.

9:42After the birth, Sylvia had left. And even though she lived 40 minutes from the hospital, she hadn't come back. This was unusual. A baby in the NICU is in a fragile state. So most of the time, the child's guardians will stay close by, in case anything happens, and for all the decisions that need to be made about the child's care. They needed to know, can we do this? Can we do that? Can we give them formula? Do you have breast milk that you're providing? All of that. They can't just go and give your baby formula without your permission. Sylvia wasn't even answering her phone. The nurses didn't know what to do.

10:22They kept calling me to see who was going to go, like who was responsible for the babies? Who was responsible for the babies?

10:38From In the Dark and The New Yorker, I'm Ava Kaufman and this is The Journey. Episode 3, The Industry.

10:51Some parts of Olympia's story about caring for Sylvia were similar to other stories I'd heard. But one of the major differences was that Olympia hadn't gone through the couple's own agency. She wasn't a Mark surrogate. In fact, years before the couple opened Mark surrogacy, they began accumulating children using another agency. A professional, well-established one. That agency was called BabyTree. Here at BabyTree, we have an experienced staff comprised of women and men who have firsthand knowledge and experience with all the steps and procedures for a successful journey. BabyTree is one of hundreds of surrogacy agencies in the U.S., and it is, in many ways, typical.

11:41It's located in Southern California, one of the world capitals of the fertility industry. Its surrogates seem to be paid around the industry average, between$50 ,000 and$70 ,000, while intended parents might expect to pay Babytree three times as much. A lot of its intended parents are from China. This is typical, too. Surrogacy is banned in China. A recent study of U.S. surrogacies found that between 2014 and 2020, more than 40 % of all intended parents from overseas were from China. Recently, American surrogacy agencies have reported an uptick in uber-wealthy Chinese clients seeking multiple children.

12:21It's not clear how Sylvia and Guojun first heard about BabyTree, but between them, they ended up hiring at least four surrogates through the agency and attempted to hire even more. And all this seems to have been Guojun's idea. He approached the agency first in 2018, back when he was still living in Roland Heights and possibly before he became involved with Sylvia. In fact, the profile he submitted to Babytree, which stated that he was childless, featured a photo of him smiling next to his then-wife, Yuchen Lee. Babytree matched Guojun with a woman who, as far as I can tell, was Guojun's very first surrogate.

13:04You, my friend, need to chill. That's Amber Applegarth. I visited her one afternoon at her home north of L.A. County. Her toddler sat on her lap. Amber had been a surrogate once before and was still in touch with that family. But this journey was disappointing. After an introductory Zoom, Guojun became distant, hard to reach. I was under the impression that he lived in China and was never out here. Like, I never knew that man was living in the States at all. In the summer of 2019, Amber gave birth to a son for Guojun. But neither he nor his wife showed up at the hospital. Instead, a woman who identified herself as Guojun's assistant collected the baby.

13:52She showed up the next day, and they brought the baby in to see me for a little bit. She mentioned to me, oh, they want you to name the baby. And his American name. So I'm like, this is weird. Why would you want me to name your baby? Later, when Amber saw the mugshots online, she realized that the woman who'd been describing herself as Guojun's assistant was Sylvia. Sylvia, meanwhile, had set up her own profile at BabyTree, separate from Guojun's. She described herself as a single woman, without any kids, hoping to start a family. She said she was using donors for the egg and the sperm, but I've since learned the donor sperm was Guojun's.

14:37It was through Sylvia's profile that the couple hired their next surrogate, Crystal Calderon. It was her first journey, so she didn't find it odd that she never met Sylvia, not even at the birth. She had a boy in January 2022. So I was thinking, OK, you know, he's going off to a great life. You know, Sylvia's real estate developer. You know, she has her life overseas and she comes here to L.A. for business as well. I was thinking, OK, he's going to he's good. The next surrogate Sylvia hired through Babytree agreed to meet on the condition that I didn't use her name or record her. Eight months after Crystal, she had a son for Sylvia.

15:17Again, Sylvia didn't show up to the hospital until after the birth. And then there was Olympia, the surrogate who delivered the premature twins in October 2022. The twins that Sylvia had rarely visited in the hospital. And I kept thinking, like, okay, you're paying all this money for you to have these kids. Where are you? These baby tree surrogates had given birth years before the Mark surrogates I'd talked to. By the time I tracked down Amber, Crystal, and Olympia, the kids they'd carried were three, four, even six years old. They were now in foster care, along with their siblings. But before that, they'd been living for years in the Arcadia mansion, where the surveillance footage had shown toddlers being spanked, hit in the face, forced to hold squats.

16:12Olympia couldn't help but blame herself. I do feel bad. I do feel bad because I'm like, these kids, they didn't ask. They, you know, they're so innocent to all of this. And were they being abused? that's something that I would have to live with for the rest of my life. How do you carry that? You know, here I am thinking like, oh my God, yes. Now, whether I like it or not, yes, I changed somebody's life, but it wasn't all for good, you know? And that's going to follow me forever. But Olympia and other surrogates also started to wonder who exactly was at fault. It's not like they would have agreed to this match had they known more about the couple.

17:02Sylvia and Guojun had misled them about their marital status and how many children they already had. And what about Babytree? What was the agency's responsibility here? My husband, he did ask me numerous times. He was like, doesn't the agency, like, do a thorough investigation? Because he felt that they were very intense with us. Oh, go do this. Go get this done. why are you investigating us so deeply? And he's like, what did they do with them? And then he told me, he was like, is it because they have money? Did the agency know about it and just allowed it? And they just were fraudulent and just knew this was going to be the case.

17:43Like, were they completely innocent in it? Am I, you know, are we all innocent in this? You know, I mean, I trusted them. You know, I would think that they would have been more, I guess tedious about who they were assisting with having children for. And again, everybody always goes back to the same thing. Mija, how is it that the agency didn't know? Everybody always asks me that.

18:21One evening this January, I drove with our producer Natalie out to the high desert, northeast of L.A., to knock on the door of someone who knew a lot about Babytree. Hi. Hi. Rebecca? Yes. I'm Ava. Her name is Rebecca Hernandez. She had worked at the agency for years. and we'd heard something promising about her. I am no longer with Baby Tree. I know. I am no longer with Baby Tree. Recently, she'd quit. Rebecca stood at her door wearing a wrap sweater and leopard print lounge pants. She has straight dark hair, a little emerald nose ring, long nails sharpened like switchblades and decorated with rhinestones.

19:03As we started to chat, it seemed like she'd been waiting for someone to ask her about Baby Tree for a long time. I was with BabyTree for seven years, and from what I know, I felt like something was off at some point. When she started at BabyTree in 2018, she had no experience in the fertility industry. Her previous job was at Red Lobster. But she discovered she loved helping women navigate their journeys. Rebecca said, BabyTree had a reputation for spoiling its surrogates. It was part of her job to mail the women gift baskets tailored to each trimester. Treat them to a day spa, talk through their hormonal swings, and host a monthly support group.

19:44And, you know, we're talking about vaginal suppositories and periods and, you know, something that kids and partners don't really want to hear. And you want, we want our sergates to be able to feel like they can talk about that stuff. In spite of these niceties, Rebecca told us that BabyTree's founder and CEO, Patrick Yu, seemed to be trying to push through as many matches as possible. Sometimes, she noticed, Patrick would withhold or obscure details that would have otherwise disqualified a match. Or, when surrogates failed health or psych screenings, he'd find doctors who'd pass them. And Patrick kept finding matches for one wealthy parent, who made Rebecca especially uneasy.

20:24Me and my co-worker, we named her the surrogate pimp. Because I didn't feel good about ladies being with her. The surrogate pimp was, of course, Sylvia. I felt like there was something off just because when he first told me that she wanted to have a lot of surrogates at one time. And at that time, she was just a single mother. And then, at some point, even though Sylvia was representing herself as single, it became clear there was someone else hovering behind the scenes. So then all of a sudden she had a partner, and it was a male, but an older male, and I thought that was kind of weird. But I figured, kind of what was explained to me as kind of like a business partner possibly type thing.

21:12I thought maybe she was doing that to help ladies feel more comfortable to move forward with her. Sylvia told the agency she was using donated eggs and sperm, though Rebecca didn't realize at the time that the sperm was Guojun's. That was part of my red flag, where it's like, hmm, you want a lot of babies that are not even yours, genetically. Rebecca heard that Sylvia wanted 12 kids. How did you know she wanted 12 kids, if that was more? Like, how did that... My, Patrick told me that. Patrick was like, this IP, she wants 12? 12 was the number? I want to say it was 12 to 15, something like that.

21:48And I was like, any other families that stuck in your mind with that high of an amount? No. Rebecca and other employees raised concerns about Sylvia's ambitious goal with Patrick. But he brushed those aside. He's like, no, no. He's like, in China, that is something that is, like, shows—it's like a wealth status. Like, wow, you must be wealthy because you have a lot of kids. I don't know. I just felt something was off. And I didn't have any, like, concrete proof, you know, until the twins. The twins. These were the babies that Olympia had carried. who'd ended up in the NICU needing round-the-clock care.

22:26It turned out Olympia wasn't the only person getting calls from the nurses. The hospital kept calling us and was like, where's the intended parents? Where's the intended parents? Hey, have they reached out yet? They're still calling. Their girls are still calling, still calling. You know, the hospital's starting to worry. And the nurses were like, okay, what's going on? A week has gone by. They've still not come to see the twins. But then when they finally did come, after a week had gone by, the nurses call us again, very concerned. Like, there's no connection there. There's no connection there.

23:00It doesn't seem like, you know, it doesn't seem normal. It doesn't seem they just kind of came just to come. Like the connection between the parents? The parents, the babies, the twins. Like, this is not normal. It's not okay. They're concerned about it. Rebecca was also concerned. She talked to her boss, Patrick, about it. The parents did eventually pick up the twins. But after that, the so-called surrogate pimp and her mysterious older partner stopped using Babytree.

23:33Rebecca assumed that was the last she'd ever hear of the couple.

23:51The surrogates I interviewed kept asking me, how had all this been allowed to happen? Wasn't it super illegal? But as I was reporting, I learned that neither Babytree nor Mark's surrogacy had broken the rules. because in the surrogacy industry, there aren't many. Nothing that this couple did in the surrogacy world, besides abuse allegations, is illegal. That's Kelly Fell. She's a perinatal nurse and the executive director of a conservative nonprofit called the Center for Bioethics and Culture Network. Kelly found out about the Mark surrogacy situation in May of 2025. after seeing a video on, you guessed it.

24:35I think she'd posted two on like TikTok or something. This was the viral TikTok posted by Kayla Elliott, the surrogate in Corpus Christi. Callie was the first person to amplify Kayla's story and she was struck by how many loopholes the scandal exposed. Starting their own agency, not illegal. Having 20 plus children via surrogacy, not illegal. Not disclosing to surrogate mothers that you have multiple women pregnant, not illegal. It's all legal in the state of California. I could start a surrogacy agency tomorrow if I wanted to. Callie doesn't want to. In fact, she's a vocal opponent of surrogacy.

25:15For her, what the couple had done was just more proof that the entire industry was beyond repair. The organization she runs has called for a surrogacy ban. This is a controversial view. But Callie's specific point about the lack of regulation isn't. People within the surrogacy industry told me the same thing. There are no federal laws governing the practice. Each state has its own laws, and some don't have any. Only one state, New York, even requires surrogacy agencies to be licensed. It was more onerous for Sylvia to get a real estate license than it was for her to open Mark's surrogacy. And since the parents are the customer, asymmetry structures the deal.

26:00Callie pointed out that surrogates are far more likely to be extensively vetted than intended parents. We don't even do home studies on these intended parents. I mean, my husband and I tried to rescue an adult pug in the state of California. And the amount of home studies and visits people wanted to do for a dog. I mean, we don't have that in surrogacy at all. I do think that's very, I mean, I have also tried to adopt a puppy at one point in my life. and, you know, I was rejected. That's our producer Natalie chiming in. She's now the proud mother of two cats. Anyway, some agencies and fertility attorneys do require intended parents to undergo background checks and screenings.

26:41But we looked through state laws and didn't find any that require IPs to disclose the number of children they have, or, for that matter, the number of surrogates. We would never build a welfare system, a child welfare system, the way that surrogacy is allowed to run. We would never build that. That doesn't exist in adoption. That doesn't exist anywhere else. To adopt, you typically work with a licensed agency and go through interviews and home studies. And even then, there's no guarantee of success. You might end up stuck on a wait list for years. That's actually one of the reasons people are drawn to surrogacy.

27:17The process is much faster. In adoption, no substantial amount of money is supposed to change hands between the parents and the birth mother. This is because of the fear that if money were part of the equation, people might sell their own children or even start having children in order to sell them. But surrogacy almost always involves a financial exchange. So I thought it'd be even more regulated than adoption. Why isn't it? I think this question is fascinating. That's Naomi Kahn, a law professor at the University of Virginia, who's written extensively about custody and reproductive rights. Naomi told me that she's currently researching this exact topic, the history of surrogacy laws and why they've evolved so differently from the ones that govern adoption.

28:08I don't think there's going to be one answer. In adoption, the focus is on the best interests of the child. In surrogacy, the contracts that are entered into are for the intending parents. And the focus of the contract is producing a child for the intending parents. Adoption is oriented around protecting the best interests of a child who's already been conceived. Surrogacy, on the other hand, has been seen more like other kinds of fertility treatments. It's generally used by parents who aren't able to otherwise conceive, and so it's focused on the interests of those parents. Surrogacy has grown in popularity, as IVF technology has become more widespread.

28:52There are now thousands of surrogacies in the U.S. each year. But unlike adoption, the practice is fairly new as an industry, so a lot of these arrangements still happen informally. Whenever Natalie or I asked industry experts about the lack of oversight, they told us that in a journey done right, oversight is supposed to be built in along the way. There's the surrogacy agency, the fertility clinic, the lawyers who handle the contracts. And at each of these stages, anyone has the opportunity to say, hold on a second, something seems off here. We asked whether there were any rules to make sure things actually work this way.

29:32And people kept steering us to SEEDS.

29:40I'm not sure if you're familiar with the organization SEEDS. You know, SEEDS is kind of a new organization. Your very first step should be work with SEEDS-affiliated professionals because we agreed to all of these standards. SEEDS stands for the Society for Ethics in Egg Donation and Surrogacy. It's a private group, but the closest thing that surrogacy agencies have to any sort of regulatory body. SEEDS members pay yearly fees and agree to follow a set of standards. They're pretty detailed. The ones for surrogacy agencies are more than 20 pages and include things like requiring background checks for intended parents and limiting simultaneous surrogacies.

30:22Hi. Hi, how are you? I'm good. How about yourself? I'm good. Thanks for taking the time. Natalie talked to the group's president, Adrienne Black. She's a four-time surrogate and also runs her own agency in Oregon. Because we do not have a lot of legislation in place related to surrogacy, the guidance has not always been as clear as we've seen in other industries and fields. And so that does mean that we are feeling it out as we go. There's one problem, though, with an approach that relies on feeling it out as you go. So if like somebody violates a standard, how do you like what are the sort of consequences of that?

31:04Ah, so this is also a piece where SEEDS is really growing up because, again, that was not really what our intention was as an organization originally, and it is where we are heading. And so we are still in that process of really identifying what are the consequences because, frankly, we didn't have a lot of scenarios until the last few years where we had to address consequences. For now, those consequences? is? Ultimately, the teeth that we have are to remove, it's to remove membership. So if the sort of worst case scenario happens, someone complains about an agency and they get kicked out of seeds, it's still like not the same as like shutting the agency down or removing its license or something like that.

31:53And I guess like, do you ever like wish that you had that power or wish that someone had that power? Is there like a need for that kind of oversight? Are you asking me as an agency owner or me as the seeds president? Well, I guess I would be interested in your answer for in both capacities. Seeds President Hat. I think one of the challenges that we look at on an ongoing basis is just that we don't have the power to do more. We aren't here to regulate an entire industry. We are here to provide ethical expectations and to help professionals meet those ethical expectations. People who choose not to be part of that, they choose not to be part of it.

32:53Fair enough. It's worth noting that neither Mark's surrogacy nor Babytree are SEEDS members. As for Adrienne's other hat, as the owner of a surrogacy agency, she worries that regulation could be costly and burdensome. Would it be good for the people we serve? Potentially. Would it put all of us out of business? Possibly. Lots of industries make these kinds of arguments when faced with the prospect of more rules. But Adrienne says it's more than just a matter of protecting the bottom line. Poorly designed regulation could make the work a lot harder. We're here because we love families. We want families to grow.

33:34And so if there's a better way to do it, I think a lot of us would be on board, if not most of us. But that's not the case, and that's not what we see in most legislation, and that's not what we see when people come in and want to regulate or license. I encountered this a lot, the skepticism that people working outside the fertility industry could be trusted to get the policies right. Take the idea of background screenings for intended parents, which might seem at first glance like a simple thing to implement. People, you know, fertile heterosexual couples or singles get pregnant all the time.

34:12That's Debra Wald. She's a prominent family attorney based in San Francisco. You know, people can have sex in the back of a car and end up with a child with no kind of checks of anything. Debra was one of several lawyers who pointed out to me that making evaluations and screenings mandatory might start to create double standards around who gets to be a parent. I mean, should every gay male couple who wants to be parents have to undergo criminal justice and mental health, you know, psychological evaluations before they're allowed to have children when the majority, vast majority of heterosexual couples don't have to do any of that?

34:54All kinds of people use surrogates, but the industry is well known as a lifeline for gay couples in particular. It's a sensitive balance between trying to make sure that this industry is being handled in a responsible way and also not just blatantly discriminating against people who either due to fertility issues or because within their intimate relationships, they don't have the right combination of gametes, need reproductive assistance to become parents. So it's not simple. From my perspective, it's actually not simple. Wald says she fears that a situation like Mark's surrogacy might trigger the wrong kind of political reaction.

35:45I worry about knee-jerk responses that take this as a common problem and solve it in ways that hurt a lot of families. Bad facts make for bad law. Natalie and I actually talked to a lot of fertility professionals who shared these anxieties about giving the federal government more power to weigh in on family making. This is Molly O 'Brien, a fertility attorney and the former president of Seeds. The United States is the safest, currently the safest place, to do this legally and ethically. I'm really afraid that people who have no other way to have a family, this will be taken away from them. This is why Molly and many of her peers were hesitant to even talk with us about Mark's surrogacy.

36:34They told us they worried that drawing any attention to unflattering stories about the industry could be weaponized by surrogacy opponents and even lead to calls for an outright ban. The worst case scenario is this becomes illegal. You can't do it. And that would be devastating to a huge number of people. It's true that, as a lot of people people in the industry emphasized, most of these matches are happy matches that result in happy families. Intended parents overjoyed at being gifted the miracle of a baby. And surrogates whose lives were profoundly changed by the experience too. Many industry professionals insisted that the Mark surrogacy scandal is not a sign of systemic problems.

37:20It's an exception. Here's Adrienne Black, the SEEDS president. Those are bad people who exploited a system to get what they wanted. They lied. They were liar pants on fire, right? And yet, as the multi-billion dollar fertility industry has grown over the years, so too has the number of scandals, exploiting surrogates or parents or children. St. Augustine's surrogate mother is fighting for full custody of the children she gave birth to after she says the intended parent never picked them up. Surrogate who refused to abort her baby despite requests from the biological parents gave birth yesterday.

38:05He made a plan to have as many as 50 children through a web of egg donors and surrogates. Now a woman convicted of running a Ponzi scheme in her surrogacy business has learned her fate in the case that we've been following for years. This wasn't just money that was stolen. It was the hope. It was the dream of building a family. It felt like every other week while I was reporting, I'd come across yet another example of wrongdoing. To me, it seemed the stakes of surrogacy were too high, and there were too many parties involved, to rely on everyone's good faith. Whether or not surrogacy should be regulated as strictly as adoption is a larger debate.

38:46But the status quo doesn't seem to be working either. And as things currently stand, there is no system in place to stop Guojun and Sylvia from recruiting even more surrogates and having even more children.

39:04Which, I found out, is exactly what they've been doing.

39:20After the situation with the twins, back in 2022, Rebecca Hernandez, the Babytree coordinator, stopped hearing much about Sylvia and Guojun. And they kind of disappeared for a while, and I thought we were done with them. And did you know why, or did he say why? He being her boss, Babytree's founder, Patrick Yu. I thought that we were just not dealing with them because he finally saw what I was feeling. And then they came back. They came back. Sylvia and her older male partner returned to Babytree. Rebecca couldn't quite remember when it was, either 2024 or early 2025. But it was definitely after they'd opened Mark's surrogacy and before their arrest.

40:06And Babytree found Sylvia and Guojun yet another surrogate. Her name was Elizabeth, and she soon became pregnant. Rebecca and I did the math At the time we were talking Elizabeth must have been in her third trimester Like Just the fact that there's a baby right Now about to be born For them is just kind of Kind of wild to me Yeah and I don't know What is she thinking? I can only imagine what her Thoughts could be now that she's about to deliver And does she know? I mean None of us know what's going to happen with the baby right now I mean are they going to take the baby to foster care? I'd be freaking out.

40:46I guess I couldn't understand why. I can't understand. It's like, you're a real agency. You have all these clients. Why would you work with these parents again when it turned out so badly? Same question. My same question. I was very disappointed that when I found out we were still working with them, when I saw her name again, I was like, but why?

41:13I needed to put this question to Patrick Yu, the founder and CEO of BabyTree. There was just one problem. At the tone, please record your message. When you've finished recording... Hi, Mr. Yu. My name is Ava Kaufman. I'm a journalist with The New Yorker. Patrick wasn't responding to my voicemails, emails, and texts. But just as we were wrapping up our reporting, he returned a call from our fact-checker, Inwo Shun. They spoke in Mandarin for almost two hours, and the next evening, she patched me in for a follow-up conversation.

41:51Okay, hi, Eva. Hi, Eva, I just told Patrick that I patched you in. Oh, hey. Hi, Patrick. So nice to meet you. Thanks for making the time. Yeah, nice to meet you. I asked Patrick why. Why had the couple come back? And why, after what had happened with the twins, had his agency agreed to work with them again? Patrick told us the story from the beginning, switching between English and Mandarin. Yeah, I think at the very beginning, they told me they want 20. 20. He said Guojun had originally come to him with the goal of creating 20 children. Patrick told us he understood the appeal of a big family.

42:34He was the father of six kids himself. But he said the idea of having that many children kind of gave him a headache.

42:48He said he didn't fully understand Guo Jun's motivations. But the project seemed to be about establishing some sort of legacy, dynasty, bloodline. He told us Guojun had selected white Jewish women as his egg donors, and he wanted them to be highly educated, including at Harvard. Patrick confirmed that after the birth of Olympia's twins in 2022, he stopped working with a couple. But it wasn't because he ended the relationship. It was the couple who left him. Yeah. After that, they just lose connection with me. I think they are done. They are finished. I think it's enough for them. Now, when they come back again, they say, OK, Patrick, I still want more babies.

43:32When Sylvia and Guojun returned and told Patrick they wanted more babies, he told me he tried to steer them to surrogates who might not seem desirable, like ones who were older or had had multiple C-sections. And he quoted the couple a higher price, hoping to dissuade them. So I gave her a very high price package. Yeah, I just don't want to let her be just, oh, too expensive. Okay, I will not work with you. But she still agrees with the price. I'm surprised also. I asked Patrick if this was because he'd harbored concerns about working with the parents. He said, no, no, that wasn't it at all. Guojun was just too much of a handful to deal with.

44:16He was rude, demanding, shouty. But when the parents agreed to his higher price, they'd all moved forward. I asked Patrick, what about all the red flags that had been raised about these intended parents? In particular, what had happened with Olympia's twins in the NICU? His answer surprised me. That's normal. That's normal? For other parents, yeah, similar. You've gotten calls for other parents who've left their children in the NICU. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. For me, I'm not surprised for that. I mean, that's the expectation, you know.

44:59At several points in our conversation, Patrick emphasized that he routinely had surrogates complain to him about intended parents who didn't visit their children in the hospital. He rattled off other common complaints, too, about parents who didn't seem excited to pick the babies up or who didn't communicate much throughout the pregnancy.

45:21couple. I work with white, black, yeah. Same. It's same. The only focus on how much I pay. How can I get a baby? They only care about the result. The result is the final. Many of his intended parents, he said, only cared about the destination, not the journey. So, Sylvia and Gojun's indifference hadn't really stuck out. He also wasn't too surprised when they came back. By the time the couple returned to Babytree, around late 2024 or early 2025, he had heard they'd opened their own agency. But he figured they found it too hard to recruit their own surrogates. Too hard to find certain mothers. So that's the reason I didn't ask any questions about how many kids you have.

46:11And so, Patrick said, he didn't realize how many more kids they'd had in the course of just a few years.

46:20He elaborated in Mandarin.

46:27He's saying, my thought process was, as long as they could afford it and a lawyer was overseeing the process, I really didn't think too much about it. So he didn't, until the news broke in July about their arrest. And talking to Patrick, I discovered that Babytree was involved in a much deeper way than I'd previously understood. We have, at that time, we have 234. So we have another four. Another four. Since Sylvia and Guojun had returned to Babytree, Patrick had matched them with four new surrogates. Patrick, you mentioned the four surrogates. Did those other surrogates all know that they were caring for the same couple?

47:12No, they don't know that. So they just thought they were giving Sylvia her first kid at that point? Yes, yes. I asked if he had any qualms about these misrepresentations. I understand your question. Yeah, I understand your question. I know what you want to know. But, you know, for agencies, it's hard. Yeah. Most agencies, they just don't ask the parents too much questions. They just picked the application as, yeah, that's the reason it happened.

47:51Inuo stepped in to translate.

47:56Okay, so Patrick basically explained that we chose not to kind of ask too many questions or we didn't really even want to figure out the complicated relationship between Guozhu and Sylvia. I also asked about what I'd heard from former Babytree employees, that his agency cut corners to make matches. Patrick said his agency never altered medical records, but it did seek out more lenient clinics and doctors. Different clinics have different standards, he said. As far as what had happened with Sylvia and Guojun, Patrick stressed that as soon as he heard the news about the arrest, he ended three of the four matches immediately before any embryos had been transferred.

48:39And even though it meant losing money, he gave Sylvia and Guojun a refund. For the fourth surrogate, though, Patrick said it was already too late. But for Elizabeth, we have nothing to do, yeah, because she's pregnant. This was Elizabeth, the pregnant baby tree surrogate that Rebecca and I had discussed. For Elizabeth, unfortunately, at that time, she just transferred. and blood work confirmed pregnancy. So I have no way to terminate. Then I just wait for, I wish Elizabeth can miscarriage by herself. But the baby grew very well. And then after heartbeat confirmed, so we think the baby is stable.

49:27Then at that time, I will talk with Elizabeth, explain the situation. He'd been hoping Elizabeth would miscarry, he said, but she didn't. And so he'd arranged a meeting between Elizabeth and the intended parents. He said it went well. Sylvia showed Elizabeth pictures of her kids on her phone and said that everything that was happening was based on a misunderstanding. Patrick went on to say he really didn't have any other option, but to trust what the parents told him. He kept telling me, this is just how the industry is. Okay. Yeah, let me explain. Yeah. By understanding my experience, no agency will reject to work with them.

50:10Why is that? It's about profit. Yeah. It's about profit. Yeah. Yeah. And because, you know, we can say it's legal allowed. We didn't do nothing wrong. It's about profit. It's legal. It's allowed. Patrick said he'd done what any other agency would have.

50:48One day last December, I drove north through the San Gabriel Mountains, out to the desert. In LA, it had been a warm, jacket-free day But out here, the air had cooled Like it was already the middle of winter The streets were decorated with Christmas lights And inflatable reindeer I was looking for Elizabeth The baby tree surrogate who was still carrying one of the couple's children But I wasn't sure if I had the right address I knocked on the door of a gray ranch house In a quiet, residential neighborhood I had a feeling I'd come to the right place when a woman opened the door, visibly pregnant beneath a fuzzy pink bathrobe.

51:30We spoke through a white grate, which she was using to keep her dog indoors. Beside me, on her porch, was a cardboard box with a blanket inside. She'd set it up as a little shelter, she explained, for the neighborhood strays. Yes, Elizabeth said. It was her first journey. She was in her third trimester, due in the new year. no she said she didn't keep up with the news in fact she hadn't heard much about her intended parents until just a few months ago that was when Patrick had arranged that meeting between her and Guojun and Sylvia Elizabeth said that everyone had done a really good job of explaining things she'd been reassured that it was all a big misunderstanding and that she'd still get paid By now, I talked to 12 women who'd carried for these IPs, and I was struck by how at ease Elizabeth seemed about the whole situation.

52:29As we kept chatting, I started to wonder if maybe, in that meeting, she hadn't been told the full extent of what was going on. I asked if she was aware that the couple had other children who'd been taken into foster care. No, she didn't remember hearing that. Yes, she assumed the baby boy she was carrying would go to the parents. No, she didn't have any questions for me. I wasn't sure how much more to reveal. I didn't want to cause any stress to her or to the baby. So I apologized for showing up out of the blue and said goodbye.

53:12Later, I would learn that Elizabeth had given birth to a baby boy. that Sylvia hadn't been allowed to pick him up at the hospital, and that the baby had immediately been placed into foster care.

53:43Coming up on The Journey.

53:49We had a diaper bag. I had onesies. I had already gotten a breast pump. We had baby stuff at home ready to go. I had busted out one of the smaller car seats for an infant and put that in the car like we were prepared. This is a contract action, completely civil, just like, did I pay you for your apples? I mean, this is the only scenario I can think of, quite frankly, where we were asked to intervene in a contract action. People see this as a surrogacy case, but they're real children, very real children that are involved. That's her. That's Sylvia. Did you see? She's in the car right there. That's her in the white Tesla.

54:28No way. Oh my God, it is her. Holy crap.

54:53The Journey is written and produced by me, Ava Kaufman, senior producer Natalie Jablonski, and producer Raymond Tungakar. Samara Freemark is the managing producer for the series. It's edited by Alison McAdam. Additional editing by Willing Davidson and Madeline Barron. Theme and original music by Alex Weston Additional music by Allison Leighton Brown This episode was mixed by Corey Shreppel Our art is by Vartika Sharma Art direction by Aviva Michalov And Ben Kothi Fact-checking, additional reporting, and translation by Inwa Shi Our summer research assistant is Ethan Kahn Legal Review by Fabio Bertoni and Ben Murray Our Managing Editor is Julia Rothschild with additional support from Kiara Ortiz Thanks also to Parker Jesko The Editor of The New Yorker is David Remnick If you have comments or story tips please send them to the team at inthedark at newyorker.com and make sure to follow In the Dark wherever you get your podcasts

56:11Thank you.