Trailer: The Journey

0:00One day last year, detectives knocked on the door of a multi-million dollar mansion in Los Angeles County. Inside, they found a strange scene. A dining area converted into classrooms, with children and toddlers seated at rows of desks. All the kids had their heads shaved. Police wondered if they'd walked into some sort of daycare or school. But the couple that lived there insisted. The children were theirs. It's a house that looks like a castle, but it's under investigation for being a possible factory, a baby factory. The couple had 21 children, almost all born through surrogates, women who'd agreed to carry babies for them.

0:48But those surrogates had been deceived. I started crying. I was like, what the heck did I just get myself into? These were pictures of Sylvia in the same exact outfit, the same leather jacket. You just can't say, oh no, that's not me. It is you, you know what I mean? Me and my coworker, we named her the surrogate pimp. She wanted to have a lot of surrogates at one time. We're here because we love families. We want families to grow. He was chasing her. Yeah, and that's the one time that we called the cops because she was screaming. and then he pulled out a gun and I mean, it was kind of like a standoff.

1:29I'm Ava Kaufman, a staff writer at The New Yorker. I've spent the past year investigating what was going on inside the Los Angeles mansion and how the American surrogacy industry allowed it to happen. Like every bone in our bodies was to protect this child and if we could keep her, we would. I was curious what you make of that decision just given the fact pattern so far. That's insane. That is fucking insane. I mean, we're at insane already. I can keep going, but I mean, we're at insane. I don't know what the next word will be. I'll have to go check my thesaurus or something. The Journey is a new series from In the Dark and The New Yorker.

2:11Coming September 15th, wherever you get your podcasts.