 When it comes to fertility treatments, it can be a pretty touchy subject for some people. But what happens when you find out that your fertility specialist has been lying to you? Worse yet, what happens if you don't find out that he was lying to you until after your child is already born? Dr. Cecil Johnson specialized in reproductive genetics for more than 50 years, but he wasn't the man he claimed to be. At one point, the man claimed to have impregnated a male baboon as wild as that may sound, but Cecil also had a few other dark secrets. See, when couples would come to him for fertility guidance, he would help set them up with a donor. Better yet, he would even let the couple choose their hair color, skin color, and the IQ of their donor. Sounds like a pretty promising process, right? Well, yes, but things aren't always what they seem. See, while Dr. Jacobson claimed to be getting his samples from a reputable source, he wasn't. Investigators say that Dr. Jacobson was eventually convicted of more than 52 crimes related to his fertility business, earning him the nickname the Sperminator. But what could have gone so terribly wrong for Dr. Jacobson and his clients? Well... If you've watched the Netflix documentary Our Father, I want to be clear from the get-go this is not the same story. They are eerily similar at times, but that documentary follows the case of Dr. Donald Klein. Today's story is about Dr. Cecil Jacobson, an American fertility doctor with decades upon decades of experience in his field. Cecil was born in Salt Lake City, Utah and would eventually attend Brown University, where he got his degree and eventually got his medical license. Once he graduated from college, Cecil got straight to work at the George Washington University in Washington, D.C. It's believed that he became a researcher there, with his research specializing in alternative fertility methods. Before long, Dr. Jacobson has worked his way up the ranks at the college, as well as quickly becoming the chief of reproductive genetics. Dr. Cecil Jacobson was highly respected by his colleagues and his peers, and he eventually had decades of experience under his belt. To put it plainly, if you needed information about fertility treatments, Dr. Jacobson was the guy to go to. But this is when things begin to get a bit interesting to put it lightly. By the 1980s, Dr. Jacobson had decided to leave his role as the chief of reproductive genetics and instead opened up a genetic center in Fairfax County, Virginia. Dr. Jacobson decided to carry out an incredibly noble endeavor. Rather than spending his days simply researching genetics and fertility, he wanted to get out into the field and actually put his knowledge to work. Dr. Jacobson decided that now was the time to begin helping out couples who were having issues with successful pregnancies. These patients would include anyone from victims of multiple miscarriages to those who simply never got pregnant at all, often for reasons they never fully understood. Dr. Jacobson made sure that his patients felt welcomed, heard, and comfortable in his workplace, and many of his patients spoke incredibly highly of him at the time. One of Dr. Jacobson's specialties was his hormonal treatments for women. Dr. Jacobson claimed to have a special blend of hormones that would guarantee his female patients would become pregnant, and quickly too. His success rates were off the charts. Virtually every one of his patients were able to successfully get pregnant within a week of their treatment, but the joy of these women was very short-lived. See, after treatment was completed, many of the women under his care would report that they achieved a successful pregnancy test soon after their treatments had been administered. After a few short weeks, Dr. Jacobson would carry out an ultrasound and show the couple the first images of their unborn child. These ultrasounds would continue for several weeks or months, but by month three, many of his patients began to miscarry. In fairness, many of his patients did carry their child to term, but a very large portion of his patients would miscarry specifically in their third month. This began to make some of his patients a bit suspicious. The crazy thing is, the pregnancy of these women was undeniable. Their bodies very quickly began to change, showing all the obvious signs of being pregnant. But no sooner than these changes had begun to occur, they would abruptly stop, quickly followed by the loss of their baby. But despite the fact that so many of his patients miscarried, none of them reported any sort of consequences for lack of a better word. To put it bluntly, their baby never came out, even though it had clearly lost its life. Now, this isn't unheard of, but the fact that none of his patients, not one, ever actually witnessed their child for lack of a better phrase, well, it was unusual. Dr. Jacobson soothed his patients' worries by telling them that their bodies had simply reabsorbed the baby. But as a few of his patients would soon learn, they were never actually pregnant in the first place. A few dozen of Dr. Jacobson's patients started to grow a bit suspicious about his practice. They began to compare notes and share stories with one another about what they had experienced while in his care. Each of the women told the exact same story. They showed up because they had difficulties getting pregnant. Dr. Jacobson would then give them an injection, then they would immediately become pregnant often within just a few days. Three months later, tragedy would strike, rinse and repeat. When so many patients began reporting the exact same story, a handful of victims formed an alliance, gathered up their information, then contacted a local news station to report their suspicions. The news station gathered all of these allegations and invested the case, later reporting on the incident and helping the families to file a lawsuit against Dr. Jacobson for malpractice. Now, you're probably thinking, well, shoot, that escalated quickly and you'd be right. See, the reason they decided to pursue charges of malpractice is because many of the women began to realize that they were never pregnant in the first place, even though Dr. Jacobson assured them that they were. When Dr. Jacobson was investigated, it was quickly determined that the hormone that he'd been injecting the women with was simple HCG, a hormone that is naturally released during pregnancy. So it only makes sense that these women would suddenly be getting positive pregnancy test results, because 99% of pregnancy tests simply test for an elevated presence of HCG in the body. So after being injected with HCG, naturally these tests would detect it and report a positive result, even though the women were never truly pregnant. When the case was eventually taken to court, several of the families provided ultrasound images that have been given to them by Dr. Jacobson. The doctor claimed that these images showed clear depictions of their unborn child, but in reality, the expert claims that these images were nothing more than nearby bodily organs or, in several cases, poop. But believe me when I say, this is only the tip of the iceberg. This lawsuit was child's play compared to the allegations that were about to emerge against Dr. Jacobson. A popular pregnancy method these days is artificial insemination. There's a million reasons why a couple may want to pursue this route of reproduction, but the quick and simple breakdown of how this works is that the couple locates a suitable donor, then that donor provides his donation sample, then that sample is implanted into the mother. Nine months later, if all goes well, a healthy baby is born. Artificial insemination was just one of the many services that Dr. Jacobson offered his clients. Considering that the doctor had been in the business for decades, he claimed to have had close relationships with a nearby donor bank that could provide samples for virtually any requests the parents could conjure up. If they wanted the father to have blonde hair with green eyes, he would make that happen. Red hair with brown eyes, you got it. High IQ with a height of at least six feet tall, no problem. Dr. Jacobson would rather quickly come up with these samples for his patients, then they would come back to the office and a quick procedure would be performed in prednating the mother on the spot. But during this process, some of his patients would get rather uncomfortable. Several of the women that he worked with said that his demeanor was less than ordinary. To make matters worse, right before each of his procedures, he would take remarkably long trips to the restroom. This may seem like a very odd thing to notice, but several of his patients picked up on this, so it's certainly worth mentioning. The truth about what was really happening here wouldn't come out for several years. Everything hit the fan between 1990 and 1992. This took place while Dr. Jacobson was being investigated for his role in falsely informing women of their pregnancy. And claiming their own feces was actually a living child. During the course of the investigation, detectives noticed that none of his medical records ever documented the name of any of the donors that he'd been connected with. Instead, each of the donors was simply referred to by a number. Dr. Jacobson said that he operated a completely anonymous business, and that he ensured all of his donors would remain anonymous until the end of time. To help facilitate this, he never wrote their names down on paper. He was the only one who had the knowledge of who the donor was, and he vowed to take this information to his grave. But this is when his house of cards began to fall. As investigators dug further into this so-called donor program, they could find no information regarding the existence of such a program. They could find no ties between Dr. Jacobson and any of the donor banks in the area, not one of them. So how was he getting in touch with all of these donors? To better understand this, investigators approached many of his former patients, and asked if they would be willing to take part in a DNA test to help prove whether or not Dr. Jacobson was telling the truth. Many of the families happily agreed to take part in the research, and they offered up a DNA sample from each of their children. This is the moment when catastrophe struck, and decimated families across the country. When detectives submitted their first seven samples for testing, every one of them came back with results that labeled Dr. Cecil Jacobson as the biological father. Detectives knew that there was much more going on than Dr. Jacobson was willing to reveal. They'd now proven that Dr. Jacobson had been lying to his patients, and they suspected he'd been doing this since day one. It wouldn't be unreasonable to assume that nearly every last one of his patients had been deceived. We don't know for sure just how many patients came to Dr. Jacobson for guidance, but we know that he's been linked to at least 75 children across America. What makes this even more disturbing is that in several of these cases, the mothers were expecting to be inseminated with their own husband's samples. So whatever became of the samples the husband provided? Well, we don't even know. Needless to say, Dr. Jacobson was taken to court by dozens of families, all of whom wanted to press charges against him. When he was asked to defend himself, this man gave it his all. He had an excuse for every question. This man was a master manipulator and a world-class liar. He denied any wrongdoing from beginning to end and vigorously fought to protect his name. When he was asked about the dozens of false pregnancies that he'd witnessed, Dr. Jacobson claimed that he truly believed each of the women had been pregnant after the administration of HCG. To him, he believed he'd come up with a secret formula to quickly force a pregnancy, a method that no one else was using. He admitted that he did know that the presence of HCG could cause a false pregnancy test, but he firmly stated that it was his honest belief that the urine concentrations would have been far too low for the test to show a false positive result. He was then asked about the ultrasound images, which he'd chalked up to nothing more than an honest error in every single case. As for the fake donor program, this is where things just get ridiculous. He claimed that he did in fact rely on anonymous donors, but he couldn't provide any documentation proving that he'd been affiliated with any legitimate donor programs in the area. He claimed that, on several occasions, donors failed to show up for their appointment. In his eyes, he was doing the families an honest favor by providing his own samples instead of just canceling the appointments. He claims that he didn't want his patients to miss a window of opportunity, so he inseminated them with his own donation. And let's be clear here, that's a pretty generous offer. But at least ask the families if they'd even be interested first. You don't just do something like this without speaking with the parents. As for the situation in which the woman's husband provided a sample that was never administered, this was labeled as nothing more than cross-contamination or a mistake in his lab. But here's the problem with this case as a whole. There were no laws in place that prevented Dr. Cecil Jacobson from doing any of this. Virtually everything he did was perfectly legal. At that time, there were no laws in the state of Virginia that would have held him accountable for the tragedies that he inflicted on so many couples. The fertility industry was almost completely unregulated at this time. So Dr. Jacobson never technically did anything wrong in the eyes of the law. And it seems that he knew this was true. He knew he couldn't ever be held accountable. But there's a bigger issue here that's been spoken of by a handful of journalists and what it means for future generations. I remember reading one article that claims that over 75% of Dr. Jacobson's children reside in Northern Virginia, and many of them are believed to be attending the same schools. So when these children become teenagers, what does this mean when they start seeking out potential partners? The genetic ramifications to future generations could be disastrous. Even the simple emotional ramifications could be harmful to these kids. What happens if they fall in love with each other without even realizing that they're half siblings? We've all read Romeo and Juliet. We know what teenagers are capable of when they feel they're being trapped in some sort of forbidden love story. Thankfully, investigators recognized just how terrible the situation was. And they vowed to make sure that Dr. Jacobson would pay for what he had done. While his actions against these families weren't technically illegal, they continued to investigate it and found that he had sent various medical documents to the Postal Service across state lines. This was highly illegal in Virginia. They also convicted him of wire fraud as they found out that some of his patients had paid him for services that he knowingly didn't provide. He was also convicted of perjury for the lies he told during the investigation. In the end, Dr. Jacobson was convicted on more than 52 counts. But unfortunately, the maximum punishment for this was a mere five years in prison and a $116,000 fine. He got out of prison sometime around 1997 or so and remained a free man up until his passing in 2021 at the age of 84. When Jacobson's wife was asked about her stance regarding her husband's crime, she proclaimed that any woman should consider themselves lucky to have Dr. Jacobson as the father of their child. She never believed her husband did anything wrong. Many of Cecil's victims have been strongly urged to move out of the state of Virginia to help minimize the impact of his actions. But nearly all of his victims have opted to remain in their home state. Let's just hope that these parents choose to educate their children about the dangers of dating someone without clearing them with the genetic expert first. If this case weren't bizarre enough, I should definitely mention that it is by no means the only case of its kind. Like I mentioned at the beginning of this video, Netflix has an entire documentary about Dr. Donald Klein, who's believed to have fathered at least 94 children in eerily similar ways. A Dutch doctor has said to have fathered 21 children in this way, and another American doctor fathered 24. In Canada, Dr. Norman Barwin has said to have fathered at least 226 children in a similar fashion, with another doctor from London allegedly fathering 600 children. It goes without saying, if you plan on receiving fertility treatments, check out your doctors very, very thoroughly first. Thankfully, cases like this are exceedingly rare, but most states in the United States still have no regulation regarding the fertility industry. So pretty much anything is fair game at this point, making this case all the more disturbing. Thank you guys for tuning in to another episode of True Crime Stories. If you want to see more true crime documentaries like this, be sure to hit the like button and subscribe. It's completely free. If you'd like to help support the channel, the best way you can do that is simply by leaving a comment below, any comment at all. It helps out the channel a lot more than you may realize. If you love the channel and want to see new episodes several days early, you can do that by clicking the join button below. And you can even pick up a True Crime Stories mug, like the one you see on the desk behind me, from tienaughts.com. But with that, my name is Tie Noughts, and I'll catch you guys in the next video.