A woman with at least 14 half-siblings has likened the global fertility industry to "the wild, wild west".
Eve Wiley is one of many people featured on a new Netflix documentary The Man With 1,000 Kids which shines a light on fertility fraud and the need for regulation in sperm donation.
The three-part series examines how charismatic YouTuber Jonathan Jacob Meijer is accused of travelling the world deceiving mothers into having his babies on a mass scale.
The documentary investigates the murky world of the fertility industry and uncovers how due to a lack of global regulations, some international fertility clinics continue to allow anonymous donations.
Advocate and campaigner Eve Wiley told The Pat Kenny Show she is a victim of similar fertility fraud.
"My parents struggled with infertility and at the direction of their fertility doctor they looked into artificial insemination by an anonymous sperm donor," she said.
"The doctor handed them this one piece of paper and it had all this donor information on it.
"My parents selected donor 106 from California Cryobank."
'I was the secret'
The man who she believed was her father passed away when she was seven. Ms Wiley said things changed when she was 16-years-old.
"When I was 16-years-old I was going through my mom's email; she was our school nurse [and] I had this habit of going through her email and finding all juicy information on all my friends," she said.
"Through that I kept finding these emails about artificial insemination.
"I'm from a small town on a farm and I just figured that she was doing something with my Grandpas cow - but then I saw my birthday.
"I always knew that there was a secret, I just didn't know that I was that secret".
Ms Wiley said she confronted her mother who 'told her everything' so she decided to find out as much as she could.
She waited until she was 18 and then submitted a request to the sperm bank to find the donor.
'Fairytale relationship'
Ms Wiley said a year later she started emailing with the man she believed to be the sperm donor which eventually turned into phone calls.
The two eventually met when Ms Wiley was in college in Texas.
"He came to meet me and it was wonderful," she said.
"We met for the first time, spent hours talking and went out to dinner.
"It was a beautiful, fairytale relationship... when I decided to get married he officated my wedding.
"My kids call him Papa - everything was just wonderful until it wasn't".
'DNA doesn't lie'
Ms Wiley said it all changed again seven years ago when her eldest son got very ill.
"Our team of doctors here in Dallas could not figure it out so we went to a different doctor who was working from a genetic predisposition," she said.
"He called and said, 'Your son has celiac disease, it's hereditary'.
"So I went on this investigation on who in my family had it and it came up empty."
Ms Wiley said she ultimately went looking at her family's ancestry and discovered she had several half-siblings.
She recalls one of the people she contacted did not believe her so they went digging a little further.
"'Your uncle is it - and I said my Dad's name - and he said 'No, his name is Dr [Kim] McMorries' - my mom's fertility doctor," she said.
"My world absolutely stopped because in that moment I knew that people lie and DNA does not.
"It only meant one thing: that my mom's fertility doctor switched his own sperm for the intended sperm my parents selected and he was my biological father."
The Man With 1,000 Kids. Image: NetflixMs Wiley said she cannot understand why the doctor did this.
"Your guess is as good as mine - I've talked with multiple people that worked with him," she said.
"Some people thought that he was financially motivated because he was saving money.
"It could have been [that] it was just ease.
"His excuse was that he went back to his medical school days when he was a donor - which had been 14 years before I was conceived - and he found his own sperm vials and he drove those across Texas and those are the ones that he used.
"I do not believe that but that is the story that he is selling".
'The wild west'
Ms Wiley said she believes there needs to be more controls on fertility treatments.
"Still to this day the United States, and really the fertility industry around the world is the wild, wild west," she said.
"This was not a crime and it did not carry a civil or criminal cause of action.
"I have all these half-siblings, I had no idea - I knew them and I had no idea".
Ms Wiley added that she is campaigning to make fertility fraud a crime in the US.
Listen back here:
