The 'Inconceivable Truth' Hidden in New York City

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. If you're a regular listener to the station, you're probably familiar with our next guest but be prepared to meet him in a different context. Matt Katz has been a staple in our station's reporting on criminal justice issues, migration, abuse of power. Chris Christie, before that, you may recall his coverage of Christie gained him a Peabody for his reporting on Bridgegate, and he wrote a book about it or maybe you've heard him talking more recently about Rikers and seeing the exclusive images he uncovered of abused inmates locked in caged showers. He's also sat in this chair as guest host of this show on some of my days off.

Today Matt joins us with his own story. In 2016, he held a call in on these airwaves and revealed that he was half Irish after doing an ancestry.com test. Until he had taken that DNA test, he believed that he was 100% Ashkenazi Jewish. How this could have been remained a mystery until now. Over the last seven years, Matt took on the questions of his paternity and now shares his findings in the podcast, Inconceivable Truth, which by the way, just hit number 10 on all of Apple Podcasts top shows chart. We're going to invite your calls on anything similar that may have happened to you and the emotional and even social importance of it. Here's a minute and a half of the trailer from Matt's podcast series.

Matt Katz's Mom: "You knew how to read an analog clock before anybody else of your age, because he was always late, and you would always look at the clock. You would know he's supposed to come at two o'clock. Two o'clock came, he didn't come.

Matt Katz: "I didn't know where my father Warren lived, I didn't have his phone number. I didn't know the truth about him, but all of my questions about who my father was turns out I wasn't asking the right questions at all. After I took a DNA test, the results blew up my world. That's when I found out that the secrets about my family went far deeper. This is my question for you. Did you and Warren get any fertility help?"

Matt Katz's Mom: "Yes, we did."

Matt Katz: "Is it possible there was a sperm donor? I don't think it's my father. Holy shit. This guy who caused so much emotional angst, he was a fucking stranger to me. I'm Matt Katz, and I've been a reporter for more than 20 years, but now I'm on the hardest story I've ever worked on, my own. What I'm finding out is turning out to be way stranger and more personally intense than anything I've ever investigated before. At the heart of it all is a mystery about my family that I need to solve."

Brian Lehrer: From the trailer of Matt Katz's podcast series, Inconceivable Truth. Now, at first glance, this seems like a totally personal mystery, but this reporting may be more similar to other stories about abuse of power on Matt's current beat. He joins us now to talk about his findings and the broader story that he's discovered about medical malpractice in New York City. By the way, Matt will be at NYU for an event tomorrow night. I'll say this at the beginning and at the end of the segment if you want to see him in person, that'll be about audio storytelling. More of that coming up. Hey, Matt.

Matt Katz: Hey, Brian. Thank you for doing this. It is surreal to be talking about such personal stuff with you, and normally we're just talking about the news.

Brian Lehrer: How'd this happen?

Matt Katz: Yes, I'll give the 90-second version. I take a DNA test in 2016. Me and my wife just did this on a whim curious where in Eastern Europe our people are from. We're both 100% Ashkenazi Jewish, and it comes back, I'm only half Jewish. This doesn't make any sense. I know where both of my biological parents are from. My mom takes the test, she comes back as my mom and 100% Jewish. Suspicions fall on my father who I'm estranged from.

Time goes on, and a year and a half goes by, and then I'm guest hosting the show after yours, the precursor to All Of It, the midday show. This is 2018, and the guest ghosted didn't show up. I was supposed to interview a woman about immigration, and I had to fill airtime. I had to go to callers. I tell my story a little briefly thing. I'm like, "Hey, I thought I was 100% Jewish. Now I find out I'm half what turned out to be Irish. That's my family's immigration story. I'm trying to understand it. Do you have any stories of your own?"

Our callers, Brian, our listeners, we had an amazing segment about people's immigration stories. Then I get an email from a listener. He's like, "Join this Jewish genealogy Facebook group." I eventually joined this group and a woman on there known as a Search Angel, she's like, "I can help you solve this mystery." She goes into my ancestry.com account where I had taken this DNA test, and she comes back and she says, "This is your half-sister. Her name is Tara. She lives in California."

I'm like, "What in the world?" I'm just trying to find why I'm half-Jewish and not 100% Jewish and then she finds a half-sister. I contact Tara, she doesn't get back to me. I find Tara's Instagram. I message her. She doesn't get back to me. I had just celebrated my 40th birthday. It's July 2018. Tara posts, "It's my 40th birthday." Tara is my half-sister, and she's two and a half weeks younger than me.

This is, as I say in the podcast, an inconceivable truth. It doesn't make any sense. I then sign up for the other DNA test. The DNA account 23andMe, and that's when I meet a second sister Helena and she tells me what I now know to be the truth, and that we all have the same father. We were conceived via sperm donor in what proved to be a pretty shady practice in 1977 in Kips Bay in Manhattan. Then I had to figure out what happened, and that's why I made the podcast.

Brian Lehrer: Listening to that clip that we played from the trailer, your mom seemed surprised that Warren, her husband, wasn't your father. How could she be surprised by that?

Matt Katz: We do not know what happened in this doctor's office in '77 obviously. We do know this, my mother had trouble getting pregnant with her husband at the time. They later divorced. She went to this doctor who is a fertility specialist, and she remembers that he inseminated her with her husband's sperm which was the common practice at the time. This is before IVF. This is how it was done so the sperm could get closer to the uterus. That's what she remembers and then she remembers being told frankly to go home and have sex.

That would make it almost I guess stick or something. That was what she remembers. I since did a lot of investigation to understand how she could not know this.

I've read old medical journals. I interviewed the doctor himself who's still alive. I interviewed him twice. He's in the podcast. These are the things I learned. First of all, she's not the only woman who did not know she was being inseminated with donor sperm in the '70s and in New York.

The reason is doctors were intentionally very secretive about this artificial insemination process in the early days. This is early on when doctors were first doing this. When they did tell women what they were doing and most mothers I'm aware of didn't know something, they were instructed to keep this information secret from their children forever. They were told that they would match the looks of the donor with the husband in order to deceive the child. That was not done in my case, by the way.

Then one of the common methods at the time was intended to literally trick the parents into thinking that the husband was the actual biological father. The way they did this was by mixing sperm, they would mix the father's sperm, which they had determined didn't work very well, with good donor sperm. This makes no medical sense but it was done according to the doctor to trick the couples into having this idea that they were having their own biological kids.

Brian Lehrer: The impression that I got from one of your episodes is that the doctors in, I guess the old days, you can tell me if they don't do this anymore, I think they don't do this anymore. The doctors thought they were doing the family a favor, that it was a benign lie in the interest of not complicating the lives of these couples when they wanted to have a baby. They thought that the secret that they were actually giving the future child a different biological father than the husband than they thought they were giving that they thought they were doing this out of compassion.

Matt Katz: Yes, they did. They saw a woman who could not get pregnant, who was desperate to get pregnant. This is again before IVF, there were no other methods. They decided that if the husband believed he was having his own biological kid, if they maybe mixed the sperm and told the couple that the donor sperm is just going to boost the husband's sperm, this is what they would say.

It's just going to help it get across the finish line. If they told them these euphemistic lies, the idea was that the father would be more attached to the child and less likely to leave the family. They were in the process just helping create families. Of course, they never predicted that we would map the human genome and people would be able to find their relatives on something called the Internet and determine that these lies existed. They never thought that they'd be caught and they never kept any records whatsoever. They never thought about the kids like me.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, any similar stories? 212-433-WNYC. We have some people calling in. We'll get a few of these in here. 212-433-WNYC, call or text with Matt Katz. Robert in Brooklyn. You're on WNYC. Hi, Robert.

Robert: Hey. Hi. I just wanted to say, and this is a story because this came up in my own family because a sibling did one of these 23andMe things. The flip side of what your guest, Mr. Katz, I believe is saying is that I don't care. My father is the man who raised me. My mother is the woman who raised me and I don't care. I wish my idiot relative had never done this because what's on a piece of paper and some DNA test doesn't matter to me and shouldn't matter to anyone else. I understand it does to Mr. Katz. I'm not criticizing him. Can we try to understand that? I don't care. I don't want the people in my family to talk to my children about this so they start thinking weird stuff.

Brian Lehrer: Robert, thank you. In fact, to this point, Matt, before you respond, I'm going to play a clip from the podcast. This is Your Barber Darrell saying, "Yes, why go searching after this revelation to you for who your biological father or donor actually is?" Listen.

Darrell: Let it go. It's not all about cloak-and-dagger and being Inspector Clouseau and finding this and find-- Some things are not meant to find, and some things want to be private and some things want to be buried. By digging them up, you open yourself up to a lot of hurt, a lot of harm.

Brian Lehrer: All right, Matt, talk to our caller Robert, and Your Barber Darrell.

Matt Katz: Sure. Listen. I absolutely agree with Robert. It doesn't actually matter. I go through extensively in the podcast how my mom's second husband, Richard, who adopted me, I changed my last name to Katz because it's Richard's last name. How much he's my dad. I call him dad to this day. He's my father. Whoever this donor father is or was, that is not my dad. I absolutely get that and go through it extensively.

However, everybody else in this world knows who their biological, almost everybody I should say, knows who their biological parents are. I think when that truth exists out there when other people know it's a truth, then the child should know. Secondly, medical information. There are donor-conceived children who have found out later in life that they were donor-conceived and they have the same conditions that their father died from. This is information people should know.

The third thing I would say is that the most magical part of this whole process for me-- Again, the podcast is about my search for the identity of my biological father, but in the process, I find three half-siblings. That has been so wonderful and so enriching to my life and their lives. We have this relationship. We have a daily text chain. That's something that I think I should know and have the right to know. Again, a child who doesn't want to pursue that, a donor-conceived child, I get that. For me and for most others, it's really important.

Brian Lehrer: I have my own story on the edges of this, believe it or not. Which is that I got contacted only about two years ago by somebody who lives in England, who's about my age. He says, "Hello, I'm your first cousin." I only discovered that recently through something similar to what you went through. He was contacting the various people. There are a bunch of us who would be his first cousin from one of my uncles. He wants to get to know some of his pretty close biological relatives. This happens.

Matt Katz: I have gotten so many messages from people with different but a little bit similar situations, long lost relatives, adoptees looking for their parents, stepfathers who become real fathers. So much of that, people can relate to pieces of this story.

Brian Lehrer: Let's see. Anthony in Fort Greene, you're on WNYC. Hi, Anthony.

Anthony: Hi. Good morning. I wanted to share my story as being an adopted child. In 1961, my adoptive family adopted me from Catholic Charities. My family was always very transparent about our adoption. We were never treated any differently by the rest of our family. We were brought up being very proud of our Italian immigrant history. I always thought about who gave birth to me on my birthday, wondering who she was knowing how difficult it probably was for her.

I did a DNA test and submitted it. I was nervous about meeting other family members because I didn't know what was going to be behind that door. I was curious about where my biological family came from. One day I forgot to toggle private. [laughs] Within two days, I get a message from a woman, Kate, who says that, "It looks like we are really close relatives up to first cousins or more." I was like, "Oh, okay." We met. She had been in touch with her birth family and had met them-- [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: Were you--

Anthony: -in contact with them.

Brian Lehrer: Anthony. I hate to cut you short, but there's one other call, I have to get in before we end. Just tell me, was it a good experience? Are you glad?

Anthony: It was. I learned that she studied art history. I'm an artist and an educator. She's an educator museum.

Brian Lehrer: Those connections get made. Same thing happened with my long-lost cousin who showed up, found that he does a lot of the same things as some of the other cousins. Anthony, thank you. Matt, we're getting a call from George in County Cork Ireland, which is-

Matt Katz: Oh my God.

Brian Lehrer: -is actually where your biological father came from, right?

Matt Katz: Yes. That's correct.

Brian Lehrer: George, you're on WNYC. We have one minute for you before the end of the show. Thank you for calling in.

George: Thank you. I'm calling from County Cork in Ireland, native New Yorker here. Six months ago I discovered through AncestryDNA testing that I have a half-brother I never knew existed. My mom, who was a teacher back in the mid-50s became pregnant and unmarried and went to California with her mother and where she delivered my half-brother. It turns out we lived only a few blocks from each other in San Francisco and no people in common.

Brian Lehrer: I have to leave it there, George. I apologize. Obviously, we could keep going with this, but the moral of the story is you probably want to tune into Matt's podcast series, Inconceivable Truth, and find out the ending of the story. You can also meet Matt in person because he's doing an event tomorrow night at NYU, seven o'clock, Tuesday night, tomorrow night. You're going to be talking about the podcast and using podcasting as a medium for personal storytelling, Matt.

Matt Katz: That's right. Just go to register @journalism.nyu.edu. Just scroll down to events. It's free. We'd love to talk to everybody about their experiences.

Brian Lehrer: Journalism.nyu.edu. Thanks, Matt. Amazing series. Keep it up.

Matt Katz: Thank you so much, Brian.

 

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