S30 E2: Who's the father? | Bad Results

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Speaker 3 Well, please don't put me through to a voicemail. DNA testing, could you please hold?

Speaker 4 Yep.

Speaker 3 Hi there. Am I speaking to a manager or a supervisor?

Speaker 3 For a prenatal department?

Speaker 3 Well, both prenatal and

Speaker 6 this is cell phone video recorded by a young woman named Koral Meyer. She and her mother, Michelle Renaud, are calling a company called Viagaard Acumetrics.

Speaker 6 Michelle takes the lead.

Speaker 7 But here's the situation.

Speaker 3 So my daughter had a prenatal paternity test done, and it showed 99.99%

Speaker 3 probability that this person was the father of her unborn child.

Speaker 3 Then he recently had a DNA test done. We got the results from him yesterday showing he was not the father.

Speaker 6 Two paternity test results from the same lab. The prenatal paternity test result says he's the baby's dad.

Speaker 6 The postnatal paternity result says he's not.

Speaker 3 So I did a little bit of research online and both of these tests are 99.9% accurate. So it's impossible for the same person to be tested accurately and have two different results.

Speaker 3 I would need to grab the file.

Speaker 8 Yeah.

Speaker 9 Would you happen to know the case ID number?

Speaker 6 The receptionist says something about having to go through boxes of files to find Cadal's case.

Speaker 3 And listen, who needs to call today?

Speaker 3 Like, this is extremely, like, you have no idea how much this affects somebody emotionally and mentally getting a positive and negative test for the same person because that's impossible unless the lab made a mistake.

Speaker 3 It's it's devastating. I'm definitely gonna have the manager call you.

Speaker 6 The manager doesn't call.

Speaker 6 But what Cadell doesn't know yet is that other people, many others, have called this company asking the same questions, looking for the same answers for years.

Speaker 12 How could I be that unlucky?

Speaker 13 Is it my fault?

Speaker 14 It's not my fault, right?

Speaker 11 Like, what the fuck?

Speaker 16 They made over my life.

Speaker 6 And they're not victims of random bad luck. There was nothing random about it.

Speaker 6 I'm Jorge Barrera. This is Bad Results.
Chapter 2. Who's the Father?

Speaker 17 You ignored my first question.

Speaker 19 Do you like Putin?

Speaker 11 Yes Taylor I like Putin.

Speaker 6 This all started for Kodal when she was 19 living the life of a college kid studying broadcasting in North Bay, Ontario, a small city on the shores of Lake Nipissing.

Speaker 6 She had her own place, worked at a pizza joint, was into photography and filmmaking, which explains the videos you've been hearing.

Speaker 6 For Kodal, they're a bit like diary entries. In them, she looks like a blue-eyed Maisie Williams.
You know, Arya Stark from Game of Thrones?

Speaker 6 Brown hair, round face, with a delicate gold-hooped nose ring.

Speaker 6 And how she tells it, her life back then,

Speaker 6 it was a little wild.

Speaker 11 I, at the time, was pretty mentally unwell.

Speaker 20 I was

Speaker 22 very much into partying and seeing random men all of the time.

Speaker 6 So when she started feeling a little off in July 2019 while working the night shift at the pizza joint, she had a suspicion.

Speaker 20 I told my friend, hey, let's get a pregnancy test because I'm not feeling so well about this.

Speaker 21 So for some reason, I was too nervous to get it myself. So I asked her to get it for me.

Speaker 7 So she went to Dollarama and got me a pregnancy test.

Speaker 11 I

Speaker 22 watch it slowly move and then I see one line and then two lines and then I yell at my friend and to come in but I wasn't panicking.

Speaker 23 I was in shock and she started panicking.

Speaker 6 Kadal is pregnant and her gut tells her it's this one guy.

Speaker 23 I just like immediately went to him to tell him

Speaker 7 because like I felt that it was him.

Speaker 6 But she can't just trust her gut. She needs to be sure.

Speaker 21 I had to search paternity tests, but I was like, wait, I'm pregnant. So I had to do research on the difference between prenatal and a paternity test after the child is born.

Speaker 23 Then I searched prenatal paternity tests near me, and then this Viagaard Acumetrics at 1232 Kingston Road shows up. And I was like, oh, wow, this is really close.

Speaker 6 In 2019, Viaguard Acumetrics is offering a full slate of lab services, fingerprinting, pardons and waivers, drug testing, and of course, DNA paternity testing.

Speaker 6 Kadal finds them on the eastern edge of Toronto, wedged between a hair salon and a Montessori school.

Speaker 19 And the hallway outside of this like medical office was like there was no lights on. So it was a little weird.

Speaker 6 Kadal is ushered in. There's a lot going on in her head.
She remembers an elderly man taking her for the blood draw. She doesn't know his name, but in time it will become a name she'll never forget.

Speaker 21 I just remember though, like his hands were really shaky when he was doing it.

Speaker 17 He was very shaky.

Speaker 19 It felt really weird.

Speaker 6 In his white lab coat, he squeezes drops from her pinky finger to put into a vial.

Speaker 23 For some reason, I started to feel dizzy, so I think it was just blood and being overwhelmed.

Speaker 28 So he's like, can you just sit down and I can get you some water if you want and stuff like that? And I was like, yeah.

Speaker 23 And I think he caught the gist that I was feeling like weird about everything and he said don't worry we'll take care of you just reassuring because I very much show my emotions and I was very much showing my emotions that day and he reassured me that we'll figure this out and all that kind of stuff

Speaker 6 Kudal pays the bill $400 up front and she'll need to pay 400 more when she gets the results. But while driving away, Acumetrics phones back and says they didn't get enough of her blood.

Speaker 6 They say they'll send her a home test kit, and when it arrives, the envelope reads Prenatal Paternities Inc.

Speaker 6 Cordal doesn't think much of it at the time. She doesn't yet know that it's the name of the company that got John Brennan's test results wrong four years earlier.

Speaker 11 We're poking holes in Corell's finger.

Speaker 6 But right now, here in her bathroom, Cordal just wants to get this done.

Speaker 29 Why do we have to do that?

Speaker 30 It's a paternity test. Paternity test.

Speaker 6 Ashley, I'm scared. She's with three friends filming the blood extraction for a school project about her pregnancy.

Speaker 25 Oh my gosh, just a mess in here.

Speaker 28 Yeah.

Speaker 6 Okay, clean your finger off.

Speaker 3 I don't want to do this. Are we doing it on your index or middle finger?

Speaker 14 That's what the paper says to do.

Speaker 31 What? He did it on my knees.

Speaker 8 Well, I don't care, but he fucking did.

Speaker 31 He obviously didn't know what he was doing.

Speaker 11 Yeah, that makes me feel very comfortable right now.

Speaker 9 Kay?

Speaker 9 You're okay?

Speaker 9 Okay.

Speaker 6 One of her friends pricks Kudal's finger and squeezes blood from it into a little vial.

Speaker 32 It's done.

Speaker 8 It's really done.

Speaker 9 You guys are such good friends.

Speaker 6 Later that day, The man she believes is the father comes over to give his DNA sample for testing. He swabs his cheek.

Speaker 27 And then he put it into the envelope and I remember him saying that he trusts me to send it out.

Speaker 6 She puts her blood and his DNA in a box, tapes it up.

Speaker 17 It just felt so

Speaker 7 trashy.

Speaker 11 Doesn't that sound terrible?

Speaker 7 I felt trashy.

Speaker 27 What I'm feeling at that moment is that I'm irresponsible and immature.

Speaker 23 To put it into the mailbox to send it to a company who's going to tell me who the father of my child is,

Speaker 23 it didn't feel very nice.

Speaker 21 And there's people just catching the bus and I'm putting a box of

Speaker 23 DNA.

Speaker 23 It's just weird. It's a weird concept.

Speaker 21 I had a pit in my stomach,

Speaker 23 but At the end of the day, my brain kept saying, science, you know, like it's obviously legit.

Speaker 27 It's a DNA company. You know, why would anything go wrong?

Speaker 6 A couple of weeks pass. Then Kadal gets the call she's been waiting for.

Speaker 3 The voice on the other end of the call is

Speaker 18 calm.

Speaker 20 He's not the dad.

Speaker 27 And I remember I couldn't breathe.

Speaker 23 Like, I started crying really hard, but it was like the cry that hasn't come out yet.

Speaker 17 The phone call ended, and that was just it.

Speaker 6 Kadal is now 14 weeks pregnant and Acumetrics has just told her that the man she hoped was the dad isn't.

Speaker 23 When you're given all of these different avenues where your life could go for your child and you start to almost like visualize what life will be like and now that one's gone.

Speaker 7 You have to erase that from your mind. and now visualize these other lives that you might have.

Speaker 6 She needs to arrange a DNA test with another man. She takes a deep breath and makes the call.

Speaker 7 I was basically begging him to come over and do the test, and I assured him that it would be in my house.

Speaker 23 We'll both be there, and we'll send it out together.

Speaker 7 So it's like super safe and foolproof. Like, there's

Speaker 27 why wouldn't you?

Speaker 6 He agrees, but there'll be nothing foolproof about the answers she's about to get.

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Speaker 4 Ashley, what's the gender? I can't tell you.

Speaker 6 Codal's gender reveal party happens on a warm October day.

Speaker 4 You gotta pull it. Pull it.

Speaker 4 Pull hard. Someone pull it for me.

Speaker 4 You gotta pull it hard.

Speaker 6 Which way? She's wearing sandals, her belly, a growing bump under a coral dress.

Speaker 8 Oh my god, I don't even want to know.

Speaker 9 Hold on, hold on, hold on.

Speaker 6 Her brother Jayden is behind the camera, and the lens focuses on Kodal standing alone, a smoke flare in her hand.

Speaker 6 She lights the flare and smoke billows out in a cloud of pink.

Speaker 6 Her little sister runs to hug her.

Speaker 6 This is a rare moment for Kadal. Everyone here knows what she's going through, that she still doesn't know who the dad is, and that she's waiting on results from a second DNA test.

Speaker 6 But for one afternoon, they can all just relax a little, celebrate.

Speaker 6 A couple weeks later, she gets the results from the second DNA test. Over the phone, an Acumetrics rep tells her this guy, he's the father.

Speaker 23 So then I texted him and he sent like hard eyes and he was all excited.

Speaker 6 And I was like, But this man does little more than send emojis. He leaves Codell mostly alone to face her pregnancy.

Speaker 30 21 weeks and

Speaker 29 four days

Speaker 9 and

Speaker 9 I'm not happy

Speaker 9 at all.

Speaker 29 I'm always exhausted.

Speaker 30 I'm always sick.

Speaker 6 Kadal records this in her bathroom. Her eyes are red, her face drained of color.

Speaker 6 Holy,

Speaker 6 just sucks.

Speaker 30 People live their own lives, and you're just stuck

Speaker 8 alone all the time.

Speaker 6 The dad-to-be shows up for only one ultrasound when Coral is seven months pregnant. She phones him later, after the appointment.

Speaker 26 Do you want to

Speaker 3 be there for the delivery?

Speaker 3 Sure.

Speaker 8 What?

Speaker 11 Sure.

Speaker 11 Sure?

Speaker 3 Or yes?

Speaker 3 Sure mean yes.

Speaker 6 When baby Harlow was born on March 7th, he's not there.

Speaker 23 So when my daughter was born, she was given my my last name.

Speaker 22 And

Speaker 11 the

Speaker 29 person who Viagaard said was the father was upset about that. So he was like, I'm going to do a DNA test because I want her to have my last name.

Speaker 23 So I want to go change it, basically.

Speaker 26 So I told him, go ahead.

Speaker 7 I was very upset because I went through this whole process. Like, it's over now.

Speaker 19 I don't want to revisit.

Speaker 6 When I spoke to him, he told me he'd always wanted a second test. That when he held Harlow for the first time shortly after her birth, he said he felt sure at that moment she wasn't his daughter.

Speaker 6 For her part, Kodal is exhausted. She doesn't need another fight, but they go back to Acumetrics, which offers them a postnatal paternity test.

Speaker 34 And it came back like

Speaker 24 a week, week and a half,

Speaker 23 and he was told that he wasn't the father.

Speaker 18 I mean, how do you even react, you know?

Speaker 3 So now we don't know, is he positive or is he negative? Let me go and get the file. I'm just going to put you on a quick hold, okay? Yep.
Okay, thanks.

Speaker 6 Which is how Couldal and her mother, Michelle, end up on the phone with Accumetrics. They don't understand what is happening.
All these tests, all these conflicting results.

Speaker 20 I was at my mom's house and

Speaker 18 so I'm just eating my broccoli

Speaker 29 and I'm like, is this really my life right now?

Speaker 23 Can I not just have dinner with my family and know who the father is?

Speaker 29 Like I already had the baby.

Speaker 23 I thought we were supposed to figure this out when I was pregnant.

Speaker 6 Correll's mom, Michelle, shares her frustration.

Speaker 3 You know, for me, I just wanted Harla to know who her dad was.

Speaker 35 She has that right to know who her parents are, and this company was taking that right away from her. They were doing this again.
How do we know that this is real?

Speaker 35 Who's the dad? Which test is correct?

Speaker 6 Kadal's baby is now six months old, and Kadal is back where she started.

Speaker 21 Honestly, I just wanted to enjoy my child.

Speaker 7 I feel like I was robbed of that.

Speaker 23 You know, everyone always says, like, that's the most valuable time. Like, soak it all in.
I could not soak anything in.

Speaker 6 So she calls up the first guy again, the one her gut told her was the dad, asks him to do another test, but with a different company. These results say he is the dad.

Speaker 6 But he's a bit wary and doesn't totally trust these new results. He wants yet another test.
So they do one more.

Speaker 6 14 months and five paternity tests with three different companies later, they finally have an answer. This man, the first man Codal tested with, he's the father.

Speaker 6 And all the emotions that have swamped Codal throughout all of this, well, they all harden into one.

Speaker 6 Anger.

Speaker 23 There's no way that this is real. Like, this can't be real.

Speaker 29 Like, you're in a state of

Speaker 7 disbelief.

Speaker 19 Like, are there other people?

Speaker 29 Am I the only one?

Speaker 23 Like was it just me that got messed up and you know there was no way in heck I was gonna let the company just fade from existence in my mind.

Speaker 23 CNA testing, how may I help you?

Speaker 3 Hi there. I called an hour or so ago.
I haven't heard back from whoever was supposed to call me back. Okay, give me one second.

Speaker 3 Hi there, thanks for holding. Okay, he's in his office.
I'm gonna transfer you right now. Okay, what's his name? Kyle.

Speaker 4 Kyle, okay, thank you.

Speaker 3 Hi, how are you doing? I'm doing okay.

Speaker 33 How are you? Good, good. I see I was handing your file here.

Speaker 3 Yeah, so I'm Khalil's mom, but she's sitting here with me right now. I'm trying to help her through all of this.

Speaker 11 Right. To be honest,

Speaker 11 we have a lab looking into the issue. We're not sure

Speaker 11 what went wrong or what the issue is in this scenario.

Speaker 3 So, this mistake has a devastating ripple effect on many, many people involved in this.

Speaker 11 I don't understand.

Speaker 3 No, you need to hear this. We got a positive result, so we put his name on the birth certificate.
It has an effect on the grandparents, you know, that are devastated.

Speaker 3 Like, there's no way you can't have a negative and a positive. DNA doesn't change.
And the prenatal, I did my research, is is 99.9% accurate. And

Speaker 3 a paternity is also 99.9% accurate. We're trying to figure out what happened on our end.

Speaker 3 I mean, I don't deal with the lab in that situation. I just deal with the administrative side.

Speaker 6 Kadal and her mom, Michelle, don't know it yet, but the guy they're talking to is Kyle Sui.

Speaker 6 As far as we've been able to work out, Kyle is the second in command at Accumetrics. He's the technical manager.
He oversees quality control for sample collection.

Speaker 9 So, what we'll do is, we're going to look into the issue. And in the meantime, we're going to issue

Speaker 9 Coral a full refund.

Speaker 6 After the refund, Accumetrics closes the file, moves on. But not Codal.

Speaker 23 I feel like I'm not even living in real life.

Speaker 25 I feel like every day is a movie.

Speaker 25 That's just some fucked up nightmare.

Speaker 22 I don't know how to deal, and

Speaker 25 I could have never imagined in a million years that I would be in this situation.

Speaker 25 I just wish sometimes I could

Speaker 25 someone to relate to.

Speaker 28 But I wish I could sit face to face with someone and have them completely understand my pain.

Speaker 6 So Cadal starts digging into Accumetrics and comes across reviews that weren't online when she first looked up the company two years earlier. And she finds a connection she hadn't seen before.

Speaker 6 Prenatal Paternities Inc. and ViGard Acumetrics, they're the same company.
And she discovers something else. She's not alone.

Speaker 23 When I found out there were other people that were affected by the company the way I was, it was relief.

Speaker 23 And it's not because I want other people to experience what I've experienced, but it's because finally I could talk to somebody and they would be like, yep, I get that.

Speaker 21 That happened to me too.

Speaker 6 Codal helps set up a Facebook page for people burned by the laboratory's prenatal paternity test.

Speaker 6 And it grows quickly.

Speaker 34 When I saw the Facebook group, I was really happy because finally I can get completely understood.

Speaker 6 Dozens join, like this woman from Guatemala.

Speaker 32 They are playing with lives, you know. It's not they are playing with cards.
They are playing with lives.

Speaker 6 There's a couple from Victoria who almost had an abortion after an Accumetrics test.

Speaker 36 If we hadn't done the retest, I just go through my head like what would have happened? What would have happened? I think I know the answer what would happen and it's terrible.

Speaker 36 And I see our amazing daughter all the time and

Speaker 36 would she not be with us like it's just devastating to think about.

Speaker 6 And there's a woman from Montreal. She finds out when her son is six years old that Accumetrics got his biological dad wrong.

Speaker 13 What is my son gonna do later in time when he finds out about any of this? Is he gonna be mad at me for years? Is he gonna forgive me? Is it my fault?

Speaker 14 It's not my fault, right?

Speaker 14 I hope he knows that it's not my fault.

Speaker 6 And John Brennan, the man who raised a baby boy for eight months before learning the results of his tests were wrong, he finds his way to the group as well.

Speaker 12 I think I was reading reading the reviews and somebody in the reviews had maybe said, hey, there's a Facebook group.

Speaker 1 You should join it.

Speaker 12 And so I log on to Facebook and I joined this group.

Speaker 34 Record this so this can be helpful. Yeah, sorry.

Speaker 6 In January 2021, Kodal and her Facebook group reach out to me.

Speaker 24 I oh, I think he's coming.

Speaker 6 When I finally get the chance to drop in on one of their regular group calls

Speaker 6 there are people on the line from at least three different u.s states a couple from central america and codal

Speaker 24 if you're open to answering like how did it um

Speaker 16 like affect you did it affect you like emotionally and everything like that oh my gosh it did really bad um it was embarrassing and people were like how did you not know and what were you doing that you didn't know and

Speaker 37 it definitely hurt and it I didn't think my first pregnancy was going to be that way if I could ask a question did it um do you have like a number of how much money it costs you for us it we between the dad and I we spend over twenty thousand dollars at court because

Speaker 37 two fathers and myself and going to court and lawyers and all of that stuff um

Speaker 16 i paid back about five or six grand to the guy.

Speaker 16 It was just, yeah, they like ruined my life for a little moment and I just just to hear that there's so many other people that it's happened to it just I don't know like it makes me even more like upset and stuff and their group it just keeps growing small amount of people but now we have about 50 some odd people in the group wow 50

Speaker 38 we I think we have more than 50 right Corel and then there's all the people in the email chain too eh there's a yeah there's a lot of people in the email chain who are not in our Facebook group because either they don't use Facebook or they just want to stay anonymous.

Speaker 29 And how many are there?

Speaker 38 There have been hundreds of emails.

Speaker 6 And for this group of people who have lost so much, finding others in the same position fuels more than just a sense of solidarity.

Speaker 34 I think for all of us, then our aim is to shut them down, right?

Speaker 14 Yeah. Right.

Speaker 20 One day I want

Speaker 25 to bring justice to people who experience the scam by Viaguard Accumetrics.

Speaker 25 For anyone who used the fucking company, if somebody is losing out on precious time with their kids because they're raising the wrong kids or they don't even get to raise their kids.

Speaker 25 I'm so mad. I'm so mad.
I don't know what to do anymore.

Speaker 6 Cadal also has questions about the company itself and the people it hires.

Speaker 23 Like, I just don't get it.

Speaker 27 Like, I can't.

Speaker 23 I don't know how the people, like, sleep at night.

Speaker 27 I don't know how they sit there and do their little jobs and answer phone calls from people who do find out and call them and tell them all the time that they have false results.

Speaker 23 Like how do you actually sit there and continue to work there?

Speaker 6 They're the questions that both Rachel and I share.

Speaker 24 How is this company getting away with this?

Speaker 1 Who works there?

Speaker 24 Who's answering the phones? Who's analyzing the samples? Playing with science and people's fates.

Speaker 24 Next time on Bad Results, we go looking for people who can take us inside the company.

Speaker 10 When you hear things and you're seeing things and you've dealt with things and then you leave, wondering, is that place still standing and finding out, yeah, it's still standing.

Speaker 15 It's like, wow, that's interesting.

Speaker 10 I think it's so ridiculous.

Speaker 15 Like if I walked in there as 35-year-old me today, I would just be like, you've got to be kidding me.

Speaker 24 That's all coming up on bad results

Speaker 6 a legal note here over the course of this podcast you're going to hear a number of allegations made against vi guard acumetrics and its employees when asked company owner harvey tenenbaum said he stands by the test and that any errors were caused by customers during sample collection

Speaker 6 Bad Results is written and reported by Rachel Houlihan and me, Jorge Barrera. Mixing and Producing by AC Row.
Jessica Lindsay is our showrunner, and Carla Hilton is our executive producer.

Speaker 6 Special thanks to the folks at CBC Podcasts for their support. Karen Burgess is managing editor for CBC News Podcasts.

Speaker 2 For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca/slash podcasts.