The Babies Kept in a Mysterious Los Angeles Mansion
1. The Surrogates
In the delicate jargon of the fertility industry, a woman who carries a child for someone else is said to be going on a “journey.” Kayla Elliott began hers in February, 2024, not long after she posted her information in a Facebook group dedicated to surrogacy. Elliott, who was twenty-six and lived in Corpus Christi, Texas, already had four children, but she was intrigued by the prospect of bearing another. She’d loved the natural rush of pregnancy. As a surrogate, she could earn money for her family while helping strangers start their own.
Within days, Elliott received a brief message from a coördinator at Mark Surrogacy, an agency in Los Angeles, who wanted to know if she was interested in working with a Chinese couple. When Elliott asked for more details, she was sent a dating-style profile. It featured a photo of a paunchy sixty-four-year-old, Guojun Xuan, with his arm draped around a woman identified as his wife, Silvia, who was thirty-six and had short-cropped black hair. They lived in Arcadia, an affluent city in L.A. County, and shared a daughter who, they said, longed for a sibling. “Our surrogate would be like our extended family,” the parents wrote. “We would want to be as close as the surrogate prefers, with as much interaction throughout the journey as possible.” Elliott was delighted.
To qualify for the job, Elliott underwent a series of medical screenings, including a psychological evaluation, in which she described herself as “outspoken, compassionate, bubbly, loving, giving, and flamboyant.” After losing about fifteen pounds to meet the weight requirement, she began the standard protocols: birth control to stabilize her menstrual cycle, followed by a round of hormonal injections to thicken her uterine lining. The goal was to give the family’s embryo—Guojun’s sperm and an anonymous donor’s egg—the best odds of sticking during the transfer, which was scheduled for July at Western Fertility Institute, a clinic in Los Angeles. As the date of the appointment drew near, Elliott told the agency she was disappointed that the couple hadn’t been in touch. In online support groups, she’d read about surrogates getting to know the so-called intended parents, or “I.P.s,” over coffee dates or on Zoom. But, whenever she’d expressed an interest in talking to Silvia and Guojun, the coördinator at Mark Surrogacy had told her they were “too busy.”
“If the language barrier is the problem, there’s an app that a lot of international surrogates and IPs use!” Elliott messaged the agency.
“It’s just their wok and busy schedules are very hard to guggling with,” the coördinator replied, apparently busy herself.
Elliott was relieved when Guojun showed up for the embryo transfer. He was accompanied by two Mark Surrogacy employees; Silvia, they explained, had a stomach bug. In the clinic’s waiting room, Guojun presented Elliott with a red envelope of cash, a bouquet of pink roses, and a gilded jade bracelet. “He was small, but you could tell that he was a well-respected person from how he carried himself,” Elliott told me. As Guojun fastened the bracelet onto Elliott’s wrist, one of the employees, acting as a translator, said that it represented an invitation to join his family.
“i’m SO excited !!!!” Elliott wrote to Mark Surrogacy a few weeks later, when her ob-gyn in Texas confirmed a fetal heartbeat. “please tell IPs i want to know their response.” She didn’t hear much, which struck her as strange. Still, she continued to update the agency on her gestational milestones. She also enthusiastically chronicled them on TikTok, where her followers, mostly family and friends, seemed far more interested than Silvia and Guojun did in the baby’s development.
“We still revel in the feel and smell of newsprint.”
“We still revel in the feel and smell of newsprint.”
Now that she was pregnant, Elliott started to receive installments of her forty-five-thousand-dollar base compensation, plus an additional three-hundred-dollar monthly allowance for prenatal expenses: gas, compression socks, doula services. The fee was around the average for such arrangements, and far more than Elliott made in her occasional work as a housekeeper. Her boyfriend, Blake Murray, a pest-control technician, brought in most of their income. They shared a house with Murray’s dad and Elliott’s kids; with the extra money, they planned to rent a place of their own, by the bay.
At seventeen weeks, Elliott was scrolling through her Facebook feed when she saw a post discussing Mark Surrogacy. Its author was a woman who was carrying for someone named Silvia. Most surrogacy contracts forbid disclosing the identities of the parties involved, but, when Elliott sent the author a private message, she confirmed that they were working with the same family. The other surrogate, who lived in Pennsylvania, also shared something else she’d heard about the couple: they already had thirteen children.
When Elliott expressed her confusion to Mark Surrogacy, a coördinator told her that the parents simply wanted “a large family.” To achieve this, they were currently “working with a few GCs”—gestational carriers, as surrogates are sometimes known—on “sibling” journeys. The coördinator added, “They definitely don’t have a million kids lol.”
Despite these reassurances, Elliott grew anxious. An episode of high blood pressure sent her to the hospital, and she suffered from debilitating headaches that made it difficult for her to stand. “I think its already too late for us since we are already pregnant,” the Pennsylvania surrogate messaged her. “we just have to deal with it and suck it up.”
Although Elliott told Mark Surrogacy that she would be induced on March 13, 2025, in Corpus Christi, neither Silvia nor Guojun showed up at the hospital that day. At 7:48 P.M., Elliott gave birth to a healthy baby girl. Murray cried as he cut the umbilical cord. For an hour, Elliott was allowed to hold the newborn to her chest.
Kayla Elliott was one of many surrogates who recalled Silvia Zhang arriving late to the hospital, in a leather jacket.
By the time Silvia arrived, alone, it was after midnight. Elliott met her in the morning, and was surprised by how frail she looked; when they hugged, Elliott felt Silvia’s bones beneath her leather jacket. Silvia barely glanced at her newborn daughter as she placed two thousand dollars in cash on Elliott’s lap, and doled out hundred-dollar bills to Murray, Elliott’s mom, and two of Elliott’s kids. Later that day, Silvia said that she’d forgotten a car seat, so Murray went out to get one. After Elliott and Murray gave her a ride to the airport, Silvia handed them another five hundred dollars and left the car seat behind.
Silvia became somewhat more responsive in the following weeks. When Elliott asked about the baby’s name, Silvia shared that it was Hays, and, when Elliott asked for a picture, Silvia sent her a video of the infant, bright-eyed and wiggling in a onesie patterned with hearts. Silvia mailed gifts for Elliott’s children. More than once, she floated the possibility of Elliott carrying another child for her.
For a while, Elliott considered the idea. Then, in May, she decided against it. “Someone needs to call me because something extremely weird is going on here,” Elliott texted Silvia and Mark Surrogacy one afternoon. That morning, she’d been added to a Facebook chat with a few other women who seemed to have worked with the couple. “i read through their messages,” she wrote, “and they’re literally saying sylvia owns the agency and that all these babies are being sold.”
Commercial surrogacy is banned or highly restricted in many countries, including India, China, and most of Western Europe. But no federal laws govern the practice in the United States. Anyone can start a surrogacy agency; unlike opening a hair salon, or a day care, no qualifications are needed for the intimate, unpredictable work of bringing strangers together to create a new life. (Only one state, New York, even requires a specialized license.) Using an agency, in fact, is entirely optional. You can hire a surrogate—or several at a time—and negotiate the arrangements largely on your own.
In the past decade, a surge of wealthy foreigners—lured by this permissive atmosphere, and by blue-chip medical care—have enlisted American women as surrogates. The majority of these clients use clinics in California, one of the strongholds of the forty-two-billion-dollar global fertility industry. A recent study of U.S. surrogacies found that, between 2014 and 2020, nearly a third of all parents were international. Forty-one per cent of those were from China, whose one-child policy limited family-making until 2016.
“Hey Kayla, there is nothing illegal going on with the surrogacy,” one of the coördinators told Elliott, after receiving her panicked messages in May. “Everything was done thru lawyers and legal process.” The coördinator warned her that anyone spreading “horrible lies” about the intended parents would be sued.
For several days, Elliott texted and called Silvia repeatedly. When Silvia finally called her back, she explained that she and Guojun had recently spent four days in jail. She didn’t say why, though she insisted that neither of them was selling their children.
“We spent a lot of money,” she told Elliott. “We want to be the family here.”
“I believe you,” Elliott said. Still, she recorded the call, not least because Silvia had revealed that Hays was now in the custody of the state.
Child-welfare cases are confidential. But given that Elliott knew Hays’s full name and birth date—and that she had recently given birth to her—she was able to get through to a caseworker at the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services. The caseworker said that one of Silvia and Guojun’s infant sons had recently been hospitalized with head injuries. The baby had twenty siblings, the majority under three years old. All of them, including Hays, had been taken into foster care. As for the rumors about child trafficking, the F.B.I. was looking into them. (This account draws on confidential records from both the child-welfare case and an ongoing police investigation.)
Guojun Xuan.
When Elliott got off the phone, she was in tears. “I thought i was having a baby that was being sent to a loving family,” she texted Silvia, “not to a situation like this.” Then she posted what she’d learned to TikTok, where the video went viral. Some people accused her of making the story up. The more than twenty children, the injured baby, the F.B.I.: it all seemed unbelievable, like a fever dream of surrogacy gone awry. But, as Elliott’s video made the rounds in the close-knit world of fertility influencers, she also started to hear from other Mark surrogates, whose stories matched her own. “Silvia probably thought we would never all find each other because of the confidentiality,” Elliott told me. “Boy, that blew up in their faces.”
As the women gathered online in private groups, they began to trade notes. They knew that, if they were found in breach of their contracts, they could be forced to repay the money they’d earned. But the risk seemed worth taking. They were desperate to understand what had happened to the children—or what was going to happen. Several of the women were still carrying for Silvia and Guojun, with due dates that summer and fall. One described feeling as if she were stranded in the middle of the ocean, pregnant and without a life raft.
Under different circumstances, the surrogates might not have had much in common. They lived in Virginia, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Florida, California. They were white, Hispanic, Black, Asian. They were lesbians and “sort of trad,” military spouses and single moms. Some opposed abortion; others worked in abortion clinics. But, thrust into the same nightmare, they quickly bonded, swapping photos of the same jade bracelets, the same envelopes filled with cash, and the same intended mother, clad in a leather jacket and smiling at their bedside hours after they’d given birth.
For most of the women, this was their first journey. They’d been drawn by the pay, but also by a sense of altruism and imagined kinship. One woman clung to the fact that Silvia, like her, was born in 1987. “Her smile—that’s what caught me,” another surrogate said. Elliott, who had been adopted at birth, was happy to be helping a woman like her mother, who’d also struggled to conceive.
Silvia Zhang.
Yet whenever the surrogates shared updates with the couple—ultrasound images, anecdotes of a baby kicking—the replies they got, if any, were underwhelming. As one woman later told an investigator, Silvia “did not sound like an excited, hopeful mother.” She and Guojun missed appointments, citing car troubles or illnesses. When the surrogates did meet the parents, they found them detached or strangely disinhibited. Perla Liburd, a surrogate from Florida, recalled that, at an introductory dinner in Los Angeles, Guojun got drunk and became unpleasant. Silvia once texted another surrogate, “Mr Xuan is sick because he was drinking too much alcohol. I am in the hospital now. He need to get the blood transfusion.”
As with Elliott’s delivery, Silvia seemed to wait until the last minute to pick up most of the newborns from the hospital, and there were several births during which surrogates worried that the infant, lacking a legal guardian, would be surrendered into state custody. Neither Silvia nor Guojun showed up at the hospital on Mother’s Day, 2025, when the Pennsylvania surrogate who’d confided in Elliott was wheeled into an operating room for a C-section. The county’s welfare agency took the newborn before the surrogate even had a chance to see her. It turned out that she had gone into labor during the four days that Silvia and Guojun were in jail.
Because the surrogates weren’t legally related to the children, the authorities couldn’t share much with them. The Arcadia Police Department said that it was planning to charge the couple with neglect and felony child endangerment, but it was unable to discuss its active investigation. (Silvia and Guojun had been released, without charges, after their arrest.) A juvenile-dependency court in Los Angeles County would decide whether the children could be returned to the couple, but its hearings were closed to the public. A kind F.B.I. agent named Shiva Taghdis asked the surrogates questions but, unsurprisingly, wasn’t at liberty to answer theirs. (The F.B.I. told me that it could neither confirm nor deny the existence of an investigation.) One surrogate who’d pressed Taghdis for details recalled getting a koan-like response: “You can trust what you’re experiencing is real.”
Faced with a void of information, the women decided to undertake their own detective work. It wasn’t long before they discovered that Mark Surrogacy had been opened by Silvia. Guojun, meanwhile, had been linked to more than fifty limited-liability corporations, many of which seemed to be real-estate investment firms. The address for Mark Surrogacy—and one of the real-estate companies—was the couple’s home in Arcadia. Online listings showed it to be a ten-thousand-square-foot mansion purchased for $3.2 million. Designed in a neo-Mediterranean style, it boasted a red clay roof, nine bedrooms with en-suite bathrooms, and sweeping views of the San Gabriel Mountains from its balconies and castle-like turrets.
A police affidavit that began to circulate last summer offered further clues. It included photographs of the hospitalized baby, restrained by headgear, whose injuries were consistent with “those sustained during a car accident or from being shaken.” Stills from videos recorded inside the home showed a makeshift classroom where toddlers sat in rows at tables facing a whiteboard. All the children had shaved heads, and nannies could be seen physically disciplining them: forcing them into squats, spanking them on top of a table, and hitting them in the face. The surrogates searched for the children they’d carried, but the pictures were too blurry to make out individual features.
Surrogacy requires a kind of emotional rigor: part of the job involves training oneself not to get too attached. But the more the women learned about the intended parents, the more they started to wonder if the moral thing to do was to intervene. Elliott was hoping to bring Hays to Texas. “We are very serious about this, and will do anything to get her back in our care where she will be loved,” she texted caseworkers in July. The Mark surrogates had found themselves in an unusual predicament: after giving their bodies and their time to help a family conceive, they no longer wanted the family to keep the children.
In 1985, William and Elizabeth Stern, a married couple in New Jersey, paid a woman named Mary Beth Whitehead ten thousand dollars to carry their child. The arrangement was a traditional surrogacy, meaning that the child would be conceived through artificial insemination, using William Stern’s sperm and Whitehead’s egg. After giving birth, Whitehead reluctantly surrendered the baby girl to the Sterns. The next day, she asked them if she could have the baby back, just for a week, because she was suffering from the separation; the couple agreed. When it became clear that Mary Beth planned to keep the baby for longer, however, the Sterns visited Whitehead and her family, with a police officer in tow. Mary Beth handed the baby out of a window to her husband, who fled. The Whiteheads spent the next three months on the lam. Mary Beth would occasionally call William Stern and threaten to kill both herself and the child. Eventually, a private detective tracked down the Whiteheads in Holiday, Florida, and Baby M, as the child was known in the news, was brought back to the Sterns.
What followed was the country’s most famous trial on the validity of commercial surrogacy. In 1988, the New Jersey Supreme Court declared surrogacy contracts in the state “illegal, perhaps criminal.” The ruling, which was cited approvingly by both Catholic clergy and a number of feminist intellectuals, argued that “there are, in a civilized society, some things that money cannot buy.” William Stern was awarded custody of Baby M as the biological father and Mary Beth visitation rights as the biological mother. But the ethical questions that the case had raised—about the meaning of family and the commodification of children, the tension between reproductive autonomy and contractual compulsion—were left painfully unresolved.
For a time, it seemed as if the surrogacy industry, which was only just beginning, might never recover from the controversy. Instead, with the spread of in-vitro fertilization, the nature of surrogate motherhood took a different shape. Within a few years, traditional surrogacy, in which a woman like Whitehead uses her own egg, was being replaced by so-called gestational surrogacy, in which both the egg and the sperm are transferred to the surrogate through I.V.F. (Gestational carriers have no genetic ties to the child.) This shift didn’t settle the industry’s philosophical questions, but, in the eyes of the law, it made them less acute.
Today, many states stipulate that gestational surrogates have no parental rights—any equivocation on this matter would cause the country’s reproductive-tourism industry to collapse. California is known as a particularly “surrogacy-friendly” destination, not least because it allows intended parents to obtain pre-birth orders, which establish their legal parentage before birth. In other states, however, the rules around surrogacy remain inconsistent or opaque. Some can require adoption proceedings. Several refuse to honor contracts. The Mark surrogates, by exploring their rights to custody across the country, were putting the industry to an unprecedented test.
This was especially true of the women who were still pregnant. They all had other jobs, but figuring out what to do about the babies they were carrying became its own vocation. The women asked dozens of people for advice, from attorneys and adoption experts to social workers and law-enforcement officials. Would they, like the surrogate from Pennsylvania, be birthing a child directly into the foster system? Which child-welfare agency, if any, would have jurisdiction over the babies? No one had a clear answer. As Molly O’Brien, a fertility attorney and the former president of the nonprofit Society for Ethics in Egg Donation and Surrogacy (SEEDS), told me, “I’ve been doing this for twenty-two years, and I’ve never seen anything like this.”
Some of the women decided to prepare, cautiously, for the possibility that they might need to take the infants home. They workshopped baby names and collected baby clothes. The photos they’d swapped of their jade bracelets gave way to pictures of breast pumps and knitted blankets. Since Guojun used his sperm for all of their pregnancies, they realized that the children would be siblings. They joked about moving near one another and buying land for a babysitting collective.
Hallie Weaver, of Cartersville, Georgia, was due last August. She and the couple had yet to obtain a pre-birth order; without one, Weaver was told, she could be considered the child’s legal mother. The child-welfare agency in her county had given her two options: take the baby home as her own, or surrender it to the state. She was tormented by the decision—and resentful that she had to make it at all. Weaver had been a volunteer advocate for children in foster care, and she wasn’t keen on placing a baby in that bureaucracy. On the other hand, she was a single mother with a four-year-old daughter, making just over the limit for state assistance; her work as a patient educator at a blood-platelet center wasn’t enough to provide for a second, unexpected child. For weeks, she found herself crying at her desk. “The thing I kept saying was I don’t know what this baby was created for, but I felt like she wasn’t created out of love,” Weaver told me. “And I was the only connection to love that she ever had, and that weighed extremely heavy on me.”
Eventually, Weaver came up with a third option. She would take the infant home, “providing babygirl a loving start to life,” and after a few months she could find adoptive parents who would be open to staying in touch. “That’s what I was leaning toward,” Weaver said. “So that when she grew up, she wouldn’t think I abandoned her.”
“I don’t know what this baby was created for, but I felt like she wasn’t created out of love,” Hallie Weaver, a surrogate in Georgia, said.
As stipulated in her contract, Weaver let Silvia know when she went into labor in August, in Georgia. Silvia replied that she was on the way, but Weaver had asked the hospital to list her as a “no information” patient. A security guard was stationed outside her room, and only visitors who knew Weaver’s password (“Elvis Presley,” her favorite singer) were permitted to see her. Silvia never arrived, but there was another surprise: although Weaver had been told she was carrying a girl, the baby was a boy.
Two months later, in early October, I visited Weaver at her house, which had been transformed by the arrival of Silvia and Guojun’s twenty-third child. There was a stroller in the driveway and pouches of breast milk in the freezer, neatly labelled and dated. On the fridge, a photo of Gabriel, as she’d named the baby, was tucked between head shots of Elvis and school portraits of Weaver’s daughter. Weaver’s mother had come over to watch “Yellowstone” with Weaver’s grandmother. Gabriel, wearing a T-shirt printed with the phrase “Mommy Makes Me Smile,” took turns napping contentedly on three generations of laps.
Weaver’s daughter had adjusted well to the change. At first, Weaver had explained to her that “Mommy’s stomach was a growing place” for the baby’s real mother, who would pick him up. After Weaver brought Gabriel home instead, her daughter treated him as her brother. She loved giving him hugs and helping to change his diapers. As the weeks went by, she kept asking Weaver if Gabriel was going to stay, or if his other mommy was still coming to get him. Weaver kept saying that she just didn’t know.
From a binder on her kitchen table, Weaver took out a piece of paper that outlined her unusual arrangement. Gabriel had been placed in the custody of the state of Georgia, which, in turn, had appointed Weaver as his primary caregiver. “I’m not considered a foster parent,” she explained. “I’m not considered kinship. I’m not really considered anything.”Although Silvia and Guojun had attended confidential hearings in Georgia to determine parentage, it appeared that the couple was still unaware that it was Weaver, and not a stranger in the foster-care system, who was caring for their child. “They don’t know what’s going on with any of the babies, really,” Weaver said. In the past two months, her family had fallen in love with Gabriel, and Weaver was wondering about adopting him herself, depending on the outcome of the hearings.
Weaver felt that she was still recovering from the deceptive circumstances of Gabriel’s conception, which she compared to a kind of assault. She often had nightmares. In one, she was sent to a labor camp after giving birth. In another, the embryo transfer had taken place in a bedroom, where she was surrounded by military commanders. She wanted to stay home a little longer, but her maternity leave was up, and she needed money: Silvia and Guojun had yet to pay her delivery bills, totalling twelve thousand dollars.
After the sun set, Weaver prepared a bath for Gabriel, mixing the water with breast milk to soothe him. She sometimes felt insecure as a single mom. “All these other surrogates, they have boyfriends and fiancés and husbands that are ready to adopt these children as their own,” she said. It was difficult for her to imagine “the identity issues” Gabriel might face when he was older. What if he went searching for his biological father? Weaver’s grandmother was more concerned about the present. She worried that, any day now, Guojun would show up at the house, demanding his son.
2. The Parents
Guojun Xuan was born in 1959, in Zhuji, a city in the eastern coastal province of Zhejiang. By the time he turned eighteen, he was living in Ürümqi, the capital of the westernmost region of Xinjiang. It isn’t known how Guojun ended up there, some two thousand miles from home, but he was one of millions of Chinese youth who, in the sixties and seventies, migrated to the remote reaches of the country. Some were lured by economic opportunity; others were relocated by government initiatives meant to demographically engineer the nation’s expanding frontier.
In his twenties and thirties, Guojun climbed the ranks of some of Xinjiang’s various state-owned firms. By the late two-thousands, he was being celebrated in the local press for saving a frozen-food company from bankruptcy; he also capitalized on China’s real-estate boom and became a private lender, according to Chinese court records. In 2008, he was named a deputy to the People’s Congress of Xinjiang—a role comparable to that of an American state assemblyman. During his five-year term, he was known for zealously introducing controversial proposals, which earned him the nickname citou daibiao, or the “spiky-head deputy.” (Citou, or “spiky head,” is slang for a pain in the ass.) When asked by a Chinese newspaper in 2012 to describe himself, Guojun said, “I am someone who likes to meddle in other people’s business and often offends people.”
The next year, China’s new President, Xi Jinping, introduced a sweeping anti-corruption initiative that targeted both senior Party leaders and low-level bureaucrats—or, as Xi put it, “tigers and flies.” This crackdown encouraged many officials and business leaders to move their assets abroad. By 2018, Guojun had registered several companies in California and dissolved, renamed, or divested from many of his Chinese firms. After this restructuring, he seems to have moved to the States with his then wife, Yuqin Li, and placed Li and his adult son, Dongchao Xuan, in control of the family’s affairs in Xinjiang. (Dongchao and Li could not be reached for comment, while Long Z. Liu, an attorney for Guojun, said that the anti-corruption initiative was unrelated to his “client’s decision to pursue the American Dream.”)
In Los Angeles, Guojun and Li settled into a two-bedroom home in the neighborhood of Rowland Heights. Guojun befriended a few of his Chinese neighbors, including Ray Wu, a genial I.T. consultant who lived across the street. He offered Wu vegetables from his garden and invited him to dinners at his home, where he ordered Xinjiang-style dishes from a nearby restaurant. Guojun never said much about his past, but he sometimes alluded to various investments. After Wu heard Guojun bragging about his donations to local Chinese business organizations, he remembered thinking, God, this guy must be rich.
Because Guojun didn’t speak English, he sometimes asked Wu for help with errands. Once, as Wu gave Guojun a ride to a meeting, Guojun talked on the phone to Li about their business interests in Xinjiang. Li was explaining to Guojun that it was no longer possible to bribe government officials. As Wu recalled, Guojun disagreed. “You’re giving them too little money,” he said. “Give them more.” (Liu denied that Guojun engaged in bribery.)
Wu found Guojun to be polite and generous, but other neighbors were less charmed. Two sisters who lived across the street told me they remembered Guojun wandering around outside in his white briefs and screaming at Li. (Liu denied this.) Sometimes a toddler would come out of the house to play on a swing. Guojun and Li were in their late fifties, so the sisters figured the boy was a grandson. In fact, he appears to have been the first of Guojun’s children to be born through surrogacy.
In 2018, Guojun had started working with Babytree, an agency that caters to aspiring parents living in China. His profile, which pictured him and Li in a park, smiling, claimed that the couple, married for more than thirty years, didn’t have any children. “WIFE IS TOO OLD,” it read.
Babytree matched them with Amber Applegarth, a nurse living near Los Angeles, who was under the impression that the couple was overseas; on one or two video calls, she met only Guojun, who said that Li was busy. Applegarth, who’d been a surrogate once before, stressed to Babytree her unease with the lack of communication throughout her journey. Eventually, the owner of the company, Patrick Yu, arranged a meeting with Guojun, whom Applegarth assumed was in town for business. The three of them, along with Guojun’s female assistant, ate at a Chinese restaurant, where Guojun struck Applegarth as having the “intimidating demeanor of someone who took control of things.”
After Applegarth gave birth, in the summer of 2019, only Guojun’s assistant showed up to collect the baby. “She asked me to name it, which I thought was odd,” Applegarth recalled. They landed on Jefferson, the assistant’s suggestion. (His name has been changed here.) It turned out that the assistant would be taking care of Jefferson until his parents could retrieve him. For several weeks, Applegarth met the assistant in parking lots to hand off her breast milk. She received a few photographs of Jefferson, then never heard about him again.
When I called Applegarth recently, she didn’t yet know that Guojun had since fathered some two dozen more children, but when she Googled his name she saw the mug shots that had circulated after his arrest. “That’s definitely him,” she said. “And that’s her,” she added. It took me a moment to understand what she meant. The woman who had introduced herself as Guojun’s assistant, she explained, was Silvia.
Silvia Shasha Zhang doesn’t talk much about her past. She has alluded to an upbringing in rural China, an education in child development, and a stint as a nutritionist. It’s unclear which, if any, of these claims are true. “I think she faked a lot of stuff, so I couldn’t tell what was real,” Melody Song, who worked as a sort of aide-de-camp for Silvia and Guojun for a couple of years, told me. Song, who is in her twenties, was initially wary of talking to me, but, once she did, she discussed her former bosses with an almost ethnographic candor. “You could tell from how they dress and talk and their English level, they might not have a very high educational background, because they were poor when they were young,” she said.
What is known, according to court records, is that Silvia gave birth to a daughter, whom I’ll call Susan, in the province of Guangdong, China, in 2011. Two and a half years later, at the age of twenty-seven, she married a man in his late sixties named Henry Hong-Ching Tang. Through Tang, an American citizen, Silvia and Susan immigrated to the United States. They lived together until 2019, when, according to Silvia, Tang abandoned the family. “He left us in Southern California without any financial support,” she stated in divorce filings. “I had to start looking for job to support ourselves while taking care of Susan by myself.”
It was around this time that Silvia appears to have started working for Guojun. Silvia’s “value,” Song said, lay in knowing how to make herself indispensable. In the spring of 2019, she became a licensed real-estate agent and carved out an unusual niche: helping Guojun and his business associates move money around. In the past five years, according to one listings website, Silvia, a rookie agent with limited English, has sold a hundred and sixty-two properties in the greater Los Angeles area, worth a total of a hundred and twenty million dollars. Gong Jue, a reporter at Initium, an independent news site founded in Hong Kong, selected ten homes at random from her sales history, all of which showed the same striking pattern: they were shuffled between shell companies linked to Guojun within a short period, and the transactions appeared to be in cash, without mortgages or loan records. (Liu, the lawyer, denied that Guojun and Silvia engaged in any illicit financial activity.)
At the same time that Silvia was helping Guojun funnel his fortune into American real estate, she was also helping him establish a dynasty. Guojun’s abiding preoccupation, Song told me, was propagating his seed. “A lot of rich people, they want to do sex parties or drugs,” Song said. “But he just wants to have more kids.” After the birth of Jefferson, Guojun’s efforts to procreate appear to have stalled, likely owing to the pandemic, but soon Silvia was able to recruit one willing carrier: herself. In the spring of 2021, having used what appears to have been Guojun’s sperm and an anonymous donor’s egg, she gave birth to a son named John. (His name has been changed here.)
Three weeks before John’s birth, an investment firm linked to Silvia purchased the mansion in Arcadia, where Guojun and Silvia moved in with Susan, Jefferson, John, and, eventually, many of the other children. Both filed for divorce from their respective spouses, though, contrary to what they told some of their surrogates, they never married each other. (Meanwhile, Silvia’s former husband, Tang, alleged in a countersuit that, while he was in Taiwan to receive medical treatment, Silvia had forged his signature, sold their house, and moved the earnings into her personal account.) Guojun and Silvia’s relationship often seemed ambiguous, even to those who knew them well. Except for Susan, none of the children appeared to be genetically related to Silvia, Song told me, because Guojun wanted egg donors who were younger, non-Asian, and more educated.
By 2022, Silvia was helping Guojun run two businesses out of the Arcadia mansion: Mark Surrogacy, which she opened to recruit gestational carriers, and Yudao Management, as Guojun’s primary real-estate investment firm was then known. Song, who remains close to the family, assisted Silvia with both operations, and with household affairs, which included arranging child care. Silvia, Song explained, was the kind of person who always took on more work, even when she was overwhelmed. Whatever Guojun needed to be done, Silvia would offer to do.
To Song, there was no mystery to the arrangement. Guojun was “a rich man who wants a lot of kids,” and Silvia was a single mom who wanted his money.
In the spring of 2022, Tina Powers started working inside the Arcadia home after seeing a job posting online: twenty-five dollars an hour to be a real-estate agent’s assistant. Powers, who was in her fifties, with a silky, confident voice, took Silvia’s calls and prepared her paperwork. “I was the face of Silvia,” she explained. “The American face.”
Powers thought it made sense that Guojun had been some sort of politician in Xinjiang, a territory known for its repressive surveillance, since he ran his home like a police state. There were cameras in every room, recording audio and video. Guojun had a command center upstairs, with monitors live-streaming the footage. One day, Powers clicked on an advertisement for a grocery store while browsing the web, and Guojun immediately came downstairs to see what she was doing.
Chinese employees called Guojun lao shi, or Teacher. (The police later found that Guojun was saved as Teacher in Silvia’s phone, too.) The company’s code of conduct detailed a penalty system that levied ten-dollar fines for an array of actions, including “parking in front of garbage cans” or leaving on the lights. Whenever something happened that the Teacher disliked, he would call a disciplinary meeting in Chinese, with a live interpreter. Guojun once summoned his staff after someone had forgotten to flush the toilet, declaring that he would scour his footage to ferret out the culprit. (Powers and five other employees later filed a class-action lawsuit, which was settled last year, alleging that Yudao Management had withheld overtime pay and denied breaks. A lawyer for the company described these claims as “exaggerated.”)
Although Silvia and Guojun didn’t discuss their private lives, their employees could easily overhear them fight. “It was fucking nuts,” Powers recalled, noting that the arguments often involved slammed doors, thrown objects, and Silvia screaming at the top of her lungs. In the summer of 2022, Silvia gave birth to another son, Benjamin (not his real name); he was premature, apparently with some complications. “There’s no way all that yelling and stress was good for the baby,” Powers said.
The word around the home office was that Guojun wanted to have as many children as possible to increase the odds of one of them becoming the President of the United States. In addition to Jefferson, several of his kids were named after former U.S. Presidents—a mix of Democrats and Republicans—or prominent foreign leaders. Song told me that, if Guojun had been born in the U.S., he might have wanted to run for President himself. He carried around a business card that identified him, somewhat redundantly, as a “Trump Doge Member,” “Official Trump Cabinet Member,” and “Trump Advisor.” (A White House official was unable to find a record of Guojun’s employment.)
Another rumor was that Silvia and Guojun “were having kids for the American citizenship benefits and selling them to other people,” Powers told me. After the family’s size was made public, both American and Chinese reporters seized on this idea, raising frenzied questions about whether the couple was engaged in human trafficking.
“It’s retarded,” Andrea Cid, a former Mark Surrogacy coördinator, told me last October. “Why would they think it’s trafficking if there’s children in the home? If there was trafficking, the children wouldn’t be there.” Cid said that the F.B.I. had stopped by her house a few weeks earlier, and that she’d explained to them, too, why she thought the economics didn’t make sense. Given not only the surrogates’ compensation but also their health insurance, medical bills, fertility procedures, attorney fees, and travel, it had likely cost Silvia and Guojun about a hundred and fifty thousand dollars to have each child. What’s more, it was difficult to fathom why anyone would want to purchase a child with Guojun’s genetic material when they could simply hire a surrogate of their own. Adoption would be even cheaper.
If anything, the trafficking rumors seemed to distract from the uncomfortable fact that Guojun’s industrialized approach to family-making was perfectly legal—and, among well-heeled élites, increasingly popular. In the United States, Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, has sired at least fourteen children with four different women; “to reach legion-level before the apocalypse,” he reportedly texted one of the women, “we will need to use surrogates.” Pavel Durov, the Russian founder of the messaging platform Telegram, who has described the propagation of his genes as a “civic duty,” has conceived six children naturally, fathered more than a hundred through sperm donations, and drafted plans to grant all of them access to his multibillion-dollar fortune. In China, the video-game billionaire Xu Bo recently issued a statement, in response to the Wall Street Journal’s reporting, saying that he has conceived more than a hundred children through surrogacies, with twelve of them carried out in the U.S.
Guojun, for his part, stressed to the World Journal, a Chinese-language newspaper based in New York, that the children “are all ours” and that “none of them are for sale.” He said that he’d always wanted to have a large family, but that it hadn’t been possible under China’s one-child policy. “In old age,” he said, “being surrounded by so many kids is such a joy.” His goal, he explained, was for each to have a career that would one day surpass his own.
Though many of Guojun’s associates talked to me, some warned me against reporting. It was hard to tell whether this was intended as advice or a threat. Rex Zhang, who’d once worked as Guojun’s driver, wasn’t keen to chat, but he wanted me to know that his former boss had a lot of powerful connections, including, he claimed, a friendship with the chief of the Los Angeles Police Department. (A spokesperson for the L.A.P.D. denied this.) “Don’t fuck with him,” Zhang said of Guojun. “Be careful.”
By all accounts, Silvia had a temper, but Guojun, who liked to drink, was particularly volatile. His beverage of choice was an expensive Chinese spirit called Moutai, which is fifty-three per cent alcohol. Several former employees described to me the sour, slightly dizzying odor that wafted from their boss as early as ten in the morning. One nanny said that she remembered Guojun swigging from a bottle during her job interview. In 2022, Guojun even called the police because he suddenly found himself missing forty cases of his prized Moutai, which he told a patrol officer had cost him four hundred thousand dollars. (Owing to a lack of evidence, the thief was never caught.)
Videos filmed inside the mansion showed children being spanked, forced to squat, and hit in the face.
Guojun has also been accused of explicitly aggressive behavior. In a suit that was settled early last year, Alejandro Diaz, a former evictions manager for Yudao Management, alleged that he was wrongfully terminated after raising concerns about Guojun’s dealings with tenants—which, in the course of one morning, involved Guojun attempting to kick down the door to one rental property, intimidating residents, and firing a Taser at a dog. After Diaz expressed his discomfort to Guojun, Guojun hit him in the arm, threw rocks at him, and, later, took what appeared to be an assault rifle from the trunk of his car and stared at him “in a threatening manner,” according to the complaint. Liu, the lawyer, said that any claims that his client engaged in threats or violence relied “on unverifiable hearsay,” including from disgruntled employees, and that when Guojun drinks Moutai it is “responsibly and on occasion.”
I soon got an even clearer sense of where Guojun’s fearsome reputation—and, perhaps, his cash flow—might be coming from. Guojun, it turned out, was linked to an elusive criminal figure known as Haoren (Dragon) Ma. Last September, the city of El Monte filed a nuisance-abatement suit against Guojun, Ma, their respective associates, and holding companies tied to a sprawling group of office buildings known, in part, as Pacific Place. Guojun owned some of the buildings; in the summer of 2022, perhaps to make room for his growing family, he had moved his surrogacy and real-estate employees, including Powers, out of the mansion and into the office complex.
As it happened, Pacific Place also housed an illicit casino and an elaborate drug-manufacturing operation—both allegedly run by Ma. In a series of raids at the broader complex, from 2019 to 2024, the police seized plastic bundles of methamphetamine, twenty thousand vape cartridges, and hundreds of pounds of psilocybin mushrooms, along with a stolen Uzi-style gun, boxes of ammunition, and counterfeit cash. Guojun was not accused of manufacturing drugs, but according to the complaint he and his associates “formed and dissolved entities after each enforcement action to conceal ownership, frustrate enforcement, and continue Ma’s unlawful gambling and narcotics operations.” (Ma could not be reached for comment.)
When I asked Liu about his client’s involvement with these schemes, he said that Guojun had “never obstructed law enforcement” and that any financial dealings were “routine landlord-tenant matters.” Others in Guojun’s orbit were more alarmed. A former business associate told me that she wanted to speak anonymously, because she feared for her life—and she believed that Silvia did, too. “If she had enough money,” the associate said, “she would have run.”
Last fall, while walking past the gate of the Arcadia mansion, I saw Silvia and Guojun fighting outside their front door. After I introduced myself, they continued shouting at each other in Mandarin, as if I weren’t there. Guojun, who was dressed in crisp black pants and a salmon-colored button-up shirt, didn’t look at me as he climbed into a black Mercedes S.U.V. When I asked Silvia if it was true that they simply wanted a large family, she sighed. She was dressed in flared yoga pants, an oversized black T-shirt printed with cartoon kittens, and beige plastic slides. “My attorney says I can’t say anything,” she repeated in response to my questions. “Thank you for understanding.” Then she got into a white Tesla and sped off.
3. The Children
On Wednesday, May 7th, two weeks before a caseworker told Kayla Elliott about an injured baby, police pulled up to the Arcadia home. Earlier that day, they had received a call from Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, where the infant, a two-month-old named Walter, had been admitted with severe bleeding behind his eyes and inside his brain. Silvia had told the doctors he’d fallen off a bed, but his symptoms, which included vomiting and seizures, did not appear to be consistent with her explanation.
At the door, an Arcadia Police detective, Evelyn Calderon, asked Silvia about the number of children she had. Silvia equivocated. When Calderon pressed her for specifics, Silvia consulted an Excel spreadsheet on her phone before responding that the tally was twenty-one. Calderon asked to check the kids for injuries, and Silvia agreed.
The police entered the house through the foyer, which was sparsely decorated, except for a piano. The kitchen held a few commercial-sized refrigerators, along with strollers, car seats, boxes of baby formula, and diapers stacked along the walls. In what appeared to be a classroom, several older women were instructing a gaggle of toddlers with shaved heads. Upstairs, the police saw that Silvia’s middle-school-aged daughter, Susan, had her own bedroom, while multiple other children shared a room full of cribs and beds with guardrails.
However unusual, none of this was cause for alarm, Captain Kollin Cieadlo, of the Arcadia Police Department, told me. “The home was not in disarray,” he said. “The kids did not seem immediately abused.” Social workers from the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services (D.C.F.S.) who were also there, he added, had agreed. A summary of their notes described the children as “happy, giggly and engaging well with other kids.” Based on this “visual inspection,” D.C.F.S. decided that “it is evident there is no neglect and abuse at this time.”
After obtaining a warrant to search the thirty-two cameras installed on the property, both the police and the social workers quickly came to the opposite conclusion. “Once we reviewed the footage,” Cieadlo said, “it was clear to us what the parents knew.” Ironically, Guojun had been caught in his own surveillance dragnet.
Although Silvia told detectives that Walter had fallen off the bed on Monday night, the footage revealed that he was injured on Sunday morning. It also showed that Silvia and Guojun immediately realized how badly he’d been hurt. On Sunday afternoon, a camera installed in Guojun’s office recorded the couple as they watched the incident on one of his monitors. In the tape, a nanny named Chunmei Li lifts Walter from the crib and carries him off camera. He cries as Li scolds him in Mandarin. Muffled thuds are heard, and the crying stops. When Li moves back into the frame, the baby appears to be unconscious.
Later that day, Silvia called Li into the office, where the camera captured her and Guojun angrily confronting the nanny. Li eventually admits that she hit Walter twice with an open hand. Guojun corrects her. “Four times!” he says, replaying the thuds on his monitor. “This is a crime and you could go to jail,” Silvia yells at Li. Then, according to a social worker’s summary of the footage, “the mother forcibly gives the allegedly abusive nanny $600 cash and a hug.” After Li leaves the office, Silvia and Guojun don’t call the police or take their son to see a doctor. Instead, Silvia tells Guojun that they will need to hire more nannies, for all the babies who will be arriving soon.
On Friday, May 9th, forty-eight hours after the police seized this footage, Silvia was handcuffed at a hospital, where she’d taken another of the children. Guojun was pulled over in a black Toyota Sequoia whose trunk was filled with ten thousand dollars in cash. (The police were unable to locate Li, who, according to Silvia, had fled; still at large, she could not be reached for comment.) Meanwhile, the children were taken into custody, where the contrast between what the social worker had sunnily determined on Wednesday (“There is no neglect”) and what doctors and caregivers observed was startling. As the children arrived at their foster homes, some of them in pairs, many had scratches, red marks, scars, and old bruises on various parts of their bodies. One was pale and dehydrated, another “dirty and unkempt.” A toddler who was hospitalized with pneumonia was missing the nails on his right thumb and left pinkie.
During medical exams that night, and at doctors’ appointments in the following weeks, the children were diagnosed with a vast array of illnesses, conditions, and developmental delays that, in some cases, might have been prevented with timely attention. Among the twenty children in custody, one had untreated asthma, one had a severe rash from an untreated yeast infection, two had untreated ear infections, and one had a misshapen head that could no longer be corrected. A few of the siblings had difficulty walking and climbing stairs, but did not appear to have received physical therapy. Another had a rare genetic disorder that could cause heart failure, but that hadn’t been properly followed up on.
Several caregivers told the social workers that the children behaved as though they’d been deprived of food. Some stuffed themselves long after they were full, “as if something bad would occur if they didn’t.” A set of twins engaged in “food hoarding,” storing bites of meals in their cheeks. One caregiver observed that a nine-month-old seemed to have been on a liquid diet.
Typically, within two months of children being temporarily removed from a home in L.A. County, a judge reviews the allegations and determines whether to send the children back; to keep them in foster care as their parents alleviate the concerns that brought them to court; or to deny the possibility of reunification. Before this hearing, a dependency investigator obtains medical records and interviews caregivers, babysitters, relatives, therapists, the kids themselves, and, ideally, the parents. Although Silvia and Guojun initially agreed to brief conversations with detectives and social workers, they soon hired private counsel, who did not make their clients available for further questioning. (Liu said this story relies on “selective excerpts” from confidential files, which his clients are constrained from commenting on due to ongoing litigation.)
Even when parents decline to talk, however, their interactions with their children, provided they want to visit them, can offer powerful evidence in a case. Silvia and Guojun were originally scheduled to visit their children at least three times a week at centralized locations, with social workers and monitors in attendance. After the first few rounds of meetings, social workers observed that both Silvia and Guojun had trouble identifying the children by their correct names, and that the children referred to both parents as Teacher. Silvia showed them little affection or attention, shuffling quickly through the infants to feed, change, or hold them. Guojun never helped. When several of the babies started crying at the same time, he remained impassive, “seated and observing the scene.” Either Silvia and Guojun were not aware that parents under supervision must be on their best behavior—out of love for their children and fear of the state—or this was their best behavior. Both possibilities were concerning.
Whenever Guojun visited Walter at the hospital, he complained to the staff that his son had been “completely fine” and expressed skepticism about the need for medical treatment. Walter could no longer swallow, and required the placement of a feeding tube—a surgery that was postponed three times because, according to doctors, Guojun refused to provide consent. During one of Guojun’s visits, the staff received multiple alarms that the monitor for Walter’s vital signs had been turned off. People supervising the visit kept instructing Guojun not to touch it. Guojun would affirm that he understood the instructions before again switching it off.
After these and many similar incidents, the social workers filed a petition to reduce the frequency of visitations. Guojun stopped showing up at most appointments. Silvia started cutting visits short or cancelling them, citing the same vague excuses that she’d given to the surrogates. As time passed, caregivers reported that most of the children seemed to grow more comfortable in their foster homes. In the morning, they no longer remained silently in their beds until they were granted permission to get up. A nine-month-old initially afraid of cuddling, “as if affection was foreign,” soon started indicating that he wanted to be held. One toddler was so terrified when she was first taken to a playground that her caregiver wondered if she had ever been to one before. Now she loved going to the park, where she played and picked flowers.
But on the days that the children met with their parents, they returned to their foster homes expressing agitation. Hays was fussier and cried more. Others forgot their potty training, regressed to food hoarding, or stopped eating. They fought, threw tantrums. At night, some woke up screaming.
4. The System
“It takes a village,” Molly O’Brien, the former president of the Society for Ethics in Egg Donation and Surrogacy (SEEDS), told me. Although it was convenient to pretend that what had happened in the Arcadia home was a private matter, impossible to foresee, each step of the couple’s reproductive spree was made possible by fertility-clinic doctors, multiple attorneys, agency coördinators, and judges, all of whom are supposed to serve as guardrails. “This kind of thing can only happen when you’ve got people who are willing to turn a blind eye,” O’Brien added.
It was difficult, reading through the files of the dependency investigation, not to wonder whether some of the children’s trauma might have been prevented. Between Jefferson’s birth, in June, 2019, and Walter’s hospitalization, in May, 2025, D.C.F.S. received six separate referrals about the parents, with allegations ranging from general neglect to emotional abuse. Yet it never filed a petition in court. For years, both the Arcadia Police Department and the F.B.I. also suspected that there was “something going on within the home”; officers conducted several welfare checks in 2024 alone, including one after a neighbor overheard nannies shouting at the children. Last year, a social worker who had previously looked into a report that Jefferson was covered in dark bruises told a colleague that she “remembered the family, as they are rich and have a lot of surrogate children.”
The mention of the family’s wealth was telling: poorer families in the child-welfare system are often criminalized for the same behaviors for which richer families get a pass. “Not everyone can know how to read the rooms,” a D.C.F.S. social worker told me. “That’s a skill set you need to learn when you’re going into these nice, well-kept homes.” (In response to questions, D.C.F.S. said that it was legally prohibited from commenting on its involvement with families.)
Long before the incident with Walter, the family had had a history of failing to seek medical treatment. In December, 2022, for instance, a public-health nurse who visited the home for a different welfare check was surprised to find a five-month-old child with hydrocephalus, a swelling of the head, who required immediate emergency-room attention. This was Benjamin, the son that Silvia had given birth to prematurely. The nurse recalled to an investigator that the child’s head was so “huge” you “couldn’t miss it.” Two days later, Benjamin underwent surgery in which a shunt was placed in his head to drain the excess fluid to his abdomen. He was also given a gastric tube for feeding.
Afterward, D.C.F.S. opted for a “voluntary family maintenance case,” an alternative to court that “is more often provided to wealthier and whiter families with serious allegations,” according to a longtime attorney in juvenile-dependency court. Social workers spent eight months monitoring how Silvia handled Benjamin’s medical needs. By the end of this period, it was noted that Silvia had developed a closer bond with her child. “Mother has been observed hugging, holding and rocking him,” a social worker wrote. “He responds in excitement with smiles and leg and hand movements.” As soon as the supervision ended, however, Silvia shipped Benjamin off to her sister, who lived in central China. She doesn’t appear to have visited him since.
In early 2024, Guojun and Silvia briefly found themselves under scrutiny from a judge in family court, who took the rare step of calling a confidential hearing before approving a pre-birth order. Guojun was irritated, according to two people present, and didn’t understand why the state was taking an interest in his family. He emphasized that he didn’t rely on government benefits, owned a big house, and was able to afford nannies. “Is it a crime,” Guojun asked the judge, “to have so many children?”
The judge ordered a home evaluation, in which a court-appointed psychologist named Keith Peterson toured the Arcadia mansion and conducted welfare checks on several of the children. Peterson also interviewed Guojun, Silvia, and some of the teachers and live-in nannies. Reviewing Peterson’s report, I noticed he’d used Silvia as his translator for these conversations, most of which were conducted with Mandarin speakers. (I asked two former caseworkers about this approach, and they told me that such a lack of independence rendered the study worthless; Peterson did not respond to a request for comment.) After hearing from Silvia—and from Guojun and Silvia’s employees through Silvia—Peterson wrote that he was “impressed with this family,” remarked several times on the spaciousness of the mansion, and concluded that he had no concerns about the parents’ ability “to provide a loving and stable home for more children.”
What had seemed like an intrusion proved to be a gift: whenever untoward rumors arose about Silvia and Guojun, Mark Surrogacy alluded to this state-sanctioned seal of approval. After Elliott first became concerned about the couple during her pregnancy, she was told by two separate fertility attorneys that the parents had passed a home study—with, as one put it, “flying colors.” Later, several surrogates were disturbed by the fact that another fertility attorney, Douglas Kautzky, who had been suggested by Mark Surrogacy to negotiate some of their contracts, had worked with Silvia and Guojun before, and hadn’t alerted the women to the family’s size. (Kautzky told me that attorney-client privilege prohibited him from discussing other surrogacies, and refused to comment on whether he knew that Silvia and Guojun owned the agency.) Like multiple lawyers used or referred by Mark Surrogacy, Kautzky was a member of SEEDS, the nonprofit group, which issues ethical standards for agencies, including transparency about “multiple simultaneous surrogacies” and conflict-of-interest disclosures. But these standards are just recommendations. Kautzky touted his SEEDS bona fides in his e-mail signature, along with a quote from the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham: “The Power of the Lawyer is in the Uncertainty of the Law.”
For months after hearing the news about Walter, the surrogates looked into filing a lawsuit against Guojun and Silvia—maybe, they hoped, some sort of class action. They asked dozens of lawyers if, given the couple’s misrepresentations, their contracts were still enforceable (the consensus was that they were), and what custody rights, if any, they might be entitled to pursue (the consensus was not many). Attorneys “didn’t want nothing to do with this crap,” Hallie Weaver told me. “I was turned away, turned away, turned away.” After months of dead-end conversations, she ultimately concluded that there was nothing “to protect a surrogate if anything goes wrong.”
One reason for this is the financial disincentive, Deborah Wald, a family lawyer in San Francisco who specializes in assisted reproduction, told me. Most surrogates lack the funds to hire a private attorney, “so they often find themselves on their own,” Wald said. Elliott talked to many lawyers who told her, sometimes unkindly, that she couldn’t even afford their retainer.
Meanwhile, it was becoming clear that, though Guojun and Silvia no longer had their children, they had vast resources with which to get them back, engaging in aggressive legal battles in four different states. In October, they sued two surrogates in Virginia for breach of contract, alleging that the carriers had kept—or tried to keep—their twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth babies. The couple demanded all legal fees they would incur and a million dollars in damages. One of the women had birthed a child who ended up in foster care. The other, Melissa Epps, didn’t have the money for a lawyer, but she did have the baby she’d delivered, whom she now considered her daughter. Epps represented herself in court until Pamela DeCamp, an attorney at the Virginia Legal Aid Society, agreed to take on her defense. “This is at its core,” DeCamp observed in one motion, “a lawsuit for possession of a three month old human being.”
That month, on the night of Halloween, Gabriel was removed from Weaver’s home without warning. A social worker told her that it was because she had postpartum anxiety, asked too many questions at a doctor’s appointment, and talked to the media. A few weeks earlier, Weaver had given an interview to a middle-school friend who worked as a reporter at Courthouse News Service. Weaver realized that the news story might have alerted Silvia and Guojun to the fact that she was interested in seeking custody of Gabriel, and she wondered if they’d spoken to her county’s child-welfare agency. (The Cherokee County Department of Family and Children Services did not respond to a request for comment.)
After caring for Gabriel for two and a half months, Weaver felt as though she’d once again been used and discarded—this time by the state. She asked the social worker whether she could set up visitations, but was soon reminded that she had no rights. “I don’t even care about my rights,” she told me. “I’m just worried about a baby that was ripped away from his food source and everyone he’s known.” Gabriel was now being fostered by strangers.
As for the rest of Guojun and Silvia’s children, the teen-ager, Susan, had been allowed to live with Silvia, on the basis that her age and her closeness to her mother set her apart from any safety risks faced by her younger siblings. Two infants were in foster care in Pennsylvania; a third was in Virginia; and the other twenty children, including Jefferson, John, Hays, and Walter, were in foster homes in Los Angeles. This last group remained in a sort of custodial purgatory, until a judge decided their fates in the Los Angeles County dependency case. The trial was originally planned for last summer, but was pushed to September, to late fall, and then to early this year.
Late last month, the trial began at the Edmund D. Edelman Children’s Court, a pinkish building east of downtown. Although the proceedings were not open to the public, the courthouse was, so I took a seat in the waiting area on the first morning of arguments. A TV showed cartoons as children idly played with toys bolted to the walls. Guojun used one of the breaks to talk to someone on speakerphone. Then, also on speakerphone, he appeared to call his bank.
The case did not look promising for the parents. Drawing on days of home-surveillance videos and months of investigation, the county was arguing, among other things, that Guojun and Silvia had failed to protect their children from abuse, neglect, and acts of cruelty; that they had concealed the cause of Walter’s injury “from medical professionals and law enforcement, delaying critical medical treatment”; and that they had “instructed and facilitated relentless violence and verbal abuse by caregivers towards children of tender years.” The county recommended against the possibility of family reunification.
Silvia’s dependency lawyer declined to comment, while Mitchell Krems, Guojun’s dependency lawyer, told me that he could not talk about the child-welfare case. He stressed, however, that any general suggestions of abuse or neglect were patently false, and that both parents had done everything they could to protect their family. He described Guojun as kind, generous, and a successful businessman, who cared deeply about his children and their education. “Society has a difficulty understanding how one can have so many kids, and they can’t fathom that you could be a good parent to all of them,” Krems said. “So the problem is that he’s being unfairly villainized for that.”
The judge appeared to disagree with this interpretation. On February 2nd, she sustained many of the county’s allegations, according to sources at the court, and dismissed only Susan from the ruling. Next month, she will decide whether to grant Silvia and Guojun the opportunity to get back the rest of their children from the state.
Elliott anxiously awaited the court’s decision, but she also feared that, without regulations, there would be nothing to stop the same kind of situation from happening again. So far, the only law to have been proposed in response to the Mark Surrogacy news was a bill introduced last fall by Senator Rick Scott, a Republican of Florida, that would ban parents in certain countries, including China, from hiring American surrogates. This year, Scott co-wrote a letter to the Department of Homeland Security outlining his concerns about the use of surrogacy by “individuals linked to the Chinese Communist Party,” which he claimed presents a “national security risk.” But nationality-based restrictions on who can access fertility treatments would do little to address the harms the Mark surrogates actually experienced.
Whenever a scandal ruptures the tightly bound world of surrogacy, the industry tends to call for a renewed commitment to self-regulation rather than for sweeping legislation. This is not without reason. Surrogacy is a vital lifeline for anyone who, by nature or by circumstance, can’t carry a child. In a post-Dobbs landscape in which even I.V.F. has, at times, seemed at risk, few fertility advocates thrill to the notion of the federal government dictating what a family should look like, or how it should be made.
“Most people are extremely happy surrogates, and often we only hear about the times that it falls apart,” Naomi Cahn, a family-law professor at the University of Virginia, told me. “You don’t want to infantilize surrogates by saying they need all of these special protections, but you do want to make sure there is informed consent.” In California, for example, the family code could be updated to require parents to disclose how many children they already have in their home, or whether concurrent surrogacies are under way. The state could also follow the lead of New York, where surrogacy agencies must not only be licensed but must adhere to a surrogate bill of rights. These include the right to choose an independent legal counsel.
Like organ donors, many surrogates draw on the rhetoric of gift-giving to describe their motivations. “Although surrogates want to be paid, they do not want to appear (and in general are not) mercenary,” the legal scholar Carol Sanger has observed. “The reconciliation of payment and altruism—a kind of seller schizophrenia—is managed by keeping the price relatively low. The money signals that their labor has value; the modest sum underscores the essence of the deal as a gift transaction.”
Yet this labor is stripped of its meaning if the parents seem indifferent to the lives they’ve been given. One surrogate who carried twins for Silvia and Guojun told me that she imagined her journey as a good deed that she would be remembered for at her funeral. Now she was racked by guilt and embarrassment. “I brought them into this world, and I thought that no one could take that away from me,” she said. “That’s still true, but in a different way—and that’s going to haunt me forever.” By collecting children the same way they’d collected properties, Silvia and Guojun had reduced a benevolent act to a purely commercial exchange. From a certain perspective, the surrogates had been robbed of the value of their gift.
For years, the F.B.I. and local police suspected that there was “something going on within the home.”
As soon as she could, Elliott decided to undertake a second surrogacy, which she’d started calling her “redemption journey.” She wasn’t the only one. At least four more Mark surrogates have begun working with other agencies. “As crazy as it sounds this aweful turnout made me feel like I HAVE to do it again,” a surrogate messaged one of the groups. “Like when people ask me about it I just don’t want this experience being all I think about.”
When Elliott told some of the women about her new contract, she was gently chided for accepting a low fee. “Y’all are making me feel dumb for not asking for more,” Elliott wrote. “But this couple is so sweet and I honestly feel like just having that relationship with each other like I wanted so badly the first journey will make up for the difference of the money.” Elliott had already become close to the intended mother, and they texted all the time. In January, when Elliott married Blake Murray, their officiant was the intended father.
Recently, I visited Elliott and Murray in Corpus Christi, where they were now renting a place of their own. On their fridge, they’d posted a picture from Hays’s birth, which showed Elliott cradling the baby to her chest and Murray kneeling beside the bed to take a closer look. Last summer, when Elliott had been trying, unsuccessfully, to hire a lawyer to explore custody options, she’d raised almost ten thousand dollars from strangers who’d seen her TikTok video. Now her plan was to put the money into some kind of savings account for Hays. Though she’d originally hoped to adopt the baby, Elliott felt it was no longer possible, or even, for Hays, the best option. By the time the judge made her decision, Hays would have spent nearly a year with her foster parents, the only people she’d ever really known.
Nothing prevents Silvia and Guojun from continuing to expand their family, which is exactly what they’ve been doing. A few weeks before the dependency hearing, I drove out to the high desert northeast of L.A. to look for a woman named Elizabeth. I was fairly certain I’d found her once she padded to the door of a gray ranch-style house, visibly pregnant in a fuzzy pink bathrobe. Elizabeth confirmed that it was her first journey. Last year, after their arrest, Silvia and Guojun shut down Mark Surrogacy and returned to Babytree, the agency they’d used for a few of their earliest children.
Elizabeth didn’t keep up with the news, so she hadn’t heard anything about the intended parents until Babytree brought her in to provide some information. That was the only time she met Guojun and Silvia. When I asked if she’d learned that the couple’s children were in foster care, she said she couldn’t remember. I wasn’t sure how much to share; she was in her third trimester. She wasn’t worried, she explained: the agency had reassured her. “They told me it’s a family thing,” she said, one hand resting on her stomach. ♦