Dr. Donald Cline, 77, pleaded not guilty Monday to two felony obstruction of justice charges for misleading authorities who were investigating complaints from two of the now-adult children against him.
Cline is accused of being the biological father of at least eight people, the youngest of whom would be about 30. The accusations were first reported by WXIN-TV in May.
Cline, who now lives in the suburb of Zionsville, told six adults who believed they were his children that he had donated his own sperm about 50 times starting in the 1970s, a probable cause affidavit said. He had told his patients they were receiving sperm from medical or dental residents or medical students and that no single donor’s sperm was used more than three times.
One of the adult children took a saliva-based DNA test through a private personal genomics company and found that she was related to at least eight other people in its database, the affidavit said. Meanwhile, two others also investigated their ancestry through DNA tests and learned their mothers both were patients of Cline and that they were related to 70 relatives of Cline, it said.
Cline “said he used his own sperm whenever he didn’t have a donor sample available,” the affidavit said he told them.
“Dr. Cline admitted to doing wrong by inseminating the women with his own sperm, but felt that he was helping women because they really wanted a baby,” the affidavit said. “Also, he felt pressured to use his own sperm because he didn’t always have access to fresh sperm.”
Cline marked the files of the women receiving his sperm with asterisks so that if a patient came back and wanted another baby, “he would use his sperm again to produce full siblings,” the affidavit said. WXIN reported the eight known siblings were born to five different women.
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