When a couple told their doctor they were moving out of town, the doctor reacted in an unusual way – he cried. Maybe his odd response was due to the fact that, unbeknownst to the couple, the doctor was the biological father to their young daughter, Kelli Rowlette.
Let's fast forward. Rowlette, from Washington state, recently took a DNA test with Ancestry.com, only to find out her father wasn't her biological father. In fact, Ancestry said her bio dad was a doctor named Gerald Mortimer who lived 500 miles away. This was so surprising that she told her mother that Ancestry had got it wrong.
What she didn't know was that her parents had gone to the same Doctor Mortimer in the 1980s, and her mother had undergone artificial insemination with both her father's sperm and that of an "anonymous donor" who was supposedly a 6-foot tall college student with brown hair and blue eyes (which the doctor was not). The parents had kept the artificial insemination a secret from their daughter, while the doctor had kept the fact that he and their daughter shared the same DNA a secret.
Even after the DNA test revealed that Rowlette's biological father was not her father, Rowlette's mom kept mum.
According to The Seattle Times:
But several months later, Rowlette discovered the shocking truth on her own.
In August, Rowlette was helping to sort through her parents’ old papers when she ran across her birth certificate. It had been signed by the doctor who delivered her — Gerald Mortimer.
Last week the Rowlettes filed a lawsuit. They are suing the now retired doctor for "fraud and medical negligence." They claim they are “suffering immeasurably."
Ancestry just put out a statement which, in part, reads, “We are committed to delivering the most accurate results, however with this, people may learn of unexpected connections.”
Image: Pixabay
