Woman Alleges Asch Sent Her Embryos to Researcher : Law: Once an admirer of the fertility specialist, she now is among his dozens of detractors.

Kimberly DuBont said she came away believing in Dr. Ricardo H. Asch more than she has ever believed in anyone.

After all, it was Asch, the internationally renowned fertility specialist, who had helped her conceive her 4-year-old son, Mikey. But on Tuesday, DuBont was calling Asch “a descendant of the devil,” saying he had betrayed her and committed the equivalent of kidnaping by stealing her embryos.

DuBont, 32, and her husband, Michael DuBont, 40, are general contractors who live near Riverside. They also are among about 30 patients who have either filed lawsuits or taken preliminary legal steps against Asch, UC Irvine and its once-prestigious Center for Reproductive Health.

Along with an Orange County couple, the DuBonts were contending Tuesday that embryos belonging to them ended up in the research laboratories of Cornell University, the latest institution cited in the widening scandal, where a biologist from Barcelona, Spain, is accused of conducting experiments without their consent.

It was Asch, the couples claim, who unlawfully provided the frozen embryos to Anna Veiga, his colleague and friend from Barcelona. Asch and his attorneys have consistently and vehemently denied any wrongdoing in the scandal, which now involves about 40 patients and is the subject of at least seven investigations.

“I used to think he was the most wonderful man,” a tearful DuBont said in the Orange office of her attorney, Melanie R. Blum. “But he’s taken all of those thoughts out of me now. . . . How could I not feel betrayed by Dr. Asch? He stole my kids, my babies. He stole something so personal. It was a kidnaping.”

The scandal expanded even further Tuesday when a Santa Monica attorney filed lawsuits on behalf of two more couples, charging that their eggs or embryos were stolen by doctors at the UCI clinic and implanted in other women without the donors’ permission.

The latest suits, both filed by attorney Larry R. Feldman, name the University of California and its three fertility specialists, Drs. Asch, Jose P. Balmaceda and Sergio Stone. The suits accuse them of harvesting eggs that ended up implanted in other women.

Barbara and Darrell Moore said in court papers that they first hired the fertility clinic in August, 1990, to harvest the wife’s eggs and then re-implant the fertilized embryo. It was not until last April, the couple charged, that they discovered the eggs had been implanted in another woman.

Susan and H. Wayne Clay made similar allegations, saying they first consulted the clinic in August, 1993.

In her case, DuBont said she met Asch in 1990, at a time when she was having trouble getting pregnant. The mother of a 12-year-old son from a previous marriage, she and Michael DuBont had tried for years to have a child of their own but couldn’t--until they met Asch, who came highly recommended by her doctor in Riverside.

She idolized Asch, she said, for the role he played in Mikey’s birth, until May, when she learned of the fertility scandal merely by watching a television news report.

“I never imagined while laying on the couch that day relaxing that it would be the first day of my life to have everlasting pain that will continue until I die because someone decided to take something away from me and my husband,” she wrote last month in a letter to Blum. “I have been cheated. I have been cheated out of my babies.”

DuBont said Tuesday that Asch actually called her in 1993, pleading with her to give her consent to have her embryos used for research purposes. But she “had no second thoughts, no doubts,” she said, until seeing the story on television four months ago.

Blum said that despite her best efforts, no effort at legal discovery has turned up the all-important consent forms, which DuBont says indicate that her eggs and embryos were positively not to be used in any research or in any other patient.

Blum has received some forms, however, one of which shows that in 1990 Asch harvested 13 eggs from DuBont and that nine were shipped to other places, three of them to Cornell University, to a person listed merely as A. Veiga. Four of the embryos were used, Blum said, adding that six remain unaccounted for.

Veiga, whom Blum alleges was using the eggs for research for an article on chromosomal abnormalities or deformities, could not be reached for comment.

Nor could officials from Cornell University, which, according to Newport Beach attorney Walter G. Koontz Jr., was the destination of embryos taken illegally from Kent and Debra Beasley, who live in Orange County and who, like the DuBonts, are among the dozens of patients to have launched malpractice proceedings against Asch.

Neither Koontz nor Blum said they know whether their clients’ embryos have resulted in any live births.

For DuBont, learning that an actual child had resulted from her own tissues “would be the worst of all. It would kill me,” she said. “I would feel totally empty inside. I can’t imagine anything worse. All of this is as awful as it can be now. I hate to say it, but I’m learning to expect the worst.”