Two More Suits Filed in Fertility Clinic Scandal : Courts: Two couples take legal action, contending their eggs or embryos were stolen and misused. The high-profile accusations against the UC Irvine clinic and three specialists have so far resulted in 12 lawsuits.

Two more couples filed lawsuits Tuesday in the UC Irvine fertility clinic scandal, contending their eggs or embryos were stolen and shipped off for use in lucrative research of no benefit to them.

The actions by Orange County residents Debra Ann and Kent Beasley and Riverside County residents Kimberly and Michael Dubont bring the number of lawsuits targeting UC Irvine and its three once-prized fertility specialists to 12.

The three doctors, Ricardo H. Asch, Jose P. Balmaceda and Sergio C. Stone, have been accused by the University of California of misappropriating the eggs and embryos of as many as 40 women. All three deny any intentional wrongdoing.

Named among the more than two dozen defendants in Tuesday’s suits are Cornell University Medical Center, where the unapproved research allegedly took place, a host of former fertility clinic employees and the couple who bought Asch’s Newport Beach home last month.

The lawsuits contend the couple, Ernie J. Beigel and Sandra Slocum, purchased the upscale home in Big Canyon for substantially less than its fair market value. Then, the suits state, they transferred the property to a trust of which they are the beneficiary in an effort to “eliminate any perceived equity” in the property.

According to the suits, the couple defrauded the plaintiffs because they knew Asch was selling the home to avoid paying whatever legal judgments resulted from the fertility controversy. The plaintiffs say the property transfer should be set aside. The home has an assessed value of about $1.1 million.

Both couples contend that embryos frozen for their future use were sent by the fertility doctors and their employees to Cornell University, where they were used in “commercially advantageous and financially lucrative” research. According to the suits, the doctors knew the embryos ultimately would be destroyed or used in other patients, the research was not intended to benefit either couple, and the truth was intentionally concealed from the donors.

Both suits contend that clinic employees, including embryologists Teri Ord and Ellen Marello, helped to hide what was going on.

UC Irvine, the former executive director of its medical center, Mary Piccione, and her deputy, Herb Spiwak, failed to properly supervise the clinic, “in conscious and willful disregard” of patients’ safety, according to the suits.

Beasley and Dubont became pregnant through the fertility procedures performed by the UCI physicians. Beasley had twins, now 3 years old, and Dubont had a boy, now 4. Beasley actually conceived triplets but lost one of them in the first trimester of pregnancy because she developed a syndrome that was a “dangerous side-effect” of fertility drugs, according to the Beasleys’ suit.