UCI Concedes Lawyer Had List of Clinic Victims

In a stunning admission, UC Irvine officials said Wednesday that a UC-hired attorney has had a stack of documents since early October indicating the scope of UCI’s fertility scandal may be far greater than estimated--but they insisted UCI didn’t know it.

“This is very embarrassing,” UCI Chancellor Laurel L. Wilkening said late Wednesday. “This is about as embarrassing an event as one could have.”

The admission comes just days after UCI officials said they had vigorously pursued all information leading to identification of possible victims in a nationally publicized scandal, in which three university doctors at two Orange County clinics are accused of stealing the eggs and embryos of women and giving them to other patients.

Only last weekend, UCI officials denied they had access to any evidence suggesting the fiasco had involved more than the 35 women that officials estimated over the summer and steadfastly maintained they had no access to a list of patients--circulated publicly in recent weeks--indicating the scandal involved at least 60 patients.

The list, prepared by a clinic embryologist, is in the hands of the U.S. attorney’s office and other criminal investigators, but UCI officials said it had not been given to them.

While trying to locate the list this week, however, an outside attorney hired by the UC general counsel’s office discovered a “two-inch-thick” stack of documents in his possession that probably contains the names of other victims, Wilkening said. The attorney, Byron Beam of Santa Ana, notified UC officials of his mistake in a letter dated Tuesday and released by the university Wednesday.

“To my horror and chagrin . . . I found several handwritten pages of what now appears to be lists of patients who had eggs donated to them outside the paid donor program,” Beam wrote.

“Now, because of our failure to promptly review, analyze and advise you of the . . . materials, we have put the Chancellor and the Chancellor’s office in an embarrassing position through no fault of theirs,” Beam wrote.

Beam acknowledged he had told the university late last week that he knew nothing of a “purported list of donors and recipients.” He said he and his firm takes “full responsibility for the mistake.”

State Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica) said the university’s version of events stretches credulity.

“There’s no more vital information” than the number of affected patients, said Hayden, whose Higher Education Committee held hearings on the scandal in June.

“To believe this story--that it was an oversight by the counsel--is difficult enough,” he said. “You can either believe a cover-up or incompetence as an answer. I can’t chose between the two. . . . It’s very troubling either way.”

Wilkening said there is certainly some “overlap” between the lists of 150 patients discovered by Beam and a roster of about 200 donors and recipients which has been circulating among patients and their attorneys, but she could not say whether the lists are the same. She said it is not apparent from the lists alone whether the patients are victims of unapproved transfers--so patients will have to be contacted for more information.

The chancellor, who described herself as “dismayed, frustrated and angry” at the attorney’s blunder, said she has turned all of the documents, including 350 pages of embryologists’ logs, over to a UC-appointed panel of physicians for immediate investigation.

The three-member panel is the same group that probed the first reports of clinical wrongdoing by the clinic’s doctors this spring and found “credible evidence” of up to five unapproved transfers. The chancellor said she may ask another physician to join the group to expedite their review and notification of possible victims.

Wilkening said she had no idea how long the panel would take to begin the notification process, nor could she provide a new estimate of possible victims.

But, she acknowledged, if she were one of the patients, “I would be irate, and I would want to give the university a piece of my mind.”

The revelation is a major setback for UC Irvine, coming just as news of the nearly six-month-old scandal had slowed to a trickle and after the chancellor herself said her institution appeared to be headed for better times. Just last month, the university received a major boost when two of its scientists won Nobel prizes.

One longtime critic of the university’s handling of the crisis said Wednesday that the most recent development, coming after months of embarrassing revelations, is “inexcusable.”

Debra Krahel, a former senior administrator at UC Irvine Medical Center who was one of the scandal’s whistle-blowers, said, “That lack of diligence has permeated this whole situation. That’s why it’s such a mess. . . . Their credibility is down the drain.”

Lt. Gov. Gray Davis, who has regularly criticized the university’s handling of the fertility scandal, said UCI’s first duty must be to the patients the fertility trio may have harmed.

“All of us regret the emotional damage this seemingly endless scandal has caused an unknown number of patients,” he said. “I personally spoke today to Chancellor Wilkening and urged her to move swiftly to notify all potentially affected patients. . . . I expect UCI to have a full and complete report on the number of patients involved, as well as the number contacted, at the regents meeting” next Thursday.

Wilkening insisted Wednesday that UCI is not responsible for mistakes of attorneys hired by the University of California, hinting that the blame rests with the UC general counsel’s office in Oakland.

Conceded General Counsel James E. Holst, “Certainly the legal work is our responsibility, and this material was received as a part of the ongoing legal work. The responsibility for this material not having been found immediately upon receipt . . . is that of the lawyers.”

But Holst said he does not believe the foul-up will have “any impact” on existing litigation against the university and said it is too soon to say whether the documents will lead to more lawsuits. At least 12 couples have sued UCI over the scandal. Several patients who believe they are among the group of newly identified victims already have sought legal representation.

According to Beam’s letter, his firm received the stack of documents containing the patient lists from an attorney for Teri Ord, an embryologist who worked for the university fertility doctors for many years. But, he wrote, the papers were disorganized and the colleague he assigned to go through them was busy with other work.

Beam indicated in his letter that he reviewed the papers personally on Sunday, following reports in the media that Ord’s list suggested the list of victims was far longer than reported by the university. At that time, he wrote, he found evidence of transfers to patients “outside the paid donor program” dating back to 1986.

Most of the transfers, he wrote, took place between 1986 and 1990 at a UCI-affiliated clinic at AMI/Garden Grove Medical Center, he said, but some occurred at UCI Medical Center in Orange between 1990 and 1992. Both clinics are now closed. The UCI clinic closed in June, weeks after the scandal broke.

The three physicians, Drs. Ricardo H. Asch, Jose P. Balmaceda and Sergio C. Stone, deny any knowing wrongdoing. Stone’s attorney, Karen Taillon, said her client could not have been involved in any of the transfers indicated in the documents, because he does not generally do transfers.