Ex-Fertility Worker Says UCI Spurned Evidence : Scandal: Attorney says the employee offered details of egg swapping to several university officials in ’92.

An attorney for a former office employee at UCI’s fertility clinic says her client offered university officials documents in 1992 showing that at least 35 women were possible victims of egg and embryo thefts, but the officials refused to look at the evidence until three years later.

This past July, the university cited those same documents--without revealing the source--as “credible evidence” that the number of potential victims in the fertility scandal had suddenly expanded from five to as many as 35, attorney Crystal Sluyter said.

Since then, the university has continuously revised its estimates upward and now reports that more than 100 women may have been victimized. The clinic’s three doctors deny knowingly doing anything wrong.

Sluyter said her client, former clinic administrative assistant Toula Batshoun, 34, collected a foot-thick sheaf of papers consisting of embryologists’ logs, patient records and financial documents beginning in February 1992, when she started to suspect that eggs and embryos were being stolen and implanted in women at the UCI clinic without the donors’ consent.

The lawyer said that over several months, beginning in August 1992, Batshoun offered the documents to as many as seven UCI officials, including an internal auditor, but no one was interested in reviewing them until this year, when the fertility scandal erupted.

Batshoun, who worked for the doctors for six years at clinics in Garden Grove and at UCI, was forced to resign in early 1993 after she admitted during an internal investigation of the UCI clinic that she had filed a false insurance claim to cover a deductible for care her family received there, Sluyter said. The attorney said the claim was a “minor” infraction and was authorized by clinic doctors. Batshoun was not prosecuted.

Sluyter said she will file a lawsuit on behalf of Batshoun today alleging the university forced her to resign in retaliation for her efforts to expose the problems at the UCI and Garden Grove clinics. She also is alleging the university and one of its outside attorneys defamed her by calling her integrity into question.

A UCI spokeswoman said Thursday that she could not comment on a pending lawsuit.

“We look forward for this case to come before a court of law, so that the entire truth can come out,” Fran Tardiff said.

In June, UCI Executive Vice Chancellor Sidney H. Golub made an apparent reference to Batshoun, whom he did not identify by name, saying that an “administrative assistant” told auditors about “problems with the eggs” at UCI’s fertility clinic in 1992.

But Golub said the employee refused to give the auditor any details to go on.

“They asked her who, what, when, where and how, and she wouldn’t say,” Golub said.

UCI officials have suggested that the auditors did not consider the accusations credible, because Batshoun was at the time suspected of stealing $4,600 from a safe at the center.

Batshoun did not steal the money and was never charged in the theft, Sluyter said.

“She was given a warning for not using [security] procedures which did not exist,” Sluyter said.

Sluyter said the university seems to have changed its mind about Batshoun’s credibility, because UCI officials have asked her to testify against the doctors should they contest their terminations.

“If she was not credible then [in 1992], why is she credible now?” Sluyter asked.

Other authorities are counting on Batshoun’s assistance as well, Sluyter said. Since this summer, she has been interviewed at length by the FBI, the U.S. attorney’s office, the state Medical Board and the Internal Revenue Service about her knowledge of what went on in the clinics.

“She’s one of the few sources of information that’s willing to talk,” Sluyter said. “She hasn’t been trying to hide this; she just didn’t have anywhere to go to resolve it.”

Sluyter said Batshoun first began to suspect egg swapping in late 1991. She confronted Dr. Ricardo H. Asch twice about the problem but received nothing but denials and, later, threats, Sluyter said.

Beginning in August 1992, Sluyter said, she told university auditor Dave Swanberg, a university attorney and at least five mid-level administrators at the medical center that she had evidence on paper of the egg misuse, but no one would sit down and read the documents.

Swanberg told her he was not interested in anything but financial misconduct, Sluyter said.

In June, a former nurse at the clinic testified before a state Senate panel that he had tried in 1992 to present much more limited evidence of egg misuse at the clinic to Swanberg as well, but the auditor told him, “I’m an accountant. I have no idea what to do with that.”

A university auditor in Oakland is looking into why the nurse’s suspicions apparently were not passed up the ladder so that action could be taken. The auditor’s report has not been released.