UC Irvine Ignored Warning, Lawyer Says : Medicine: An employee of fertility clinic tried to alert officials beginning in 1992 about irregularities, her attorney contends.

An attorney for a former office employee at UC Irvine’s fertility clinic says her client offered university officials documents in 1992 showing 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 scandal had expanded from five to as many as 35, attorney Crystal Sluyter said.

Since then, the university has continued to revise 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 UC Irvine 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 university officials, including an internal auditor, but no one was interested in reviewing them until this year, when the fertility scandal erupted.

Batshoun, who worked six years for the doctors at clinics in Garden Grove and UC Irvine, was forced to resign in early 1993 after she admitted during an internal investigation of the UC Irvine 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 authorized by clinic doctors. Batshoun was not prosecuted.

Sluyter said she plans to file a lawsuit on behalf of Batshoun today alleging that the university forced her to resign in retaliation for her efforts to expose the problems at the UC Irvine and Garden Grove clinics.

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

In June, UC Irvine 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 the fertility clinic in 1992. But Golub said the employee refused to give the auditor details.