Asch Blasts UCI, Media; Says He Is Victim Too

In his first wide-ranging interview, the former director of UC Irvine’s scandal-plagued fertility clinic lashed out Monday at what he called a “sloppy,” vengeful university and a press corps willing to believe UCI’s self-serving lies.

“I blame all of you,” Dr. Ricardo Asch said of the mess his life has become.

Appearing thin but well-rested, Asch portrayed himself in back-to-back media interviews throughout the day as a man bewildered and betrayed. He spoke passionately of his derailed career and disrupted family life from a couch in a Mexico City hotel room, making what he called his last effort to set the record straight.

Behind him, as a backdrop, was a collage of photographs--carefully arranged by his attorney--displaying the smiling faces of children the fallen fertility specialist helped to create.

Asch, 48, is accused, along with his two former partners, of stealing eggs and embryos from scores of women and giving them to other patients or using them in research. At least seven live births might have resulted from improper transfers at UCI, UC San Diego and an affiliated clinic in Garden Grove, university officials allege.

Federal officials are investigating allegations that the doctors engaged in mail fraud, tax evasion and fertility-drug smuggling, but no charges against the trio have been announced. All three doctors have denied wrongdoing.

Far from the major perpetrator, Asch said he too is one of the scandal’s victims.

He said he had to sell his two houses and his cars in the United States, leaving his Santa Ana practice and the country last fall because he and his family have been so maliciously attacked. He, his wife, Silvia, and three of his five children are now living in Mexico City, where Asch says he is teaching and doing research.

“To me, it’s a tremendous change of life that I don’t think I deserve. I have given all my life over to helping people have children and to work in an academic environment to improve the field of reproductive medicine. . . . I hope this is what people are going to remember me for . . . and not about these things that I don’t bear full responsibility [for.]”

The doctor had few words of solace for patients who believe they have been victimized--especially for the approximately 40 women suing him.

“My opinion is that there are . . . people that don’t have a case and they are jumping on the bandwagon . . . to try to use the opportunity for their own financial benefit rather than to create justice,” he said.

The doctor said he had “absolutely not” ever intentionally transferred eggs and embryos to other patients or researchers without the donors’ consent.

“If I have ever done that, you know, by mistake, well, I feel very sorry,” he said.

However, repeating testimony he gave at his sworn deposition in Tijuana last month, Asch said he had not considered it his responsibility to check or to track patient consent forms. That, he said, was the responsibility of university-employed nurses, whom he declined to identify.

Again and again, Asch said he has been treated unfairly by journalists too eager to accept the university’s version of events.

“What I am amazed [about] is . . . during all of this process, from the moment it became public, I have not heard of any of the good things that I have done in life--never. I think there is a campaign to try and destroy my reputation rather than trying to present what Asch, the man, both as a professor at UCI and now, did . . . for science and the community.”

The doctor reserved most of his criticism for UCI, saying it was the university’s “sloppy” management and mistakes by its employees that gave rise to the scandal.

“I feel [university officials] know the mistakes that were done, and I’m sure they know intimately their responsibility in this. . . . They want to find a scapegoat in me,” Asch said.

“Suddenly now, I am the fall guy . . . for cases that were my patients, that were not my patients, patients that I’ve seen, patients that I have never seen, patients that have procedures when I was never in the country.”

Byron Beam, a lawyer who represents UCI on the fertility matter, rejected the notion that the university is making Asch the scapegoat.

“It’s totally absurd,” he said. “The man is the architect of his own situation.”

He said Asch had final say in hiring employees at the clinic and that Asch retained the right to control and direct the staff.

“The university simply paid them,” he said.

Beam said that UCI provided the facility and equipment but that Asch ran the operation as he saw fit. “It was basically his operation.”

Officials have declined to pay for Asch’s defense, saying he acted outside the scope of his employment and engaged in fraud.

That stance visibly rankles Asch, who said Monday that he is running out of money to defend himself.

“The university has that responsibility, to pay for my defense,” under the terms of his contract, Asch said.

In other comments addressing the multiple investigations and allegations targeting him and his partners, Asch also said:

* His attorneys have made an offer to the U.S. attorneys office under which he would return to the United States to testify before a federal grand jury.

But there is one condition: Federal officials must not use his cooperation as an opportunity to arrest him. Lloyd Charton said the U.S. attorney’s office is considering the offer. Federal officials have otherwise declined to discuss the case.

* Most of the limited evidence Asch has seen of possible improper transfers has not pertained to surgeries he performed, he said.

Asch declined to say who did the procedures, but ruled out his partner, Dr. Sergio C. Stone. Stone, he said, has “zero responsibility” for any alleged egg swapping because he did not perform the procedures, Asch said.

Asch would not discuss the possible role of his other partner, Dr. Jose P. Balmaceda, referring any questions to Balmaceda, who is now practicing in a clinic in Chile. Asch said the scandal has driven a wedge between the two longtime colleagues and friends. The pair have not spoken since Balmaceda left the United States last summer, he said.

* There was no “secrecy” surrounding transfers of donated eggs or embryos at any of the clinics where Asch practiced, Asch said.

He said the names of prospective donors and recipients were posted at the clinics and that nurses, biologists, doctors and fellows all were involved in different aspects of their treatment.

Asch said he could not possibly have personally tracked which eggs and embryos went to which patients because the matching process was complex and involved linking pools of donors and recipients.

* Asch said he had no motive for stealing eggs and embryos. He scoffed at the idea voiced by UCI Chancellor Laurel L. Wilkening and others that he appeared to be handing younger women’s eggs over to older patients to boost his clinics’ pregnancy success rate.

“She doesn’t know what she is talking about,” Asch said, explaining that the number of cases in which donated eggs were used was a fraction of the some 6,000 transfers that occurred at clinics where he worked in the last decade. It was not nearly enough to affect his success rate one way or the other, he said.

* Asch has never seen a list of transfers prepared by his longtime biologist, Teri Ord, which provides the basis for allegations that at least 60 women might have been involved in improper egg swapping. Asch said he “cannot imagine” so many improper swaps occurred.

Ord, who says she prepared the list at Asch’s and Balmaceda’s request, is likely to testify about that list at her deposition, set for later in the week in San Antonio.

Asch said that, contrary to media reports, he had no problems with Ord’s performance and considered her a good employee.

* He did, however, say that Ord and others in clinic biology labs were responsible for deciding which reproductive materials were sent off for research at Cornell and the University of Wisconsin. Their decisions were supposed to be based on patient consent forms, which Asch said he did not receive or review.

The issue is important because Asch has been accused by UCSD and by several patients in lawsuits of giving their eggs and embryos to researchers at these institutions without permission. Last month, UCSD officials said Asch was suspected of giving away 21 viable fertilized eggs and three frozen embryos without patient or UCSD approval to a University of Wisconsin researcher.

* Asch categorically denied pocketing university money, as UCI has charged. If anything, he said, he and the clinic gave more than its fair share to UCI.

The doctor conceded there were lessons to be learned from the UCI scandal. He said he would never against “trust anybody” to do administrative tasks in one of his clinics without close supervision. He acknowledged, in retrospect, that patient consent forms must be closely tracked by physicians.

But most of all, he said, he’s learned that UCI can’t be trusted.

“I think many things should change at UCI because of their really sloppy management of all of this,” he said. “I hope that no other doctors and biologists will be hurt particularly because of the [misconduct] of UCI.”