Ord Says Asch ‘Was Not a Person That You Crossed’

For three days, Teri Ord had sat in a small room on the 16th floor of a high-rise less than five blocks from the Alamo. Suddenly, late Friday, knowing there would be one more day of constant grilling, and still other chapters as yet unwritten, she began to sound like a Texan who was truly outnumbered.

“I’m tired,” she said wearily, her eyes stained with tears, as the third day of a four-day deposition into Ord’s knowledge of the UC Irvine fertility scandal drew, inexorably, to a close.

On Friday, just as they had on Wednesday and Thursday, Southern California attorneys representing plaintiffs in the 40 lawsuits against UC Irvine probed, prodded and picked at the former chief biologist for the once-prestigious Center for Reproductive Health.

Friday’s session, like the others, lasted from 9 a.m. to dusk, with the lawyers taking breaks, it seemed to Ord, only to get recharged to renew the attack.

“I guess I’m not surprised,” she said. “I suspected they would look at everything.”

“Everything,” for the most part, has examined Ord’s character: what she knew about the dozens of misappropriated eggs and embryos and when she knew it; how close was her relationship to Dr. Ricardo H. Asch, and why, if she suspected him of wrongdoing, did she not report it earlier; and then on Friday, the questions started hitting closer to home.

Attorneys were puzzled as to why Ord, 39, a woman with only a high school diploma, holds a curriculum vitae that credits her with writing or contributing to 48 scholarly, scientific articles.

Ord said that for all but three of the articles she was listed only for having aided “the team”--clinic director Asch and his partners, Drs. Jose P. Balmaceda and Sergio Stone.

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UC Irvine has accused the three doctors of taking the eggs and embryos of scores of women without consent and implanting them in others. They are the subject of seven separate investigations.

The doctors also are accused of insurance fraud, financial wrongdoing and research misconduct. Asch and Balmaceda have left the country, but all three have consistently--and vehemently--denied any deliberate malfeasance.

Asch has blamed clinic staffers for any foul-ups, and during his own deposition in Tijuana sought to portray Ord as a chief culprit.

She is named as a co-defendant in at least 11 of the 40 lawsuits.

Of the articles in question, she researched three by herself, she said. But she and her attorney, Marshall Silberberg, scoffed at the idea, which one attorney suggested, that she should have obtained approval from UC Irvine’s Institutional Review Board--which monitors the school’s scientific research--before agreeing to write the article.

“The articles I wrote dealt with sperm preparation,” Ord said in a monotone voice.

“Yeah,” Silberberg said, “but here’s these attorneys, jumping up and down, saying she didn’t get approval. She didn’t need IRB approval in the lab, did she? So why would she in writing an article? What--the little swimmers were at risk?”

And, of course, Ord was asked again Friday about her relationship with Asch.

If she had known him since the 1970s--when she met him in San Antonio--and impressed him enough to accept his offer to move from Texas to California in 1986 to run his lab, why did she not tell Asch that people were spreading misconduct rumors about him in 1991?

Didn’t she owe him that degree of loyalty?

“Well, because if things are just rumors, that’s a pretty heavy allegation to be laying on someone,” she said. “So I wouldn’t go to my boss and just say something like that. I just wouldn’t go and say something so serious to someone when there’s no proof, only rumors.

“That’s the main thing. Plus, he was not a person that you crossed. He was not a person that you [disobeyed]. It would not have been appropriate to do when you were his employee, but he wasn’t somebody you would have done that with anyway.”

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Ord said she knew of people who, for whatever reason, had fallen out of favor with Asch, “And they would be gone,” she said. “I don’t know if they lost their jobs or what, but suddenly one day, they just wouldn’t be there.”

Asch told reporters recently in Mexico that Ord and her husband, a fertility specialist and former research partner of Asch, had once asked him to be the godfather of their twins, a boy and a girl, now 7 months old.

She said adamantly, this time with a brief look of anger, “I did not ask him to be the godfather of my children. Uh, that would be incorrect.”

She conceded that Asch had been the best man at her wedding in August 1993.

She quit UC Irvine in September 1994 and moved back to Texas.

In looking back over a 14-year association with Asch, Ord said she remembers him, “irrespective of this mess right now, as, technically, a very good doctor . . . a good thinker, who helped a lot of people.”

But there also were the memories of working excruciating days at UC Irvine, such as the time she said she logged seven-day weeks for five straight months, with some of those workdays lasting 20 hours.

“I was always understaffed,” she said. “That was the big con of everything for me. I was doing too much work, too long hours. . . . But I think we had a good program irrespective of any of this during the time I worked there.”