Asch ‘Saddened’ by Former Aide’s Accusations

Ricardo H. Asch, the doctor at the center of UC Irvine’s fertility clinic scandal, was “surprised” and “deeply saddened” by his former chief biologist’s assertion last week that she copied confidential records as insurance against any attempt by the physician to sabotage her career, Asch’s attorney said Saturday.

“He never would have tried to blackball Teri [Ord]. He can’t believe she even felt that way,” said Josefina Walker, who represented Asch’s interests in San Antonio.

Ord’s remarks came during a four-day deposition conducted by attorneys representing plaintiffs in 40 lawsuits against UCI stemming from the scandal in which three doctors are accused of taking scores of eggs and embryos of women without their consent and implanting them in others. Some of the women who received eggs gave birth to children whose true biological parents are unknown, attorneys say.

Asch, who read about Ord’s remarks in newspapers in Mexico City, where he now lives, particularly disliked references to Ord needing protection in case he tried to “blackball” her in the future.

“He’s sad she would even express fear about such a thing,” Walker said. “Wouldn’t he look stupid to his colleagues, calling them and saying, ‘She’s terrible. She does a really bad job,’ when he always thought so highly of her?”

Asch and his two partners, Jose P. Balmaceda and Sergio Stone, are the subject of seven separate investigations. UCI has accused them of insurance fraud, financial wrongdoing and research misconduct.

The doctors have denied any deliberate wrongdoing. Asch and Balmaceda have left the country and are working at clinics in Latin America.

In the deposition that began Wednesday, Ord, 39, testified that she suspected Asch of stealing eggs and embryos as far back as 1991 but never approached him, even to the point of telling him that colleagues were spreading misconduct “rumors” about his activities. She remained his employee for another three years.

But as the deposition wound to a close, Marshall Silberberg, Ord’s attorney, said her concerns about not confronting her boss, and what he might do with her future should she have done so, were alarmingly real.

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“Believe me, Asch had enough clout in infertility circles worldwide to really hurt Teri and her husband,” a fertility specialist and former research partner of Asch’s, Silberberg said.

“She copied the documents so she could go to him, if need be, and say, ‘Don’t do this to me. It’s not right. It’s not fair,’ ” Silberberg added. “It was just a little club she could hold over his head so he wouldn’t go out and do something vindictive.”

Ord said Saturday that at the time she copied the documents, shortly before leaving the clinic in September 1994, “I didn’t think he was going to blackball me. I just did it in case. I didn’t want to take the chance. I knew we wouldn’t be leaving under good terms--I wouldn’t be leaving under good terms.”

Asch met Ord in the 1970s at a clinic here, then persuaded her to come to Orange County in 1986 to manage the lab at his own new clinic in Garden Grove. He later moved his fertility operations to Irvine, under the auspices of UCI, where it developed an international reputation.

After leaving the clinic, Ord returned to San Antonio, where her husband, Dr. Pasquale Patrizio, conducts a private fertility practice. The deposition was held here rather than in Orange County so Ord could be close to the couple’s 7-month-old twins.

The name of Ord’s husband came up in testimony Saturday, when attorney Lawrence Eisenberg, who represents several plaintiffs in the case, asked her if she had been trying to protect her husband’s career as well as her own in not reporting what she knew. He asked if the same motive was at work in copying the patient files that documented eggs being taken from donors without their consent.

But Ord declined to answer questions about her husband.

At the time in question, the Italian-born Patrizio, who was new to the United States, was completing a fellowship at UCI, where he remained until mid-1995, even after his wife had left. Attorneys said Saturday that Ord’s sister also worked at UCI after Ord left.

“By copying those patient files, she was trying to protect three people from Asch,” said Orange attorney Melanie Blum, who represents 17 plaintiffs among the 40 lawsuits filed against Asch and UCI. “Herself, her husband and her sister. All their careers were at stake.”

Plaintiffs’ attorney Walter Koontz compared the copying of confidential patient files to a line from the movie “The Firm,” in which actor Tom Cruise describes similar documents as “a ship out at sea that will never reach its port, as long as I’m alive.”

“In the same way,” Blum said, “her documents would never reach port--unless something happened to her . . . which, of course, it did.”

But Walker said Asch believes now that the scandal could have been prevented had Ord approached him “rather than remaining silent.”

“Absolutely,” she said. “If Teri or anybody else had gone to him, he would have gotten to the bottom of it. He wishes she had come to him.”

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However, university auditors and underlings of Asch began approaching him as far back as 1992, and each time he denied the allegations, according to plaintiffs’ lawyers.

As one of Asch’s attorneys, Walker said she was concerned that Ord’s comments about blackballing were damaging not to Asch, but to Ord.

“Why would they be damaging to him?” she said. “He never threatened her for any reason. She even said in her testimony that she felt kind of silly about copying the documents, like she was a character in a movie. The truth is, she had nothing to fear.”