Couples’ Tales Formed Basis for UC Deal

Each of the 50 lawsuits had a unique story that might have moved a juror to tears.

Some couples who alleged that their human eggs or embryos had been stolen at the famed UC Irvine fertility clinic later conceived and had children. Some adopted. Some remain childless. Others alleged various kinds of malpractice, but not egg-stealing.

So the announcement by plaintiffs’ attorneys Friday that the suits would be settled en masse for $10 million was not surprising.

It culminated complex negotiations between lawyers for the University of California and for 50 couples that began in April as the university sought to contain damage from a public relations fiasco that surfaced two years before. About two dozen lawsuits are still pending.

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The scandal, first widely publicized in May 1995, centered on three UC Irvine-affiliated doctors who allegedly profited from a scheme to steal eggs from unsuspecting women in the late 1980s through the early 1990s. Some eggs were then implanted in women who later gave birth. UC Irvine’s Center for Reproductive Health was shut down as a result. Drs. Ricardo Asch and Jose Balmaceda, the two principals in the affair, have left the country. Their colleague, Dr. Sergio Stone of Villa Park, is under arrest on federal charges of mail fraud and tax evasion. All have denied intentional wrongdoing.

Attorneys involved in dozens of the lawsuits spawned by the alleged misdeeds say that university officials were faced with a series of punishing disclosures in separate jury trials unless they settled out of court.

“We’d gotten their attention,” said Nancy Knight, whose Newport Beach law firm represented nine of the 50 couples. “They understood the magnitude of the problem. It was effective to present so many cases together.”

A full examination of the accord that apparently has settled about half of the more than 100 civil lawsuits connected with the fertility scandal remains impossible because UC attorneys are declining to confirm the deal’s size and structure. Efforts to reach UC and UC Irvine lawyers Saturday were unsuccessful.

In addition, the state Supreme Court last week imposed an order blocking access to details of settlements reached in the case. The court is scheduled to review plaintiffs’ requests that their court records remain private, overriding the public interest in disclosure.

But plaintiffs’ attorneys involved in talks with the university said the groundwork for a deal was laid last year when the first cases came up for review.

Lawrence S. Eisenberg, an Irvine attorney who handled about 20 lawsuits, said that university officials initially wanted to review each case one at a time. So in late 1996, according to Eisenberg and Knight, a series of couples came to the Santa Ana law offices of Byron Beam, an attorney for UC Irvine, to tell their tales.

“It was an interesting proceeding. They [the plaintiffs] could talk without interruptions, without objections,” Knight said. “They could simply tell their stories.”

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The first pair alleged that eggs were stolen from the wife and implanted into a woman who gave birth to twins. Another case involved a couple whose allegedly stolen eggs did not produce a birth. But that couple, Diane and Budge Porter of Nebraska, had another compelling angle to their story: He is partially paralyzed and in a wheelchair.

At some point after the end of the year, Eisenberg said, the case-by-case procedure got bogged down. Attorneys couldn’t coordinate schedules.

So Eisenberg and Melanie R. Blum, an Orange attorney for several plaintiffs, proposed in April that 50 cases be reviewed jointly. Talks were held in May, again at Beam’s office. But this time, there were no live statements to university lawyers. Instead, plaintiffs put their stories on paper.

The cases, Blum and Eisenberg said, fell into three categories:

First were those women whose eggs were allegedly stolen during a medical procedure and implanted into other women, producing live births. They got what the two attorneys described only as “the maximum individual settlements under California law.”

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It is impossible to know exactly what that means without reviewing court records. But Eisenberg suggested that the attorneys adhered to a state statute limiting malpractice damages for emotional distress to $250,000 per plaintiff. So each couple with evidence of egregious malpractice might have gotten somewhere near $500,000.

Another category involved couples who were victims of various kinds of alleged malpractice, or whose eggs were stolen and may have been used for research.

In the middle, the attorneys said, were couples whose eggs were stolen and implanted but from which a live birth did not occur.