Their romance turns into a complete nightmare after a shocking revelation reveals they’re not just lovers, but brothers.
Ever since Victoria Hill was a child, there has been a running joke that she and her father may have been the postman’s children. After all, they couldn’t have looked more alike.
Hill brushed it off as a genetic mystery, but it wasn’t until the now 39-year-old submitted a DNA test to 23andMe that she discovered a dark family secret: She wasn’t the only one with siblings.
She actually has 23 half-siblings from the same father, a fertility doctor named Burton Caldwell who allegedly artificially inseminated Hill’s mother without her knowledge, including a high school boyfriend with whom Hill admitted to being “close.”
“I’ve slept with my half-brother,” said Hill, a clinical social worker who lives in Connecticut. CNN“I went to elementary school with other people.”
She later found out she lived across the street from a deli run by another half-brother.
“I was traumatized by this,” Hill said, “and now I look at people’s pictures and think, if he’s my brother, then anyone could be my brother.”
Hill moved to Wallingford, Connecticut, where she met her then-boyfriend, who was her best friend for “years” before they decided to date in high school and then broke up when she went off to college.
“We never ended up getting married and having kids, but he’s someone I would still seriously consider doing if life had gone in that direction,” she said. Local NBC News.
According to CNN, Hill’s case is likely one of the most extreme examples of fertility treatment fraud, which the outlet has tracked down at least 30 doctors who have offered to treat women with fertility treatments.
Janine Pearson, who now lives in Canton, Connecticut, is one of Hill’s half-siblings. After taking a DNA test in 2022, she discovered not only her connection to Hill, but also to a boy she attended summer camp with.
“It was like my whole life just suddenly stopped,” the 36-year-old previously told CNN, calling it a “violation.”
“It shouldn’t be a lawless place where doctors can do whatever they want,” she added.
She and Hill told NBC News they confronted Caldwell about their findings, but Pearson said he “fully acknowledged it.”
“I didn’t want to give the doctor the opportunity to say no,” she told CNN when asked why she drove an hour to the doctor’s home to discuss the issue in person.
“He had absolutely no remorse,” Pearson told NBC News during an interview at Caldwell’s home.
“He asked me some very tough questions about my life, my accomplishments, how many grandchildren I have and there was no apology. He said he had no thought at all about how many people like us there are and the impact it would have.”
Pearson and her mother subsequently filed a lawsuit against the doctor, and in March both she and Hill testified before lawmakers in Hartford about the importance of a new law that would prohibit doctors from knowingly artificially inseminating a patient without their consent.
“In my testimony today, I am asking for clarification on what is meant by physician, because there are cases that target not just physicians, but anyone who works in a medical practice who has access. There was a case last year, which has not yet been made public, that targeted a lab technician,” Hill said at the time.
“Any kind of fraud where someone knowingly, intentionally tampers with gametes. Again, this is another correction. Not just sperm, but gametes, eggs, embryos, sperm, because there are instances of that.”
