In Netflix’s true-crime documentary “Our Father,” a girl named Jacoba Ballard discovers sooner or later that her household historical past is not what she thought it was. After working an ancestry take a look at, she learns that she has a number of half-siblings. Understanding that her mother and father had used an infertility physician to conceive, she started working making an attempt to uncover how she was associated to so many individuals. After doing a whole lot of digging, Ballard realized that her mom’s infertility physician, Don Cline, inseminated her mom together with his personal sperm with out her information — which meant her half-siblings had been additionally seemingly his organic kids.
Ballard pursued authorized motion towards Cline when it turned clear to her and her siblings she’d contacted that none of their moms knew the physician had apparently used his personal specimen for insemination. Nonetheless, she continued to run into roadblocks that prevented Cline from experiencing any repercussions. As she continued to pursue the matter, she realized of increasingly more half-siblings — all seemingly organic kids of Cline’s.
Within the Netflix documentary, Ballard and her siblings reveal that Cline mentioned there was no approach there have been various siblings. However his story modified: there could not be greater than 10,15, or 18, he mentioned. Because the movie attracts to an in depth, viewers are launched to sibling #61: a twin born to one in every of Cline’s associates. Within the last moments of the documentary, it is revealed that as of manufacturing on “Our Father,” Cline is understood to have fathered no less than 94 kids from his insemination practices — and that that quantity is almost certainly not last.
Whereas Ballard and her half-siblings demanded punishment for Cline for inseminating their moms with out telling them that it was his personal specimen, he was solely ever charged with two felony counts of obstruction of justice for mendacity to investigators, based on native information station Fox 59. He was positioned on probation and given a $500 tremendous, however regardless of the siblings’ needs, no fees of rape or battery had been ever introduced.
