Jorge Barrera
speaker
197 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Jorge Barrera’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
He remains far away from any courtroom.
I'm Jorge Barrera. This is Bad Results, Chapter 6, Travesty.
Dr. Harvey, please. Kyle's guilty plea opens another door in our investigation. So I call Acumetrix, hoping to talk to Harvey about him. To my surprise, Harvey picks up. Hello, Dr. Harvey Tenenbaum, it's Jorge Barrera. You see, we've heard from a former Acumetrix employee who alleges he saw Kyle tossing prenatal paternity samples into the garbage.
So I put it to Harvey. Did Kyle throw out samples while working at Acumetrix? Because we know and I know that Kyle was working for you when he started this side, this business, right?
So there's questions around, you know, he told the judge, we have the transcript, we told the judge he threw away samples and I wanted to know if he was doing that when he was with you, if you're aware that he was doing that.
No. Because, no?
Listen, send it in.
Another surprise. Harvey actually answers the email I send. It's the one and only time he'll respond to any of our emailed questions. And in that email, Harvey says that Kyle's no longer an employee. He says he doesn't know anything about Kyle's U.S. case and won't comment any further.
But we still have questions for him about the finger prick tests, about whether samples were tossed, about his, Harvey's, scientific credentials. We wrote long emails detailing all the allegations we'd gathered and we sent those to both Harvey and his lawyers. They all went unanswered.
So we figure out a new plan to put this all to Harvey in person, to try something that in our business is called a jump.
I don't know. You guys never get snow. Freaking tropics down here. It's late March 2024, a couple months after Kyle's guilty plea. Rachel and I are parked with a good view of the back door to the Acumetrix lab. Harvey doesn't know we're here, so our hope is to catch him off guard a little, get him to answer our questions on the record.
We wait a bit, and then he emerges. Harvey's 91 now and walking with a bit of a stoop shuffle through the falling snow. Dr. Harvey Tenenbaum, hey. How are you? I'm Jorge Barrera. I'm a journalist with CBC. How are you, sir?
And the reason I just want a moment of your time, because we've talked to like dozens of people whose lives have been upended by your laboratory's prenatal paternity tests. Well, you know, you do...
Give me a call tomorrow. Why don't we go in and talk about this? I can't talk to you right now. Because I know that you knew these tests were flawed, but you still kept selling them.
The tests are perfect, he says. Accurate. It's the fault of the customers. It's the cross-contamination. Harvey's now just a few feet from his Mercedes. I'm walking sideways and backwards, trying not to block his path between a wooden fence and his car. Harvey told Rachel and Hidden Camera they'd stop offering the prenatal paternity test because the test was, quote, not that accurate.
Well, do you still do prenatal paternity tests? No. When did you stop doing that? Years ago. Like how? When? Because we have evidence from 2020, 2021.
Yeah? And why did you stop them? Couldn't get the reagents at the right price. I don't know if you caught that word, reagents. It's a substance used in DNA testing to trigger a chemical reaction. So he's telling me that the company didn't pull the test because they got the results wrong, but because they got too expensive to run. We haven't heard that one before.
I keep prodding for answers as Harvey gets into the driver's seat of his car. There's dozens of lives that have been upended by these tests. They believed in you. They believed what you said, that your tests were ironclad. But you have to call me tomorrow. Excuse me. Okay, so we can come in and we can sit down and talk. You call me, don't come in until you call. Okay. All right.
Harvey's windows are completely covered with snow. He backs up and smacks his vehicle into the wooden fence, flashes the wipers and drives off. Uh-huh. Calling BioGuard Acumetrix. So we take Harvey at his word and call Acumetrix the next day.
Good morning. Dr. Harvey Tenenbaum, please.
Showing 141–160 of 197 · page 8 of 10
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