S30 E1: The “Fake Baby” | Bad Results
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This is a CBC Podcast.
You are the father!
Remember this era? You are not the father.
You are not the father.
Yeah, the era of daytime trash TV. We're talking 1996 NBC Universal lineup.
Those Maury Povich show episodes were some of the most brutal. The wild emotion, the public shaming, the actual fistfights.
And in the middle of all the chaos, the big moment, when an envelope is opened and we hear the results of a DNA test revealing the truth. Who is the dad?
We're going to settle it right now. You are the forever.
This story we're about to tell you is also about paternity tests. But these tests, they're not done for TV ratings.
And the test result in the envelope, the one that's supposed to reveal the truth? Well, in this story, it doesn't.
I'm Jorge Barrera.
I'm Rachel Houlihan.
We're both journalists with the CBC News Investigative Unit.
And for many months, we've been investigating a story that's still unfolding today.
This is a story about people who put their faith in a laboratory that promised the definitive answer to a very important question. People who would later learn the answer was not definitive at all.
It infuriates me.
I was pissed. This is not a good thing going on here. It never crossed my mind that, oh, I'm going to get some false positives today.
And at the center of it, a small Canadian lab with an explosive secret.
Thank you for calling our award-winning Laboratory Testing and Research Centre.
a pattern of naming the wrong dads.
A pattern that messed with people's fates, triggering court cases, destroying families, and rupturing lives.
That's just some fucked up nightmare. It was like a death. What's going on here? There's something wrong. She doesn't look like the baby you told me I was going to have.
And it all went unchecked for more than a decade, from Canada to the US, from the United Kingdom to Australia. Those are the situations where like, oh no, you know it's really wrong. Can something actually be done now? Because this is huge.
Hello.
How are you doing? I've just arrived at John Brennan's condo in Atlanta, Georgia. I've flown in from Toronto to meet him and his very excited dog, Kona. Months ago, I'd reached out to John by email with my usual preamble. Hi, my name is Rachel Houlihan. I'm a journalist working on a story about a company that does paternity tests. Can we talk? These stories are really personal, so I didn't know how much John would want to share. But on the phone, to my surprise, he was an open book. He actually told me, I'm an open book. It's a relief, because this story that I'm investigating with Jorge, most of it is not open. John's tall and lean, and he has these really bright blue eyes. His place is sparsely decorated, tidy, and it has the obligatory man cave leather couch, plus a few other signs that the 31-year-old lives alone. Yeah, I noticed you have no food in your fridge. Is that because that's bachelor lifestyle?
Yeah, kind of. Honestly, there's like so many restaurants around here. I just walk. Sorry. I'm very nervous.
Now that we're meeting in person, he does seem nervous, like really nervous. He's even a bit pale, which I didn't expect given our initial conversations. But it does explain why his best friend Delano Rodriguez is here.
Yeah, many times I'd stay on the phone with him for three, four hours a day, just keeping him out of a spiral.
The two grew up together. They've been friends since the fifth grade. And Delano was there when a prenatal paternity test turned John's entire world upside down.
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