In September 2024, a senior employee at Viaguard Accu-Metrics is sentenced for running an unrelated $6 million hair-testing scam. Will this development prompt the police to investigate his former employer as well? Will it finally push Tenenbaum to comment on the record? And what options remain for John, Corale and the other customers living with the long term impact of their bad results? A legal note: Over the course of this podcast, a number of allegations are made against Viaguard Accu-Metrics and its employees. When asked, company owner Harvey Tenenbaum said he stands by the test, and that any errors were caused by customers during sample collection.
Chapter 1: What happened during Kyle Suey's sentencing?
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.
When was the last time it even snowed and it's got to snow today? Yeah.
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.
And now we just wait.
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?
I'm all right, thank you.
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...
Thousands of tests, and half the errors are the collection problem.
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Chapter 2: What was Kyle Suey's role at Acumetrix?
This is news to us. We know Corral called the Toronto Police a couple of times to file a complaint, but they told her there was nothing they could do and she should try going to the North Bay Police. She was told by the North Bay cops to maybe try the Ontario Provincial Police. Codal got nowhere. Rachel and I called as well. All dead ends.
But now Kyle's lawyer is saying there might be an investigation. So armed with this new information, we reach out to the Toronto Police again. And they give us an official statement. There's nothing about an Accumetrix investigation in their system. What started out as a promising lead goes cold. The authorities don't seem to be that interested in Accumetrix.
I think this year has to be the year we need to stop them.
Taking legal action against Acumetrix comes up a lot amongst the members of Coral's Facebook group.
I agree. I'm actually going to call my lawyer right after this. Okay, I'm going to mess with mine.
So in the beginning, I was in touch with a few attorneys and originally they had said that in order for us to pursue this on such a large scale, the more of us we get together, the better it is.
But here's a bitter pill. Because the direct-to-consumer prenatal paternity tests Acumetrix sold aren't regulated in Canada, there really aren't many ways to seek accountability. Plus, there's generally a two-year statute of limitation on personal injury cases. From the moment someone realizes the prenatal paternity test named the wrong dad, the legal clock starts ticking to file a claim.
But those two years can pass in a blink in the midst of emotional turmoil. The California mother, Sarah Domenico, she managed to sue Acumetrix, but only because she filed her claim exactly two years, to the day, after her daughter's birth. This is why Codal and her Facebook group reached out to us in the first place. Right now, our investigation is the only way for them to get answers.
For the vast majority of them, including Codal, it's likely too late to sue. It's been four years since Kodal sent her first DNA test samples to Acumetrix. Four years since that first gender reveal party. Kodal was just a teenager then, waiting on prenatal paternity test results from Acumetrix. Today, things are different in Kodal's life.
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