Their romance turned into a total nightmare after a shocking discovery revealed they were more than lovebirds — they were siblings.
Throughout her childhood, a running joke between Victoria Hill and her father was that she might not be his child. After all, the pair were nothing alike.
Shrugging it off as a genetic mystery, it wasn’t until Hill, now 39, submitted a DNA testing kit to 23andMe and discovered a dark family secret: her brother was not the only sibling she had.
She actually shares 23 half-siblings from the same father — a fertility doctor named Burton Caldwell who allegedly inseminated Hill’s mother without her consent — including her high school boyfriend, whom she admitted she was “intimate” with.
“I have slept with my half-sibling,” Hill, a clinical social worker who lives in Connecticut, told CNN. “I went to elementary school with another.”
She later learned she lived across the street from a deli owned by more half-siblings.
“I was traumatized by this,” Hill said. “Now I’m looking at pictures of people thinking, well, if he could be my sibling, anybody could be my sibling.”
Hill moved to Wallingford, Connecticut, and met her then-boyfriend, who had been her best friend “for years” before they decided to date in high school. They subsequently split when they headed to college.
“We never ended up marrying and having children, but he is someone who, even to this day, I very much would have considered that, had life taken us in that direction,” she told her local NBC News outlet.
According to CNN, Hill’s case is likely one of the most extreme instances of fertility fraud, which has been committed by at least 30 physicians that the outlet could confirm.
Janine Pierson, who now lives in Canton, Connecticut, is also one of Hill’s half-siblings. After taking a DNA test in 2022, not only did she discover her connection to Hill but also to a boy she attended summer camp with.
“It was like my entire life just came to this screeching halt,” the 36-year-old previously told CNN, calling it “a violation.”
“It shouldn’t just be, you know, the Wild West where these doctors can just do whatever it is that they want,” she added.
Both she and Hill told NBC News they confronted Caldwell about their discoveries, and he, according to Pierson, “completely admitted it.”
She drove an hour to the doctor’s house to address the issue in-person, she told CNN, because she “didn’t want to give him the opportunity to say no.”
“He had no remorse whatsoever,” Pierson told NBC News of her sit-down with Caldwell at his home.
“Asked me very pointed questions about my life and my achievements and how many grandchildren he had, but offered no kind of apology whatsoever. He said he really didn’t think about how many of us there would be or what that impact would be like.”
Pierson and her mother have since filed a lawsuit against the doctor and in March, both Pierson and Hill testified to lawmakers in Hartford about the importance of a new law that would bar doctors from knowingly inseminating patients with their sperm without consent.
“In my testimony today, I’m asking for them to expand on the word physician, because there’s other cases where it’s not just physicians, it’s anybody that works in a clinic that has access. There was a case just last year that hasn’t come out yet where it was a lab tech,” Hill said at the time.
“Any sort of fraud where someone knowingly and intentionally is messing with like the gametes. And again, that’s another correction, not just sperm, but gametes, eggs, embryos, and sperm because we have cases of that as well.”
