Streaming giant Netflix has been ordered to pay $385,000 after losing a lawsuit brought by an Indiana woman who claimed the streamer outed her in public as the daughter of disgraced fertility doctor Donald Cline.
Lori Kennard sued the streaming service in 2022 after her name appeared in a documentary about the doctor who deceptively used his own sperm to father 94 children with his fertility patients during the 1970s and 80s, according to the New York Post.
The documentary, Our Father, followed the case of Cline who for years told patients that he was using donated sperm from medical students or residents and that no single donor was used more than three times but instead he used his own sperm in every case.
Kennard had never publicly acknowledged that she was one of Cline’s offspring, and when she was contacted by RealHouse, Blumhouse Productions’ documentary company, about being a part of its documentary on Cline, she says they assured her that her name and face would not be part of the project.
She had agreed to appear in the documentary but maintains that she was told her face would be blurred out in the final cut. That, though, did not occur. Consequently, she appeared in the documentary without her consent despite those assurances and as a result, she claimed in court that she suffered “severe harm” to her reputation when her medical history became public knowledge.
She also claimed the outing caused emotional trauma, embarrassment, and distress.
A jury concluded that Kennard had kept her involvement in the Cline case a family secret and had never made her birth information public until the documentary came out.
Dr. Cline’s lies finally came to light in 2015, decades after his actions, when his progeny began finding each other with private DNA testing services such as 23andMe.
Investigators ultimately identified at least 94 children of parents who used Cline’s fertility services as having been born from Cline’s sperm.
Cline was convicted on two counts of lying to investigators in 2017, but served no jail time after receiving a suspended sentence. However, he was forced to surrender his medical license in 2018 and is barred from ever practicing medicine in Indiana. Authorities, though, found that despite the lies and deception and the moral depravity of the doctor’s actions, he did not actually break any laws concerning medicine and fertility procedures.
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