“An Unprecedented Case of Child Abuse”

After that first arrest, Silvia and Guojun kept at it. Even while under scrutiny from police and the child-welfare system, the couple went on to have six more babies through surrogates. They launched custody battles in Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Georgia, in an attempt to bring those infants to California. And, when some of the surrogates resisted that idea, the parents sued them for breach of contract and demanded a million dollars in damages. All the while, Silvia and Guojun maintained that their arrest was simply a misunderstanding, and that their vast family would soon be reunited.

Earlier this year, I published an investigation into the couple for the magazine; last month, In the Dark released a podcast series in which we expanded on that reporting. A source with knowledge of the case told me that The New Yorker’s findings—and the public scrutiny that followed—played a role in the county’s decision to press charges. According to court records, investigators observed thousands of acts of alleged abuse in the home footage, and the extent of the violence “cannot be fully conveyed through written description alone.” If convicted as charged, both parents face over a decade in prison.

News of the arrest spread quickly. Kayla Elliott, a surrogate for the couple who’d first exposed their scheme on TikTok, immediately texted a group chat composed of some of the couple’s other surrogates. “Everyone was, like, ‘What the hell?’ ” she told me. Elliott watched a live stream of the press conference from her home, in Corpus Christi, Texas; her husband watched from work. “We talked about it so many times, like, ‘What’s taking so long?’ ” she said. “ You have to try to be patient and trust the process, but it was difficult when the lives of these kids are on the line.”

That afternoon, I drove to a courthouse in Pasadena, where the couple was being arraigned. Silvia entered the courtroom wearing an oversized white T-shirt and black pants. Her right eye was puffy and red, but she otherwise looked the same as when I’d seen her in the spring. Guojun, though, was barely recognizable. The last time I’d tried to interview him, he had been energetically strolling around a parking lot with a full head of black hair. Now he was in a wheelchair, completely bald. According to his lawyer, Guojun had a rare form of leukemia and was recovering from a bone-marrow transplant. A medical port stuck out from his chest, its catheters dangling.

Both Silvia and Guojun pleaded not guilty. The judge then turned his attention to the question of bail. MacKenzie Teymouri, a deputy district attorney, was requesting that it be set at a hundred million dollars for each defendant. It was an extraordinary sum, she acknowledged, but the couple had extraordinary resources.

I’d known that Guojun was wealthy; he and Silvia ran a real-estate investment firm, routinely purchasing properties in cash, and it had likely cost them more than two million dollars to have so many children. But their actual finances were fuzzy. Now Teymouri was telling the court that the couple’s assets exceeded a hundred million dollars. Sheriff’s deputies and the F.B.I. were still searching the mansion, she said, but already they’d discovered antique sculptures, along with reserves of expensive alcohol. These included crates and crates of Moutai, a pungent Chinese liquor that Guojun’s former employees told me he liked to drink straight from the bottle. According to a law-enforcement source, the F.B.I. is looking into whether Guojun engaged in money laundering. (An F.B.I spokesperson confirmed that agents had searched the house, but declined to comment further; one of Guojun’s lawyers denied his client’s involvement in illicit financial transactions.)

At the arraignment, Guojun’s criminal-defense attorney, Mitchell Krems, protested that a nine-figure bail was “absurd.” He said that Guojun could die at any moment, and asked for five million dollars instead. After some back and forth, the judge decided on twenty million dollars for each defendant, with the additional conditions that the couple wear electronic monitoring devices, leave home only for court or medical emergencies, and surrender all their passports. (Authorities had found several hidden in a safe, including a Mexican one in which Guojun’s last name was given as “Xuan Lozano.”) The judge also granted Teymouri’s request for a protective order that would forbid the parents, who were both charged with multiple counts of dissuading witnesses, from interacting with the children. According to court records, cameras captured the couple coaching some of their kids to deny that they had been hit.

Outside the courthouse, Krems held an impromptu press conference. He blamed any abuse on the couple’s nannies and denounced the charges as biased. “We wouldn’t be in front of this court,” he said, “if my client was white and was Elon Musk.” Silvia and Guojun, he went on, were being unfairly targeted because they were Chinese immigrants from “a Communist country,” trying to “exercise their liberties to have as many children as they want.”

Surrogacy is banned in China and most of western Europe. Yet in the U.S., where there are thousands of surrogacies each year, no federal regulations govern the industry. While some agencies, clinics, and attorneys ask intended parents to undergo background checks, screenings aren’t mandatory. In fact, no state laws require parents to disclose the number of children they have, or, for that matter, the number of surrogates they’ve hired.

In recent weeks, fertility experts have claimed that Silvia and Guojun would have been unable to carry out their plans had they worked with industry professionals. This is not quite true. I discovered that, in addition to the ersatz firm they operated out of their house, the couple made occasional use of independent agencies. They also enlisted the services of blue-chip fertility clinics and pricey fertility lawyers.

One reason there are so few rules around surrogacy is that the practice is viewed primarily as a fertility treatment, and such treatments tend to be tailored to the parents’ desires. The laws regulating adoption, by contrast, are designed around protecting a child who has already been conceived. In the wake of the Arcadia case, several efforts have emerged to redress this asymmetry. In May, a group of fertility lawyers launched SurroStudy, a screening service that employs licensed social workers who can perform home studies and background checks on all of the parties in a surrogacy arrangement, including the intended parents. “None of us wants to be caught up in a scandal because we find out, ‘Oh, God, it’s their twenty-fifth kid,’ ” Rich Geisler, a fertility lawyer and the co-founder of SurroStudy, told me.

Around the same time, a group of surrogates, not connected to Silvia and Guojun, launched an advocacy organization called the National Surrogate Alliance. Kayde Mason, a two-time surrogate, told me that she’d created the group after noticing there were professional organizations representing the interests of fertility doctors, lawyers, and agency owners, but none for the women putting their bodies on the line. “Who were the surrogates in your story supposed to reach out to?” Mason asked me. “There should’ve been someone ready to step in and provide support and there wasn’t. There has to be somewhere for surrogates to go that’s bigger than just the agency they signed up with.”

The women who had carried for Silvia and Guojun told me that they would have never agreed to work for the parents if they’d been informed of the scale of their family. In fact, in August, five of them sued the couple for fraud and sexual battery, among other claims. Jamie Majerus, their lawyer, told me that she hadn’t been able to find any precedent for the complaint’s unusual legal argument about reproductive exploitation. “You can’t have consent when you sign a contract based on misrepresentations,” Majerus said. “Each plaintiff in this case surrendered her body to the couple’s enterprise, and she did so only because they deceived her into believing she was helping a single loving family conceive this one child.”

Last Friday, Silvia and Guojun again appeared in court, where their lawyers argued that both defendants should be released on their own recognizance—that is, without posting bail. Mitchell Krems said that Guojun’s grave medical issues—which included a “hole in his chest,” mucus coming out of the back of his head, and diabetes—were not being adequately addressed in jail. Guojun had shuffled out of the house the morning of his arrest (bragging, according to one law-enforcement source, about his unproven connections to President Donald Trump), but Krems said that his client was now unable to walk. He added that Guojun would have difficulty accessing his bank accounts because he didn’t remember his passwords.

Matt Koohanim, Silvia’s defense attorney, took a more puzzling tack. He contended that Silvia was merely Guojun’s assistant and had no legal claim to the children. “This is more of an employer-employee arrangement,” he said. It was true the couple had never married—but Silvia had described herself as Guojun’s partner and the children’s legal mother on the couple’s surrogacy contracts, and throughout their child-welfare proceedings. Koohanim knew this firsthand, since, for the past year, he has been representing Silvia in her effort to regain shared custody of the couple’s twenty-plus children.

Koohanim went on to say that Silvia never interacted with the surrogates, despite hundreds of exchanges, including voice memos, texts, and recorded phone calls, that show she was their direct point of contact. As for the alleged abuse, Koohanim wanted the court to know that the children lived in a giant house and had their own beds. “There were no cigarette-burn marks,” he said, lowering the bar. “There were no cages. There were no dog collars.”

Felony child-abuse cases tend to focus on a discrete, visible assault—what the law terms “great bodily harm.” This type of injury was not experienced by most of the children in the Arcadia case—Silvia and Guojun had even allegedly instructed their nannies not to leave marks when hitting the children—but Teymouri laid out the aggregate physical and psychological harms. She talked about how the Arcadia children didn’t go to school, didn’t get taken to playgrounds or restaurants. Instead, they were beaten “from sunup to sundown” in nearly every room of the house. The violence was so unrelenting, Teymouri said, that she’d had to mute the videos she watched because of the “constant screaming.” In one of the tapes that she described, Guojun walks into a bedroom, patrolling its rows of sleeping children with a flashlight, “like a warden.” When one of the kids sits up, he allegedly smacks the kid down. During their search of the house, Teymouri added, the authorities had found four cattle prods.

At the end of the hearing, which lasted over an hour, the judge declined to reduce the bail from twenty million dollars. Elliott was one of several surrogates who told me that, though she was relieved that the parents would remain in custody for now, she longed to know how the babies were doing. “They’re not our genetics, but we still gave birth to them, and we still carry a little part of their DNA inside of us,” she said. Maria Castellanos, a surrogate who’d had two children for the couple, told me that she celebrated both of their birthdays every year. She was hoping that their foster parents might get in touch and send her a picture. “That’s all I want,” she said. “I just want to make sure the kids are O.K.” ♦