The Family Secret That Waited 50 Years to Surface | Peter J. Boni

Tiffanie: Imagine finding out that you are semi adopted, but in a process far more secretive if you are dealing with your own identity crisis. Stay tuned, this is a story you won't for. Imagine being 50 years into your life and a bombshell is dropped on you. The life you thought you had was all a lie. This week my guest knows how this feels firsthand. At the age of 50, he found out that his father was not his father. He was actually a, sperm donor.

>> Tiffanie: My name is Tiffanie and I'm your host of, True Crime Connections. And our guest today is Peter J. So Peter, I want to go ahead and thank you so much for being here.

>> Peter J.: Hi. Happy to be here.


Your life was not what you imagined at uh, the age of 50

>> Tiffanie: Your life was not what you imagined at the age of 50. that's just insane.

>> Peter J.: Yeah, well, my mom was 75 and she had open heart surgery and a post operative stroke. So all of the chains that guarded her secret just didn't work anymore. Those locks didn't work anymore. And she didn't tell me directly. She told visitors to her rehab center that I was not biologically related to my dad. He was, proven to be sterile. And after five years of marriage they found a Harvard based fertility specialist who provided a anonymous sperm donor. So my biologics and my self perception were all askew. They didn't connect.

>> Tiffanie: And to think about that happening in your 50s, like you've gone how long thinking that was your dad. What kind of perspective did that put you in?

>> Peter J.: Well, a lot of confusing emotions all at the same time. Just to go back a little bit, Tiffanie, I always gave credit to three things to the person that I had become as an adult. I had rather a disruptive childhood. Lots of moves, 11 different schools between the first and the eighth grade. My dad was sick. He didn't work for the last four years of his life. He had unipolar depression. And when he was younger he could shake that off. But as he aged, he just couldn't shake it off anymore. So back and forth from hospitals and by the time I was 16, he took his own life. Old school, Italian family, keep it quiet, don't talk about it, don't let that shine over onto us. I kind of bought into that. So I was very secretive on that and secretively feeling a little bit flawed as a result of that. And during his funeral I had my, I call it my Scarlet O'Hara moment. You know, I won't let this lick me. I'm going to get over this and be strong and independent and never needy. Never, never Weak. So that kind of ran my life, if you will.

>> Tiffanie: So.

>> Peter J.: But, but I accredited all of that with my adaptability. Certainly my college education gave me windows of opportunity that I never would have seen otherwise. By the time I was discovering this, I was a long term CEO in the technology field and then service in Vietnam as a special operations infantry field officer and team leader. I would credit to my, collaborative leadership style. Although, PTSD was never a term that was used for returning veterans. We all had issues and society kind of taught us, don't talk about it. So I had opportunities to overcome the trauma of my childhood, but I didn't talk about it. I hid it. And the same thing holds true with anything that was lingering from my Vietnam experience. I just didn't talk about it. But I credited those three things for the person that I had become, taking my DNA for granted. So how can you feel, deceived and angry and happy and sad all at the same time? It was a very confusing rush of emotions that I had experienced and what I'll call identity trauma. And at the time, my wife and I were also going through a marital crisis. So let's, let's keep on mounting it up. Right. And she encouraged me and my friendship circle encouraged me to seek some therapy on this. Well, the old school of therapy that I had seen in both the war room and in the boardroom is that you're weak and needy and maybe you're unfit for command. Well, I was a CEO and I needed, I knew I needed some help. So I very discreetly went off and found some therapy and actually cycled through a few different therapists until I found the right one for me to deal with trauma. And what he told me is, he said, son, congratulations, you hit a trifecta. What are you getting a trifecta? Well, new trauma, this identity trauma that I had just experienced, actually rekindles old trauma. Thought, long past. So any problem I might have had dealing with my dad's death resurged, and all of my anger about Vietnam resurged all at the same time. So to deal with one, I had to deal with all three.

>> Tiffanie: I, can't. Yeah, let's try that again, because you didn't deal with any of them before, so. Yeah, now you have all of them.

>> Peter J.: Yeah. And a lot of grief. I felt a lot of grief. I didn't grieve properly for my dad and his death to begin with. So, 33 years later, I was grieving for him. Go figure.

>> Tiffanie: It's just so Crazy how, like, back then it was, don't talk about it, don't talk about it, don't talk about it. And like, now, you see, today, everyone's like, please talk about it, please talk about it. And it. It's just really good, though, because it's healthy to talk about it. Like, when you push all that down for so long, it causes so many other issues.

>> Peter J.: Yeah. Well, it was certainly the crux of my marital issue as well. Divulging my anxieties or my fears to my wife from her vantage point robbed her of a Dewey, of intimacy from me. I thought I was just being strong for my family, you know?

>> Tiffanie: But you were taught.

>> Peter J.: Yeah. Conditioned.

>> Tiffanie: Yes. Yes.


Pete says half of his birth certificate was a fabrication

So did you end up talking with your mom when you found all this out to hear from her?

>> Peter J.: I did. Well, I got her out of rehab and took her home and waited until she was settled and then had a dinner with her on a Sunday and said, mom, we have to talk. And I went over this with her, and she said, oh, no, I never said that. I must have been delusional. And it took her a little while to come around to say yes. That was, in fact, the truth.

>> Tiffanie: In a sense. Like, do you wish you never found out, or do you think you're happy because it kind of brought you close, not closure, but you were able to start healing other parts of you that you probably didn't even know needed to be healed?

>> Peter J.: Well, you know, there's this thing called genealogical bewilderment. And there was a term coined by some psychologists in the 1960s when they were studying adoptees, and some of the adoptees failure to adopt, to their environment or what have you, or their sense of belonging. And I raged with this genealogical bewilderment myself. What was my genealogy? If I wasn't Northern Italian, what was I? What was my health history? Half of my health history was a fabrication. I mean, I was fearful that maybe I was carrying a mental illness gene or a depression gene. I wouldn't allow myself to ever feel bad, feel sad. That was denying that gene existed in my body. And, well, I was raised as an only child. My question did I have any siblings? Or how about did I ever date a sibling? Or worse? I didn't know. So that just drove me crazy, the absence of that. Now everyone has a right to know their genealogy. They have a right to know their health history. I was denied that right. I was a little aggravated by that. If health history was not important, why does a doctor ask you every time you go to a new, new Physician. Why do they ask you that? Well, obviously it's an important, an important piece.

>> Tiffanie: Oh, yeah. Family history.

>> Peter J.: so half, my half of my history was a fabrication. And my birth certificate according to the, the practices basically was a fraud.

>> Tiffanie: Do they have, like, a place to put like.

>> Peter J.: Well, the practice. The practice back then was, to use a different obstetrician than the fertility specialist and never tell anybody that you have used an anonymous sperm donor. So when the child is born, simply name the husband as the father to the child. So my birth certificate names my dad as my dad, My father, my biological father. But that was the practice. Then.

>> Tiffanie: Why did she go with somebody unidentified? Like you get to go through a book that was.

>> Peter J.: Well, back in 1945 when I was conceived, there was no book, there was no frozen sperm. Everything was a live fire exercise by a donor that was recruited by the doctor. There were no sperm banks at that time. So what she gave me as clues is she gave me the name of the doctor. She missed. She got that wrong. She gave me the address of the doctor. It was, right street address, but the wrong city. And I went on a hunt between the, Harvard Medical School Library of History and Boston Public Library. And I couldn't find anything. And no records were kept at that time. So the wild goose chase. Yeah, the only, the only, recourse I had really was to go on a deep dive, Tiffanie, a deep dive of research into the whole science that created me to begin with. And I looked at the science from a. Well, from a science standpoint, a sociological standpoint and a legal standpoint. And I did a deep dive of history, looking at actually from biblical references right through to today. And as I exposed what I had learned about this very large, now multibillion dollar industry that has evolved all under the radar of church and state. I expose that to a friend of mine that was. Told me that, you know, Pete. He said, pete, I used to breed Rottweilers. And I'll tell you that there are more, there's more regulatory oversight to breed puppies than there is to enable the conception of a human being. So. Well, how can that be? He said, well, with puppies you have, there's no such thing as an anonymous donor. There is a health check done, a genealogy, a genealogical test done on the puppy, on the, on the dogs. There is a sibling registry, and there's a limit, to the number of offspring per donor. Well, with human conception, there's no guarantee of known donor. There's no guarantee, no legal requirement for genealogical test. There's no legal requirement to divulge her health history or update it. There's no requirement to limit the number of offspring per donor. There are people that have over 100 siblings. How is that right? There's no sibling registry. There's plenty of cases recorded now where people have learned that their high school sweetheart was actually their half sibling and their first intimate relationship was with a half sibling. These are max. That would be horrible. There's no requirement for, donor or recipient counseling regarding the needs of the donor conceived. And there's no laws in the book that require any consequences, any legal consequences for what we'll call blatant fertility fraud. Among blatant fertility fraud could be a doctor who used his own sperm on countless numbers of patients. There's plenty of cases of that happening or a lot happened. Or a donor that goes to, for instance, a screw bank and says that he's a PhD and speaks five languages. Really, he's a convicted felon. And this schizophrenic has three dozen siblings that are offspring that have problems as a result. That's a real case, by the way. So there's no legal consequences to any of the how is that right?

>> Tiffanie: It's not.

>> Peter J.: yeah. So when I learned all this, I, I said to myself, gosh, this could be a thought provoking book. But I couldn't write the book because I couldn't finish my story. DNA technology was 12 years from being discovered or 12 years from being unveiled by 23andMe.


So there was no way for me to find this anonymous donor

So there was no way for me to find this anonymous donor.

>> Tiffanie: I did hear a case of a doctor, he used his own sperm and I think he had like a thousand kids they found. Yeah, that is insane. Like, we're actually picking out who they wanted, but instead of using theirs, he just kept using his own.

>> Peter J.: Yeah, there's cases have been part of a documentary put on by Netflix. I think it was called Our father. That was Dr. Klein in Cincinnati. And the number wasn't a thousand. It was a lot less than that. But the concept is right. I think the Guinness Book of Records had a doctor who was the spouse of a fertility doctor in the UK where she used her husband's sperm over 600 times in a small community.

>> Tiffanie: That is just crazy to me. And to think that there's nothing they could do do over that.

>> Peter J.: Like unethical? Yes. Unlawful? Well, no.

>> Tiffanie: So did you end up doing one of those, like, home tests? 23andmeancestry.com I think there's another one too.

>> Peter J.: Yeah, I went through my, my research. And, and that was in 1995. I learned this from 1996 until about 2005. I did all of my research, my deep dive of research. Then I kind of put it on the back burner. I get busy, and my wife and I were in a good place. And any lingering genealogical bewilderment, I just stayed into m. The back of my mind. Well, by then I was working on venture capital and I had a life sciences advisory board that was all excited about this new company in the end of 2007 called 23andMe. And they were excited because that was the front runner to personalized medicine in their mind. Personalized medicine, let's match, a medication with what's going on in your DNA and personalize the treatment that we have. So for $999, when I was a brand new customer of 23andMe, I was among what they call a lunatic fringe. And technology, when you're the first in, they give you the brand of the lunatic. So I was among the lunatics that spend $999 for my DNA test. And what that told me is I wasn't Northern Italian. I was English, French, and a sliver of Scandinavian. Well, I could live with that. But given that I was a new customer, there was wasn't a large database to find a, an offspring or to find a sibling or to find a relative that was paternal. So I thought, let me just wait this out and eventually somebody's going to come to the front and I'll find it. Well, nine years later, nothing. And boy, I was really frustrated. My kids started to talk to me about this other company called Ancestry.com that started advertising Black Friday special, $49. By 2017, I signed up for a $99 list price and got my Ancestry.com test. And with that I found a paternal relative. And I was able to, in a short period of time, identify some, siblings or a sibling who, helped me understand who, who my biological father was, what his health history was, etc. So with that, I ended up writing a book. Uprooted Family Trauma, Unknown Origins, and the Secretive History of Artificial Insemination. I started writing that actually in 2005. That was before I actually knew my heritage. And my title at that time was a working title. And the working title came from an article I read in Time magazine during my research in 1945. And they were discussing the legal status of a donor conceived child in 1945. And they highlighted the case in the superior court in Cook County, Illinois, where a husband was granted a divorce on the grounds of adultery because of a donor conceived child. The child was considered to be illegitimate by the courts. And the title of that article, what do you think the title was?

>> Peter J.: How about Artificial Bastards with a Question? actually I use that as a working title for my book until I finally finished the book and then my publisher ran us a group through what they call it a focus group to help me retitle the book.

>> Tiffanie: I mean, shoot, you think your trauma, Think about the kid who was the darn bastard. You know what I mean? Growing up knowing like that was your headline.

>> Peter J.: Well, the church and state really drove this whole practice of fertility underground for one, hundred years actually from now 100 years ago. The moment it came, the first case was publicized. The church jumped on it and declared it adulterous against God's law to have non vaginal conception. The state followed through with precedents, legal precedents, both in Canada and the UK and then finally in the US in 1945 that declared that a child illegitimate and adulterous. So the common vernacular on that was adultery by doctor. So the fertility practitioners weren't breaking the law, but they drove the whole practice underground in a crowd of secrecy.

>> Tiffanie: That's crazy. That's, that's still considered today, right? Did they reverse that or is there like.

>> Peter J.: No, that's not the case today. No. Society has certainly opened up quite a bit since then. But now you have frozen sperm. Frozen egg. You have marketing people running these banks of egg and sperm. They are practicing all of the merchandising of Procter and Gamble. That's how you have the 8020 rule on business. I learned about the 8020 rule. 80% of your people, your customers, like 20% of the inventory. Milk bread, poultry butter, what have you. So it's no wonder that people have over 100 siblings picked out of a catalog.

>> Tiffanie: That's crazy to think, of. Do you still keep in contact with your so called brother?

>> Peter J.: My sister, yes. I have a real nice friendship with her. And she was a home run who opened up and really helped me as opposed to push back on me and really helped me understand who her father was and so forth. I have, subsequently found other siblings as well that were donor conceived. Now I'm productive. I have maybe one of a half a dozen or so. I have relationships with a couple of them. Nice friendships actually. But now that I'm a little older, I, and I've found my genealogy. I know what my health history is. I know I have some siblings. I have nice relationships. There's one question I'll never have answered ever.


You wrote a book about being donor conceived and finding a sibling

How many siblings do I have, really? I will never know. I will never know. Can ever date one. I'll never.

>> Tiffanie: Well, I mean, I'm happy to hear you and your wife are doing well. Did you, after like therapy and everything, did that help?

>> Peter J.: Yes, it did. Yes, it did.

>> Tiffanie: Good.

>> Peter J.: That was hard work.

>> Tiffanie: It is hard work. You know, that's why a lot of people don't want to do it, because you gotta face all those things that, that you didn't want to face the first time.

>> Peter J.: And as Muhammad said once upon a time, that it's not the marathon that wears you down, it's the stone in your shoe. I had three stones in my shoe, three stones. And I had to deal with all three and tell you suicide is a wound that just never heals on top of that. So that was one of the stones. That was a big stone.

>> Tiffanie: Did he say why or like leave a note or anything? Just.

>> Peter J.: No, no, nothing. No, no, no, no. It took about 100 days for his body to show up. So he was missing for about 100 days. He disappeared from the hospital. So when I learned my, genealogy, my health history, when I found a sibling, I thought I could finally write my story. And that's when I put my book together and got a publisher and retitled it. And it's in three different parts. There's the revelation part where I talk about my whole childhood and, and this incident in 1995 when my then 75 year old mother spilled the beans. I talk about the education I got from my research on the whole industry and its practices. And then I talk about my discovery of my DNA discovery and how that happened. I go over what I call the donor conceived bill of rights and I'm really now using this book as a platform for my advocacy to have, known donor only. First of all, I'm all for science to enable wanting people to have a family with some consideration for the people like me created by the science. So known donor only require genetic testing, require health history limits to the number of offspring per donor so people don't have 100 or more. A sibling registry required so you know who the heck they are. Mandate counseling for the donors and the recipients regarding the needs of the donor conceived and get some laws on the books to provide legal consequences for blatant fertility fraud. So all of the proceeds I've earned on this book, and it's been three years now, all the proceeds I've been donating to a couple of advocacy organizations that are working the state and federal environment for laws on the book.

>> Tiffanie: I think that's great though. Those are things that are needed so this does not keep happening.

>> Peter J.: Oh, exactly. So we made some progress over the last few years. But there's there's one way to eat an elephant. You know, it's one bite at a time. And we're doing it one bite at a time, state by state by state by state.

>> Tiffanie: I've always said I wish when there's a really good law passed in one state it would go to all of them. But that would make it too easy. So.

>> Peter J.: Yeah. And try to, try to get anything done federally today. It's a little bit difficult. So yeah, it's so dysfunctional now. the US is really behind other countries are quite advanced in this donor conceived Bill of Rights. The uk, Australia, New Zealand just as examples. But the more I tried to follow the science, the more I found the science with the money. Money rules and gotta be trusting rich pay cash.

>> Tiffanie: Well that's good to know that other countries are taking a little bit more seriously.

>> Peter J.: Yeah.

>> Tiffanie: To work that way and quite a few things. But we take longer over here.

>> Peter J.: We'll get there. We'll get there. I'm confident there's 500 members of Congress. Eventually one or more of them will find out that they are donor conceived and will have a friend in court.

>> Tiffanie: Sometimes that's what it takes to move the needle, right?

>> Peter J.: Yeah. we'll see.


Well, if somebody listening is having like an identity crisis what would you tell them

>> Tiffanie: Well, if somebody listening is having like an identity crisis, what would you tell them?

>> Peter J.: I have a five part formula that I used. Not a formula until I looked back at what I did that worked. So this is my formula that I developed over the period of time to help me navigate the trauma. First of all, number one, just acknowledge it. You can't fix what you can't see. I put my head in the sand for too many years about my trauma. So acknowledge it. Number two, seek all the information you can get on it like my deep dive of research. Number three, get some help. Support groups, therapy, just. It's a hard road all by yourself. Get some help. Number four, forgive. Forgive yourself and forgive others. I had to forgive myself and forgive my mom and forgive some things that happened in my life in order to heal. And in order to heal. Number five, for me, I had to reveal. I told myself, no more secrets, secrets you just poison. And my book in part was therapy for me too because I revealed everything. Not just to my My circle, but I enlarged it. I guess I'm into part six now, which is kind of self actualization. Helping others navigate their own trauma and learning from what I have done. And let's see if I can help them.

>> Tiffanie: Absolutely. I'm going to make sure I put your link to the book in the show notes too, in case to pick that up.

>> Peter J.: Yeah, we'll have it on a website. My website, www.peterjbonniebo and I.com and that'll link you to, my book, information about my book. I'll, link it to Amazon and you can go to your local bookstore as well and get it or order it from your local bookstore.

>> Tiffanie: Awesome. I'll put both links in the show notes.

>> Peter J.: It's on Kindle or it's an ebook. Fashion. It's also an audiobook now. I've got some recognition on the book actually. It's getting a few awards. Best narrative nonfiction in the year that was published as an example. Oprah hasn't called me yet, but that's okay.

>> Tiffanie: I think she's retired. Yeah. Well, that's great. I mean that means people are really finding truth and healing in your book, which is going to make you feel good.

>> Peter J.: It does. You know, there's a, there's a spot on my website where people can contact me. So it's always gratifying to get some reader, reader contact about the book making an impact for them now as it comes to be.


27% of people have had a DNA discovery that they didn't expect

Pew Research has looked at the 50 million people in the, DNA databases today worldwide. 5, 0 million. And their estimate is that some 27% of them have had a DNA discovery that they didn't expect. Not necessarily parent and child, but they have a relative they didn't know about or their, their grandfather was not their grandfather or their great grandfather was somebody else, etc.

>> Tiffanie: I know someone that happened too.

>> Peter J.: Yeah. So my take is that these therapists are totally underprepared for the burst of identity trauma that will happen as people find their genealogy is not what they expected and they have a fallout as a result of that.

>> Tiffanie: Yeah, my friend, she found out that she had an aunt, which means her sister or her mom had a sister. And it turned out that it was somebody that she had known throughout her life, but it was like a friend. But it turned out it was not a friend, it was actually her sister. It was crazy.

>> Peter J.: Well, there's lots of reasons for being. Misattributed is a word that I'd never heard of before. Misattributed that's when your birth certificate and your DNA don't line up. I knew other words. Misnomer, misunderstood, misconceived, but never misattributed. It turns out that there's a variety of reasons for that leading is closed adoption. People were adopted, they weren't told it. So closed adoption is number one, the donor conceived. Certainly back in the old days they called it semi adopted to sort of polish off the social stigma of donor conception. They used a different term, semi adopted. Well, I can do that. You could be the product of an extramarital affair, or a one night stand, or a sexual assault reported or unreported. You could be switched at birth or you could find that aunt Martha raised you. You thought she was mom, but really cousin Mary was mom raised by another family member. That happens in families even today.

>> Peter J.: So a lot of reasons to be misattributed. Now the American Society of Reproductive Medicine is a trade organization where the fertility industry and it's American in name only because 25% of its membership was actually international. They did a study in 2010 and with that they estimated that there were about a million donor conceived people adult. And they estimated that 30 to 60,000 new donor conceived babies would be born every year from 2010. By using the midpoint of that, there's been a 50% increase in the numbers of people like me donor conceived in the last decade. So we've gone from a million to, to 1.5 million just in the last decade.

>> Tiffanie: That's crazy.

>> Peter J.: But people like me, the adults, less than 10% of them it's estimated, actually know that their donor conceived.

>> Tiffanie: yeah, I think probably a lot of them secrets just die with the family members.

>> Peter J.: Yeah. Well, I start my book off with a quote from Buddha. the three things are starting to appear. The sun, the moon, and the truth.

>> Tiffanie: I like that.

>> Peter J.: But you know, no more secrets.

>> Tiffanie: Yeah, no more. I mean secrets don't make friends. What I've always been told. I mean it looks like you're doing wonders though. So I mean, I congratulate you on your journey. You, you're making strides, you're helping others, you're impacting lives and you help saved your own. So I mean, I think that's amazing.

>> Peter J.: Yeah, thank you for that. Thank you for that.

>> Tiffanie: Absolutely.


Tiffany's goal with the book is to impact assisted reproductive technology

Is there anything else that you would like to add?

>> Peter J.: I think you cut a lot of it. The best thing you can do for an author is buy his book or spread the word about it. Tell your library about it. Invite me to speak. Invite an author to speak. I'm on a speaking circuit. My three goals for the book, I'll tell you that my three goals for the book. First of all, to impact the practice of assisted reproductive technology. Once again, I'm all for science. Just make it considering people like me influence the legislative agenda for that donor conceived Bill of Rights. And thirdly, speak to the needs and the emotional well being of all people that are misattributed for whatever the reason. I had a reaction as a result of my learning and I'm finding that my reaction is very common. The rush of contrary emotions. Happy, sad, angry, etc. So a lot of people report that no matter their reason for being donor conceived or the reason for being misdestributed, rather.

>> Tiffanie: You got to take your time with the journey. I mean you're, you're, they're always going to change. You got to go through them over and like, you know, the grieving, the angry, the, all that.

>> Peter J.: Yeah. Well today if somebody learns they are misattributed for whatever the reason, there are DNA testing, there's DNA testing available to get some, some knowledge in short order. It took me 22 long years and I was just not going to give up on that. I was just driven to find my heritage. Now you know, in, in Vietnam I used to run psyops missions. And one mission was called the Operation Wandering Soul. And we were playing upon the superstition of the enemy. Right. We called them the enemy. The North Vietnamese Buddhist philosophy that if they, they died and they didn't return to their ancestral burial ground, they would wander around forever for eternity lost. So I think to myself that I would be that wandering soul if I never learned that I, that I found I found my heritage. But if I never found it, I would be that wandering soul.

>> Tiffanie: I'm glad you didn't give up. You were meant to find it made it a bit.

>> Peter J.: Well, it was.

>> Tiffanie: Yeah.

>> Peter J.: All right, so that's my story.

>> Tiffanie: Very interesting. It, I can imagine there's so many other people who probably do share a similar story in some shape or form and it's just crazy to me that none of that was regulated like.

>> Peter J.: Yeah, well it's, it's still not regulated.

>> Peter J.: It's even different today though. You have single people, and same sex couples trying to start families and that's okay. Sociology has just changed.

>> Tiffanie: Yeah. All right, well then I just want to thank you for being here and sharing your story.

>> Peter J.: Thanks for the invitation Tiffanie, of course.