Why did a mysterious couple collect babies in a Los Angeles mansion? A five-part podcast series from In the Dark investigates. Listen to the trailer A woman who acts as a surrogate, carrying a child for someone else, is said to be going on a “journey.”
Kayla Elliott started her surrogacy journey at the age of twenty-six. She gave birth to a baby girl for a wealthy couple living in a mansion in L.A. County. The couple told her that they already had one child, who desperately wanted a sibling.
But nothing about the situation was as it appeared. Kayla soon learned that the couple already had twenty other children, most of them under the age of three, who had also been carried by surrogates. After one of the children was taken to an emergency room with head injuries, the police got involved, and then the F.B.I. As the scandal unfolded, the surrogates for the couple began to find one another. Who was this mysterious couple, and why had they collected so many children? “The Journey,” a five-part audio series coming September 15th, unravels what was going on inside the couple’s mansion and exposes a scheme that threatens the surrogacy industry.
New Yorker subscribers get early, ad-free access to all five episodes. More on this Story
A wealthy couple obtained dozens of children through surrogates. Did they want a family, or something else?
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Did the U.K.’s most famous family massacre end in a wrongful conviction?
A six-part podcast series from In the Dark investigates. The New Yorker investigative podcast examines the killings of twenty-four civilians in Haditha, Iraq, and asks why no one was held accountable for the crime. A four-part podcast follows a powerful sheikh and the women who have tried to escape his control. Credits
Host and Lead Reporter Ava Kofman Senior Producer Natalie Jablonski Producer Rehman Tungekar Managing Producer Samara Freemark Editor Alison MacAdam Additional Editing Madeleine Baran, Willing Davidson Theme Music Alex Weston Audio Engineer Corey Schreppel Illustration Vartika Sharma Art Directors Aviva Michaelov, Ben Kothe Fact Checking Yinuo Shi, Iman Husain Additional Reporting and Translation Zimo Li, Yinuo Shi Summer Research Assistant Ethan Kan Legal Review Fabio Bertoni, Ben Murray Managing Editor Julia Rothchild
