The Donald Cline Case — Indiana Fertility Fraud Doctor

The Case

The Donald Cline case is an American fertility-fraud scandal from Indianapolis, Indiana, in which former fertility doctor Donald Lee Cline secretly used his own sperm to impregnate patients who believed they were receiving anonymous donor sperm or their husbands' samples. The fraud, carried out over years at Cline's private clinic, was eventually exposed by donor-conceived adults using consumer DNA testing, and Cline ultimately pleaded guilty to two felony counts of obstruction of justice in Marion Superior Court.

The Crime

During his career as a fertility specialist in Indianapolis, Cline routinely told patients that donor sperm came from anonymous medical students or matched-profile donors. Instead, according to investigators and court records, he replaced the intended samples with his own sperm, resulting in pregnancies he never disclosed to the women involved. The practice was not a one-time act; reporting and academic analysis describe a pattern that produced at least 94 biological children fathered by Cline through his patients.

At the time, Indiana — like most U.S. states — had no specific criminal statute against fertility fraud. That legal gap is one reason prosecutors ultimately built their case around Cline's lies to investigators rather than the inseminations themselves.

The Victims

The victims fall into two overlapping groups: the women who came to Cline seeking fertility treatment and the children conceived through his deception. Many of those children grew up believing their biological father was an anonymous donor; some believed they were the genetic child of their mother's husband.

One of the most prominent victims is Jacoba Ballard, a donor-conceived woman whose curiosity about her origins led her to commercial DNA testing. Her discovery of multiple half-siblings — and the realization that they all traced back to Cline — became the catalyst for the criminal investigation and is the central narrative of the Netflix documentary Our Father. Public reporting does not provide a single verified list of all affected mothers and children, and many have chosen to remain private.

Investigation

The investigation began not with police but with families. As more donor-conceived adults uploaded their DNA to genealogy databases, the cluster of half-siblings around Cline grew impossible to ignore. Ballard and other siblings compiled evidence and brought it to Indiana authorities.

When investigators confronted Cline, he denied using his own sperm. DNA evidence, however, directly contradicted those denials, showing he was the biological father of numerous children conceived at his clinic. Because Indiana law at the time did not criminalize the underlying conduct, Marion County prosecutors charged him in September 2016 with two Level 6 felony counts of obstruction of justice for lying to investigators during the inquiry. Cline was about 78 years old when charged.

Trial and Verdict

The case was resolved without a trial. In Marion Superior Court, Cline pleaded guilty to both obstruction-of-justice counts. He received a one-year suspended sentence and a $500 fine — an outcome that many victims publicly described as deeply inadequate given the scope of the deception.

The lenient sentence reflected the narrow charges available rather than the gravity of the underlying conduct. The case became a frequent reference point in academic and legislative discussions of fertility fraud, including in medical ethics literature examining the need for specific statutes covering reproductive deception. In the years that followed, Indiana and several other U.S. states moved to enact fertility-fraud laws explicitly addressing this kind of misconduct.

Today

The criminal case against Cline is closed, but its civil and cultural aftermath continues. Cline surrendered his medical license, and additional half-siblings have continued to surface as more people take consumer DNA tests. The 2022 Netflix documentary 'Our Father' dramatically broadened public awareness of the case and of fertility fraud as a category of harm.

The documentary also produced its own legal aftermath: an Indiana court reported that a child of the Zionsville fertility doctor won a federal invasion-of-privacy case against Netflix over the use of a victim's name in the film. For the donor-conceived siblings, the work of identifying one another and processing what Cline did is ongoing — a private investigation that, in many ways, did not end with his guilty plea.