The Journey, Episode 5: The Children

Will the children be returned to the couple’s mansion? As the judge reaches a decision, Ava examines a confidential court file and makes a startling discovery. New Yorker subscribers get early, ad-free access to “The Journey.” In Apple Podcasts, tap the link at the top of the feed to subscribe or link an existing subscription. Or visit newyorker.com/dark to subscribe and listen in the New Yorker app. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Madeleine Baran?

  Previously on The Journey.

• 0:04Speaker 01

  I say this with all my heart, guys. Like, if I could give my fertility, just a sliver of it, to every mom out there who's struggling with fertility, I would do it in a heartbeat. I mean, I would, no questions asked. Like, I...

• 0:18Speaker 02

  Police say while Sylvia Zhang and Guo Jun Chen were arrested and released, their investigation into them continues.

• 0:27Speaker 03

  What are the thoughts going through your head in terms of what's gonna happen to baby girl?

• 0:32Speaker 04

  This is a lot. It was a whole lot. I just wanted to be safe. I wanted her to be safe.

• 0:39Speaker 05

  Yeah. We spent a lot of money. We want to be the parity here.

• 0:44Speaker 06

  People see this as a surrogacy case, but they're real children, very real children that are involved. And they deserve security and stability and all of those things that normal, every normal child should have.

• 1:13Madeleine Baran?

  Throughout my months of reporting, I'd been trying to find out what had happened to the children while they'd been living inside the mansion in Arcadia. But all I'd been able to gather were scattered details. There were the rare sightings from neighbors.

• 1:28Speaker 03

  I saw two little baby like this. Like, like, two foot tall, like toddler? Yeah, toddler.

• 1:36Madeleine Baran?

  There were the occasional baby videos the surrogates had been sent.

• 1:40Speaker 01

  She was big old cheek.

• 1:41Madeleine Baran?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:43Speaker 01

  I haven't seen the pictures of her face up close. No.

• 1:50Madeleine Baran?

  I'd heard the underwhelming descriptions Sylvia had provided to the surrogates during calls.

• 1:55Speaker 05

  They are really healthy. And they are friendly. They're helping each other. They are independent. They know put the trash to the trash can.

• 2:09Madeleine Baran?

  And I'd seen the shocking images from the police affidavit showing the two-month-old baby.

• 2:15Speaker 02

  The baby cries for a few seconds until a thud or a hit is heard, and crying suddenly stops.

• 2:35Madeleine Baran?

  But there was more information, a lot of it, hidden just out of sight.

• 2:42Madeleine Baran?

  In the months since the kids were removed from their home, a social worker known as a dependency investigator had been compiling a detailed dossier on the family, a case file. It spanned hundreds and hundreds of pages. This investigator had conducted interviews with caregivers, medical staff, nannies, the few children who were old enough to speak, and Sylvia and Guo Jun themselves. He'd collected medical records, photographs, read through psychological evaluations and notes from other social workers. He'd even interviewed some of the couple's surrogates. It was all this evidence that a judge would be looking at in L.A.'s juvenile dependency court.

• 3:25Madeleine Baran?

  The proceeding was not a criminal trial, but a civil one. And at its conclusion, the judge would decide whether or not to reunify the family.

• 3:37Madeleine Baran?

  That decision would have ramifications far beyond California.

• 3:43Madeleine Baran?

  Since Sylvia and Guo Jun's arrest in May of 2025, they'd had at least six more children, also through surrogates, bringing their tally to 27.

• 3:55Madeleine Baran?

  In addition to the kids in L.A., two were in foster care in Pennsylvania. One was in Georgia, and one was still living with a surrogate who carried her in Farmville, Virginia. The fate of all these kids depended on what was in that case file. It's confidential, tightly guarded by the juvenile court. But then, one day, I had a reporting breakthrough. I got the chance to review it.

• 4:32Madeleine Baran?

  From In the Dark and The New Yorker, I'm Eva Kaufman, and this is the final installment of The Journey.

• 4:41Madeleine Baran?

  Episode 5, The Children.

• 4:53Madeleine Baran?

  I can't tell you how I was able to see the family's dependency case file. And a lot of it, I'm not gonna share here. Child welfare cases are kept secret in California to protect the privacy of kids. But that secrecy can also serve to shield the actions of adults, not just the parents, but adults within the child welfare system. And that's the part of the file I want to tell you about.

• 5:24Madeleine Baran?

  I'd always assumed the story had started around the time of the couple's arrest, after the two-month-old baby had been taken to the hospital with severe head injuries. But it turned out, long before that, long before Sylvia and Guo Jun created 27 children and all these children ended up in foster homes around the country, the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services, or DCFS, had been well aware of the family.

• 5:55Madeleine Baran?

  Reading through the file, I saw that DCFS had been getting tips about Sylvia and Guo Jun for years. Social workers had received what are known as referrals about the family on at least six separate occasions. That's six opportunities when the child welfare system could have intervened, and it repeatedly failed to do so in any meaningful way.

• 6:24Madeleine Baran?

  As far as I can tell, the first time the agency made contact with the family was in 2019, back when Guo Jun was still living in Roland Heights. Sylvia's daughter, then eight, was seen sitting alone in a parked car outside Guo Jun's house for hours, by some accounts. The daughter eventually called 911. DCFS decided there wasn't enough evidence to determine whether neglect had occurred, though Sylvia was charged with a misdemeanor, willful cruelty to a child. She completed a diversion program, and the criminal charge was dropped.

• 7:01Madeleine Baran?

  The second referral came a few years later. It had to do with a set of twins who'd been born prematurely and ended up in the NICU in October of 2022. These were the babies Olympia Belmonte had carried.

• 7:15Speaker 07

  And I remember the phone call where they call me and they're like, you know, we know that you're the surrogate, but we can't get ahold of the mom that's listed.

• 7:24Madeleine Baran?

  The summary of the referral states that Sylvia and Guo Jun only visited the newborns two or three times during their weeks-long hospitalization and didn't call to check on them.

• 7:35Speaker 03

  When you started with the bed, they left the kid at the hospital. I thought you were gonna say, like, oh, they didn't come back for two days or something, you know? Okay, well, great. Maybe they got in an auto accident, whatever. But two weeks?

• 7:44Madeleine Baran?

  This is Bob Powell. His law firm routinely sues child welfare agencies on behalf of parents and children. He's one of 10 experts I consulted to help me make sense of what I was reading. Like everyone I spoke to, Bob told me the second referral with Olympia's twins was a warning sign.

• 8:03Speaker 03

  Really, really? That's like a red flag, like, a big one. Yeah. They fly at the county fair-sized flag.

• 8:09Madeleine Baran?

  A county fair-sized flag?

• 8:10Speaker 03

  Yeah. That's a huge red flag.

• 8:14Madeleine Baran?

  But the agency deemed the second referral inconclusive. Just a month later, in December 2022, came the next referral, the third.

• 8:25Madeleine Baran?

  A public health nurse visited the Arcadia mansion, presumably to check on the premature twins. And the nurse stumbled across a medical emergency involving a completely different child, a five-month-old baby with hydrocephalus, a buildup of fluid in the brain that causes the head to swell. If hydrocephalus is left untreated in infants, the condition can be fatal. The nurse later told a social worker the child's head was so huge, you couldn't miss it, and his gaze was to the side. The nurse told Sylvia she needed to take her son to the ER immediately. Two days later, the baby underwent emergency surgery to drain the excess fluid from his head. According to the dependency file,

• 9:10Madeleine Baran?

  because of his parents' delay and seeking care, he has health issues that will last the rest of his life.

• 9:21Madeleine Baran?

  In situations like this, DCFS has the option to take a family's case before a judge. If the judge decides to proceed, that means many more eyes on the children and attorneys are appointed to advocate for them. And if necessary, the children will be placed into temporary foster care. But DCFS didn't do that here. Instead, the agency opted for a voluntary family maintenance plan, in which social workers observed Sylvia's parenting and ensured the child was being taken to medical appointments. This period of supervision ended after just eight months. Not long after, Sylvia shipped her son off to central China to live with her sister,

• 10:04Madeleine Baran?

  and she doesn't appear to have visited him since. I asked the attorney, Bob Powell, what he thought about DCFS's actions here. I was curious what you make of that decision, just given the fact pattern so far.

• 10:20Speaker 03

  That's insane. That is fucking insane. I mean, we're at insane already, I'm keep going, but I mean, we're at insane. I don't know what the next word will be. I'll have to go check my thesaurus or something.

• 10:34Madeleine Baran?

  I then told Bob that during this brief period that DCFS was supervising Sylvia and Guojun, the agency received yet another call about yet another child. Someone seemingly at a school reported that a three-year-old had dark bruises on his lower back, left arm, and leg. The child said his mom hit him, though I saw notes in the case file suggesting it had been a nanny. DCFS determined the allegation was unfounded.

• 11:03Speaker 03

  Now I gotta hear more. I mean, apparently that's four, that's four.

• 11:07Madeleine Baran?

  That's the fourth referral, yeah.

• 11:09Speaker 03

  What else have we got?

• 11:11Madeleine Baran?

  The list goes on. Referral number five is about an entirely different set of twins, born in 2023, less than a year after the set Olympia had carried. These twins were also premature and hospitalized with complications. Sylvia and Guojun again failed to visit them in the NICU and didn't attend their follow-up appointments. I read DCFS's conclusion to Bob. Disposition: referral is evaluated out, no disposition, ongoing referral investigation.

• 11:42Speaker 03

  Wow, that's the lowest of the low.

• 11:45Madeleine Baran?

  What does lowest of the low mean?

• 11:47Speaker 03

  Evaluated out. Eh, yeah, whatever. Does not rise, does not rise to the level of of child abuse is basically what it means, if you want to be more technical.

• 11:58Madeleine Baran?

  Mm-hmm, okay.

• 11:59Speaker 03

  Which it fucking does, but go ahead.

• 12:03Madeleine Baran?

  The sixth referral came not long after the fifth, this time from an Arcadia police officer. He'd ended up at the house because Guojun had called the cops on Sylvia during one of their fights. According to Guojun, Sylvia had thrown things, pushed him into a chair, and unplugged the Wi-Fi router before storming out of the house. The officer noted that the home had multiple cribs and multiple kids, and when he'd asked Guojun for their names and birthdates, Guojun had to look them up on his phone. So that's six different occasions in which DCFS made contact with a family.

• 12:47Madeleine Baran?

  Each time, a caseworker would have been required to review the family's past referrals. But despite the pattern of medical neglect and signs of potential physical abuse, the agency never took the parents to court, even as the household continued to expand, year after year. So far, Sylvia and Guojun had evaded serious scrutiny. But reading through the case file, there was one other moment where it almost seemed like someone was going to take a closer look.

• 13:31Madeleine Baran?

  This was in March 2024, around the same time as the sixth referral. A family court judge requested a home visit and psychological evaluation of the parents. This judge isn't connected to the dependency court. He was tasked with approving the orders of parentage, those documents used in surrogacies. And perhaps because of how many orders the family already had, he took this rare step of requesting a home study. The court appointed a psychologist for this job, a man named Keith Peterson. Peterson toured the Arcadia mansion and carried out his own welfare check on the children. And the report he produced was glowing.

• 14:14Madeleine Baran?

  Peterson wrote that he came away, quote, "impressed with this family," and reported no concerns about Sylvia and Guojun's ability to provide a loving and stable home for even more children. As I read the report more closely, I noticed something. The interpreter Peterson used for nearly all his conversations with teachers, nannies, Guojun, and Sylvia's sister in China was Sylvia. He conducts all of those interviews using the mother as his translator.

• 14:50Speaker 03

  There's a genius. There's a genius.

• 14:55Madeleine Baran?

  Have you ever seen that before?

• 14:58Speaker 03

  Jesus Christ, no.

• 15:00Madeleine Baran?

  Everyone I asked about this unusual methodology made the same kinds of noises. Here's Sean McMillan, another lawyer who specializes in suing child welfare agencies. That's awesome. Oh, what a guy, okay. Tell me why you're laughing. Because that's just so dumb. I mean, come on. There's a bunch of problems with that, okay? First of all, the subject of your evaluation can't be your interpreter, right? There's obvious conflicts there, obvious conflicts. Secondarily, how do you know that she's interpreting correctly for you? How do you know you're really getting the information that you should be getting?

• 15:43Madeleine Baran?

  I emailed, texted, and left voicemails for Peterson, the court-appointed psychologist, but I didn't hear back. A spokesperson for the Superior Court said that he could not comment on the specifics, but told me that court-appointed experts work independently and according to their own professional standards. As for DCFS, I sent the agency a detailed list of questions on two occasions, and both times, a spokesperson responded that while the agency understood the public's interest in the well-being of children, confidentiality laws prohibited it from commenting. Of course, I can't know what social workers and psychologists were thinking, but the experts I consulted about these referrals converged on two explanations for why the

• 16:28Madeleine Baran?

  family might have evaded scrutiny. One is just bureaucratic incompetence. DCFS was frequently described to me as understaffed and underfunded. A blistering state audit in 2018 found that social workers did not always accurately identify the threats present in children's homes. My sources also suggested there might have been another factor at play: money. There's extensive research showing that in the child welfare system, wealthy families are treated differently than poor ones. I remembered how one of the social workers had noted how Guojun and Sylvia are rich, and how several times in that home study, Keith Peterson, the court-appointed psychologist,

• 17:11Madeleine Baran?

  remarked on the spaciousness of the family's nine-bedroom home, which he said he was certain could readily accommodate future children and staff. So there were those six referrals and that home study in 2024. And then, there was the seventh referral. And this was the incident that turned out differently. The seventh referral happened in May of 2025.

• 17:55Madeleine Baran?

  It began when the two-month-old baby boy was taken to the hospital with severe head injuries. Police and social workers were sent to the Arcadia mansion. Sylvia and Guojun granted them permission to look around. Captain Collins Yodlow of the Arcadia Police Department told me the house had an institutional feel. Bedrooms were all divided up, you know, a couple cribs or a couple beds to a room. There was one large kind of...

• 18:22Speaker 03

  Of communal sleeping area where there are a lot of toddler beds, where the younger children were all put to sleep in one room.

• 18:29Madeleine Baran?

  As he and his colleagues walked through the house, they saw a large chef's kitchen with commercial-sized refrigerators, a lot of strollers, infant car seats, boxes of baby formula, and there were the classrooms.

• 18:43Speaker 03

  Picture your third-grade classroom. You know, you've got desks lined up in a row. You've got your teachers at the front of the class with, you know, a whiteboard. And in this case, there's a TV. And the children were put in chairs. And that's where some of them were when we got there that evening.

• 19:02Madeleine Baran?

  This was all pretty unusual, but Seattle said that everything generally looked OK.

• 19:07Speaker 03

  Kids were running around seemingly happy, doing kid things, playing with toys, you know, getting markers out and drawing on paper and things like that. There was nothing that made us take a step back and say, hey, we have to intervene immediately at this point.

• 19:24Madeleine Baran?

  According to the notes I saw, a social worker from DCFS conducted a visual inspection of the children that evening and agreed with the police assessment, writing, quote, "It is evident there is no neglect and abuse at this time."

• 19:41Madeleine Baran?

  The police and social workers left the home. And it seemed like this referral might turn out like all the others. Just some confidential notes shoved into a folder that no one outside the child welfare system would ever see.

• 19:58Madeleine Baran?

  Except this visit, something was different.

• 20:02Madeleine Baran?

  Remember those cameras that Guojun had all over his home? This time, the officers decided to take a look at that surveillance footage.

• 20:15Madeleine Baran?

  That afternoon in May 2025, when police visited the house, they seized hours of surveillance footage, two weeks' worth of it, from all 32 of the cameras throughout the mansion. Social workers involved in the dependency case watched some of the footage. And included in the files I reviewed are pages of their meticulous, time-stamped notes.

• 20:40Madeleine Baran?

  Among the materials they looked over were videos of the incident involving Sylvia and Guojun's two-month-old son, the one who'd been hospitalized with head injuries.

• 20:51Madeleine Baran?

  The details may be hard to hear, but I think they're important to share because Sylvia and Guojun, their lawyers and those close to them, often said that the nannies were solely to blame and that the parents had no knowledge of any wrongdoing taking place in their home. But according to notes I'd reviewed, this footage shows that Sylvia and Guojun were fully aware of what had happened to their two-month-old son.

• 21:19Madeleine Baran?

  A camera installed in Guojun's office recorded the couple as they replayed the video of the entire incident just a few hours after it happened. In the video they're watching, a nanny picks up the two-month-old boy and carries him to another part of the room, off-camera. She tells him to stop crying. Several muffled thuds are heard. The baby's cry changes, and that stops.

• 21:47Madeleine Baran?

  The nanny places the baby back into the crib in view of the camera. He now appears to be unconscious. She begins to rub his sternum in an attempt to wake him up. Watching this footage in Guojun's office, Sylvia stands up and points at the screen. She seems shocked. Later that same day, the nanny enters the office, where the camera then captures her confrontation with Sylvia and Guojun. All of them watch the incident together on a monitor. The yelling, the thuds, the whimper, the silence. Sylvia appears enraged and yells at the nanny that she could go to jail for this. The nanny eventually admits that she hit the baby twice.

• 22:33Madeleine Baran?

  Guojun corrects her that it was actually four times. He replays the footage again.

• 22:41Madeleine Baran?

  Then Sylvia gives the nanny $600 in cash and a hug. After the nanny leaves the office, Sylvia and Guojun don't discuss their son's medical care or call the police. Instead, Sylvia immediately tells Guojun that they will need to hire more nannies for all the babies who will be arriving soon.

• 23:09Madeleine Baran?

  The next night, Sylvia takes the two-month-old boy to the hospital, but later says that the wait is too long. So another day passes before the baby is seen by a doctor. It's not as though Sylvia is unaware of the severity of her son's injuries. In other videos taken from inside the house during this time, Sylvia says something is wrong. Her son isn't feeding properly. His cry is deep and low. According to notes from the police, the nanny tells Sylvia the baby is vomiting and even texts her two videos of the child shaking. He looks as if he is having a seizure. When Sylvia does finally get the baby seen by a doctor, she conceals the cause of his injuries,

• 23:52Madeleine Baran?

  telling hospital staff, police, and social workers that her son accidentally fell off the bed.

• 24:20Madeleine Baran?

  I talked to someone who'd watched a lot of this footage, a professor of neuroscience and pediatrics at Harvard Medical School named Charles Nelson.

• 24:28Speaker 03

  I'm no novice to this. I've, you know, been involved in other child protection cases, but this is the first time I had to watch it.

• 24:36Madeleine Baran?

  Charles has spent decades studying how early deprivation shapes the developing brain. And he'd been tapped as an expert witness in this case by the lawyers for LA County. They'd asked him to watch the videos and to testify during the trial about what he saw.

• 24:51Speaker 03

  The scale of this was mind-boggling. There was unspeakable abuse of a large number of kids. And then it was just the heartlessness of the whole thing, that these nannies showed not one bit of love or affection towards these kids, nor did the parents. You expect people responsible for the welfare of young children to invest in those young kids. And there's just not a shred of evidence that I saw of that.

• 25:22Madeleine Baran?

  The nanny allegedly hitting the two-month-old baby wasn't the only violent incident captured by Sylvia and Guojun's cameras. The very same day, the cameras had filmed other nannies appearing to abuse the couple's other children, hitting them and forcing them to hold a squatting pose for several minutes on end. And the parents were aware of all of this, too. Charles said he saw Guojun participating. Did you see the moment on the video where the father comes in to the classroom?

• 25:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, multiple times.

• 25:53Madeleine Baran?

  Multiple times.

• 25:54Speaker 03

  Where, you know, the father would come in and he might hit the kid. And then his job was to get the kid to pose. And then he'd leave. He was rarely in the room for more than a few minutes. But he would come in when there would be a real big blow up. And probably he heard the nanny screaming and beating this kid. Then he would come in to sort of lay down the law, basically by getting the kid to pose. He'd hit the kid sometimes, too. And then the dad would leave again.

• 26:23Madeleine Baran?

  Charles told me the trauma to these children was likely compounded by the fact that they were constantly watching each other endure the abuse.

• 26:31Speaker 03

  The other kids would be looking away. Sometimes they'd be laughing. It was odd to watch. And it made me think that they're behaving this way because they had sort of become a nerd to this whole situation, which is like really depressing.

• 26:50Speaker 03

  The only one heartwarming moment was this kid was being beaten. And he was right on the table, right in front of another kid.

• 26:59Madeleine Baran?

  And at one point during the beating, that kid reached out and grabbed his hand. And that was really touching.

• 27:13Madeleine Baran?

  Two days after police seized this footage, they arrested Sylvia and Guojun. Guojun was pulled over while driving, and police found $10,000 in cash in the trunk of his car.

• 27:28Madeleine Baran?

  The police were unable to arrest the nanny, who'd allegedly beaten the two-month-old because she'd fled.

• 27:35Madeleine Baran?

  I tried to find her at what appeared to be an old address in L.A., but couldn't reach her for comment. Sylvia and Guojun were jailed for four days. Those same four days Sylvia had mentioned to one of the surrogates on the phone.

• 27:49Speaker 05

  They put my husband and me all in the jail, four days.

• 27:53Madeleine Baran?

  But they were released without charges, and police said they were continuing their investigation.

• 28:02Madeleine Baran?

  Meanwhile, social workers from DCFS returned to the house, this time to remove all the children.

• 28:11Madeleine Baran?

  This was the moment when they were placed into foster care.

• 28:18Madeleine Baran?

  As the children arrived at their new homes, many had visible scratches, scars, bruises, and marks, some of which appeared to have been made with a ruler or stick.

• 28:30Madeleine Baran?

  And during medical exams that night and at doctor's appointments in the following weeks, the children were diagnosed with illnesses, conditions, and developmental delays, which, in some cases, might have been prevented with timely medical attention.

• 28:47Madeleine Baran?

  One toddler was missing the nails on his right thumb and left pinky. He also had to be immediately hospitalized for pneumonia. Another had a misshapen head that could no longer be corrected.

• 29:06Madeleine Baran?

  Remember how just 48 hours earlier, a social worker had determined that everything seemed fine at the home, writing, "It is evident there is no neglect and abuse at this time"? I couldn't stop thinking about how the agency had missed all of these bruises and scratches, marks that would have been clearly visible.

• 29:27Madeleine Baran?

  I asked Sean McMillan about this. He's one of the attorneys whose practice specializes in suing DCFS. And what does it mean that the social workers conducted a full visual inspection and missed everything that then other social workers and doctors at the intake centers that Friday night when the children were all removed?

• 29:47Speaker 05

  It means they're lying.

• 29:48Madeleine Baran?

  You think they must have not conducted a visual inspection two days earlier?

• 29:52Speaker 05

  Dude, dude, this happens all the time. Nobody wants to believe that social workers lie, but I'll tell you right now, they do.

• 30:00Madeleine Baran?

  I reached out to DCFS one more time to see if it wanted to respond to this specific allegation that its employees had been dishonest. I also asked the agency what it made of my growing suspicion that some of this might have been prevented if, at any of these earlier points, social workers had decided to intervene. This time, a spokesperson for the agency responded with an additional statement. She wrote that "The field of child protection is deeply complex" and that "When children are seriously injured or fatality occurs, DCFS rigorously examines its response to determine whether practices can be improved."

• 30:42Madeleine Baran?

  In the face of all this evidence, I wondered how Sylvia and Guojun would defend themselves in dependency court. So one evening during the trial, I called Mitchell Krems. He's Guojun's lawyer in the case. I asked him about the allegations the couple was facing.

• 30:58Speaker 02

  They're totally blown out of proportion. False.

• 31:02Madeleine Baran?

  All of the allegations in court?

• 31:04Speaker 02

  Blown out of proportion, yes.

• 31:06Madeleine Baran?

  And do you expect that the family will get their children back?

• 31:09Speaker 02

  I can't comment too much because it's a, you know, juvenile dependency proceedings are closed.

• 31:15Madeleine Baran?

  Yeah.

• 31:16Speaker 02

  Since, you know, the general public is aware of them.

• 31:19Madeleine Baran?

  Right.

• 31:19Speaker 02

  I will just say that, you know, these are good parents. They're doing everything to act in a protective capacity. Obviously, it's a unique situation that people are not used to seeing so many kids.

• 31:35Madeleine Baran?

  I asked about the other parts of this unique situation, that there were videos also showing the parents were aware of the abuse, that Sylvia had known her son was injured, but waited two days before getting him seen by a doctor.

• 31:50Speaker 02

  Well, that's just patently false, that they knew and didn't respond in time. You know, the mother was very diligent in taking the child to the hospital. And, you know, any sort of allegation that she failed to protect this child is just, it's disproven by the records.

• 32:08Madeleine Baran?

  But when I asked him what those records were, Mitchell Krems said he couldn't comment on the specifics because the entire case file was confidential. In terms of the affidavit that was, that is in the public record, that has the video of the classroom and the video of the nanny going off screen and children being spanked and slapped in the face.

• 32:28Speaker 02

  I'm in a very precarious situation because I can't describe, you know, the exonerating evidence to you because it's all confidential. But I will say that, you know, it's patently false that my client incited any sort of torture, not torture, but any sort of abuse of the child. He doesn't believe in abusing children. He actually believes in enriching them and giving them the best opportunity to succeed. That's part of his ideology as a successful Chinese businessman, is that he's very educationally driven.

• 33:10Madeleine Baran?

  I spoke with someone close to Guojun and Sylvia, who said something similar. Guojun really did want his kids to be successful. She admitted their parenting style was less than ideal, but in her view, that was because they didn't know any better.

• 33:26Madeleine Baran?

  As she understood it, the parents thought they were doing a really good job.

• 33:45Madeleine Baran?

  Earlier this year, I published an investigation in The New Yorker about Sylvia, Guojun, and their many surrogates. At that point, the dependency court proceedings had been going on for a few weeks, which was longer than usual. But there were so many kids, and there was so much evidence, it was yet to be decided whether or not the children would be reunified with their parents. Weeks passed, then months, and then one day this spring.

• 34:15Speaker 06

  Um, what's up? You have some news for me?

• 34:18Madeleine Baran?

  Yeah, I have an update about the case. I called our producer Natalie.

• 34:23Speaker 03

  The dependency court issued a decision on whether or not the parents are going to get to keep their kids.

• 34:31Speaker 06

  Oh, my God. Like, the decision? Like, the big thing we've been waiting for?

• 34:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 34:38Madeleine Baran?

  Nearly a year after the kids had been taken away, the court had ruled that Sylvia and Guojun would not have the opportunity to get them back. In technical terms, the judge had bypassed the possibility for family reunification services. And eventually, Sylvia and Guojun are likely to have their parental rights terminated.

• 35:02Madeleine Baran?

  Although I'd been told Sylvia and Guojun are challenging the rulings, people familiar with the child welfare system told me that appeals in these kinds of cases rarely succeed. I should note that Sylvia's older daughter, from her previous relationship, was dismissed from the case. That child, then 14 years old, had already been sent home to Sylvia on the basis that her age and closeness to her mother set her apart from the safety risks faced by her younger siblings. As for the rest of the children, they would not be returning to the Arcadia Mansion. Some would likely stay with the foster families they'd been with for the past year. Others might end up with different guardians. I was pinging you. I was blowing up your phone

• 35:47Madeleine Baran?

  because I have a big update, finally. I started calling all the surrogates, who, for nearly a year, had been anxiously waiting for news about the case.

• 35:56Speaker 05

  Oh, thank God. Thank the Lord.

• 36:00Speaker 01

  I'm relieved, you know, I'm relieved because I felt really guilty for my part in it, you know, as far as.

• 36:05Speaker 07

  I mean, it's good news. It's good to hear that.

• 36:09Madeleine Baran?

  With the relief came more complicated emotions, too. I recently caught up with Amber Appelgarth, the couple's very first surrogate. The son that she'd carried for the family was now seven.

• 36:21Speaker 05

  To that child, that family's all he knew. And in his eyes, I can only imagine, he probably thinks like, that's my mom, that's my dad. He thinks that that's probably normal, you know what I mean? And now he's, you know, put somewhere where I hope he's being treated far better. So now he's experiencing a better life. But I was relieved.

• 36:45Madeleine Baran?

  While the question of what would happen to the children seemed at last to have been decided, there was another question that still hadn't been resolved, regarding what would happen to the parents. It came up in almost all my calls with the surrogates, whenever I trekked in with them.

• 37:03Speaker 01

  Are they still pursuing the criminal charges? The Arcadia PD, have they filed? What about like the child abuse and all of that, where they found guilty and all of that?

• 37:11Speaker 05

  I want to know, is Sylvia going to go, you know, is she going to go to jail for any of this? Like, those are the things I'm like, she needs to, I mean, I'm no one, I shouldn't be judging, but I'm like, she.

• 37:23Madeleine Baran?

  Kind of needs to pay the price for all of this.

• 37:29Madeleine Baran?

  Ever since the parents' arrest on suspicion of child endangerment in May of 2025, they've been under investigation by police and by the FBI. Though, police told me that the feds no longer seemed to be looking into the parents for human trafficking, that there wasn't a "there" there. The possibility of state charges for child abuse, however, remained. Police had seized two weeks' worth of surveillance footage from the Arcadia Mansion and submitted their findings to the L.A. District Attorney's Office, twice. Both times, the DA's office asked the police to do more investigation.

• 38:08Madeleine Baran?

  In July, the nanny, Chunmei Li, was charged for allegedly hitting the two-month-old baby. But as of this writing, prosecutors have yet to file criminal charges against Sylvia or Guojun.

• 38:27Madeleine Baran?

  In the meantime, some of the surrogates were considering their own legal action. A few weeks after I published the story, I got a call from Kayla Elliott, the surrogate I'd visited in Corpus Christi, the one who'd posted the TikTok video and inadvertently become a whistleblower.

• 38:44Speaker 03

  We finally found an attorney to help us sue Sylvia and Guojun.

• 38:47Madeleine Baran?

  You did? That's huge news, Kayla. The lawsuit wasn't about getting custody. The surrogates understood that many of the kids had now been with their foster families for almost a year.

• 39:00Speaker 03

  My surrogate baby has been, you know, with her foster family since all this happened, and she doesn't know me, you know what I mean? Like, so much time has gone by. Like, yes, I carried her, but like, I don't, I mean, I highly doubt she would remember my voice or my face, you know what I mean? She has no idea who I am. So like, if I was given the opportunity to take her, obviously, I would. But like, I'm more focused, not just about like, the baby, also, so much as I am like, it sounds horrible to say, but like, getting revenge on these people, you know what I mean? Like, I want them to know that what they did was unacceptable, and even though they might be prosecuted like, under the eyes of the law, I want them to know and hear from me out of my own mouth how much pain they caused me and these women.

• 39:46Madeleine Baran?

  In August, Kayla, Stacy King, and three of the couple's other surrogates sued Sylvia and Guojun for fraud, among other claims. Shortly before the complaint was filed, I spoke to their lawyer, Jamie Majeris.

• 40:01Speaker 03

  Surrogacy, it asks a woman to place the most private and vulnerable parts of her body in the trust of another. So each plaintiff in this case surrendered her body to, what we're saying is basically the couple's enterprise.

• 40:18Madeleine Baran?

  Jamie typically represents survivors of sexual abuse, but she told me she saw parallels in the harms suffered by the surrogates. In fact, they were making an unusual legal argument, alleging sexual battery.

• 40:32Speaker 03

  You know, she, they each submitted their sexual and reproductive organs to weeks of hormonal manipulation, to repeated invasive procedures, to the insertion of, you know, instruments and catheters into her body, to implementation of the embryos in her uterus, and to this physical ordeal of pregnancy and childbirth. And she did so only because they deceived her into believing she was helping a single loving family conceive this one child. And obviously, that was a lie. The consent, it was obtained by fraud, which, that's not consent under the law.

• 41:19Madeleine Baran?

  The couple did not respond to requests for comment for the series, but previously, one of their lawyers told me that, since the surrogates had entered into their contracts voluntarily, they had no claim that they were taken advantage of. It was, he wrote, "a legal impossibility."

• 41:47Madeleine Baran?

  The surrogates wanted to know how the children they'd carried were actually doing, but they didn't have any way of finding out. From my reading of the dependency file and talking to experts, it seemed evident that some of the children would experience psychological and developmental challenges, which would last into adulthood. But I'd also seen in the file some hopeful signs. As time passed, some of the caregivers had told social workers that the children seemed to be growing more comfortable in their foster homes. One set of twins initially engaged in food hoarding, storing bites of meals in their cheeks, but now they were eating normally. A nine-month-old, put off by cuddling, quote, "as if affection was foreign," soon started

• 42:32Madeleine Baran?

  indicating that he wanted to be held and would crawl towards his caregivers to ask to be picked up. One toddler was so terrified when she was first taken to a playground that her caregiver wondered if she'd ever been to one before. Now, she loved going to the park, where she smiled, played, plucked flowers. As for the two-month-old baby, who'd allegedly been hit by the nanny, he spent weeks in the hospital before he was discharged to a foster home. According to notes in the file, he needed to be woken up every three hours to get food through a feeding tube and was prone to seizures.

• 43:12Madeleine Baran?

  But his foster parent and a medical evaluator described him as a "very resilient baby" who showed interest in the toys and people around him and wiggled his little fingers and toes. There was one kid I was still hearing updates about. That was the baby in Farmville, Virginia, the only one still living with a surrogate who'd carried her. That surrogate, Melissa Epps, had declined to be interviewed for the podcast, but I was still in touch with the child's court-appointed attorney, Brooke Teefy.

• 43:48Speaker 05

  She's just growing and just getting so big, and she's just, she's, she's in a home that has extended family members that are, that are taking care of the child, too. And it's a farm. She'll be raised with chickens and all kinds of farm animals.

• 44:05Madeleine Baran?

  Brooke visited the little girl regularly at Melissa's house, just outside of Farmville.

• 44:11Speaker 05

  One time, the child was sleeping, and Ms. Epps brought me back to see the child, and she had that motherly pride in that she was, she had had this child, she birthed this child, and she's taking care of her. And, you know, it goes to show you that, you know, biology's not everything, and that parental bond is formed so early. And she definitely has that, and this child sees her as, as mom, and it's, it's, it's good to, to see. I mean, that's the only mother she's known.

• 44:48Madeleine Baran?

  As for whether the baby will ultimately get to stay with Melissa, it's going to be a while until anything in Virginia is decided. The custody case is still playing out there. Brooke told me she was planning to save all her paperwork so that one day, when the girl was older, she could learn more about where she came from and maybe get in touch with her siblings.

• 45:18Madeleine Baran?

  See, it's a mix of these new builds?

• 45:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, it looks like newer ones, and then I saw one really teeny tiny, tiny little house, and these houses are real nice. Three-car garage, oh, man.

• 45:31Madeleine Baran?

  One afternoon earlier this year, I gave Kayla Elliott a tour of Arcadia. Kayla had recently decided to undertake another surrogacy journey. She was calling it her redemption journey.

• 45:45Speaker 03

  A journey is an understatement, for sure. It's an adventure.

• 45:52Madeleine Baran?

  Her new intended parents also lived in Texas, but they happened to have stored their embryo at a fertility clinic in L.A., so they'd flown her out from Corpus Christi for a medical screening. I'd accompanied her to her appointment, and afterward, we decided to go for a drive. There was one house in Arcadia that Kayla was particularly curious to see. We pulled up to a neo-Mediterranean-style mansion with castle-like turrets, a stone facade, and arched entryways. A white Tesla was parked on the street, just outside the gate. And this time, someone was in the car. That's her. That's Sylvia. Did you see? She's in the car right there. No. I'm driving around.

• 46:37Madeleine Baran?

  That's, that's her, that's her in the white Tesla. Oh, my God. No.

• 46:45Madeleine Baran?

  Oh, my God, it is her.

• 46:49Madeleine Baran?

  Sylvia pulled the Tesla into the driveway, beside Guojun's black Mercedes. Then she walked inside the mansion and shut the door.

• 47:00Madeleine Baran?

  Kayla thought about texting Sylvia, but she didn't think she'd get a response to the question she really wanted to ask her.

• 47:07Speaker 03

  I just want to know why, like, just, like, if anything, she owes us at the very

• 47:14Speaker 05

  That explanation, you know, like, why did you do it?

• 47:21Madeleine Baran?

  Why did they do it? One of the credos of surrogate motherhood is that the baby is a gift, a treasure, a labor of love. Kayla no longer suspected the couple was trying to sell these children. But she still couldn't make sense of why Sylvia and Guojun had seemed indifferent to the gift of life they'd been given.

• 47:43Madeleine Baran?

  After Sylvia went inside, Kayla and I sat parked on the street for a few more minutes.

• 47:49Speaker 05

  How many bedrooms is this house again? I forget. It's like a... Nine to 10. Wow. It's just so crazy because, like, can you imagine, like, if these were decent people? Like, this would be such a beautiful home to raise kids out. Like, it has so much potential, you know what I mean? To be just such a pretty place.

• 48:15Madeleine Baran?

  Looking up at the mansion, Kayla thought about the life the baby girl she carried might have had growing up there.

• 48:23Speaker 05

  Oh, my gosh, she's gonna be one next month. I was just thinking about that. Wow.

• 48:32Speaker 05

  Wow. I would die to see pictures of her now, her big old cheeks.

• 48:40Madeleine Baran?

  Kayla still has a photograph from the night of the birth on her fridge.

• 48:46Madeleine Baran?

  In it, she's cradling the baby to her chest while her boyfriend Blake bends over to take a closer look. She told me she sometimes found herself wondering if the baby's foster parents might one day reach out to her.

• 49:02Madeleine Baran?

  More than anything, she was hoping they might send her a photo. Some sign that the baby was now OK.

• 49:30Madeleine Baran?

  The journey is written and produced by me, Eva Kaufman, senior producer Natalie Jablonsky, and producer Raymond Tungakar. Samara Freemark is the managing producer for the series. It's edited by Alison McAdam. Additional editing by Willian Davidson and Madeline Barron. Theme and original music by Alex Weston. Additional music by Gary Meister.

• 49:56Madeleine Baran?

  This episode was mixed by Corey Shrupple. Our art is by Vartika Sharma. Art direction by Aviva Mikhailov and Ben Kothi. Fact checking by Inwol Shuh and Aman Hassan.

• 50:11Madeleine Baran?

  Our summer research assistant is Ethan Khan. Legal review by Fabio Bertoni and Ben Murray. Our managing editor is Julia Rothschild, with additional support from Kiara Ortiz. Thanks also to Parker Yesko.

• 50:27Madeleine Baran?

  The editor of The New Yorker is David Remnick.

• 50:31Madeleine Baran?

  If you have any comments or story tips, please send them to the team at [email protected]. And please make sure to follow In the Dark wherever you get your podcasts.