This doctor drama is sick.
New Yorker Morgan Hellquist “screamed and sobbed” and nearly crashed her car after learning her gynecologist, who once fitted her for an IUD and had given her breast and pelvic examinations for years, was actually her biological father — and he knew it.
“He knew the whole time who he was and I didn’t,” a weeping Hellquist, 36, said of Dr. Morris Wortman while sharing her story on “Good Morning America” on Friday. “He took away that choice for me.”
And she’s suing Wortman, an upstate OB/GYN based in Rochester for regularly acting as her physician while allegedly knowing he was her father.
Her lawsuit, which was filed in September and seeks unspecified damages, also charges Wortman with medical malpractice, lack of informed consent, battery, fraud, negligence and infliction of emotional distress.
“[Wortman] committed a gross, wanton, and willful fraud against [Hellquist] so outrageous in character as to violate all bounds of decency, and which involves high moral culpability, rises to a level of wanton dishonesty, and shocks the conscience,” her legal documents argue.
When The Post reached out for comment about the lawsuit, a man at the last listed number for Wortman declined to comment by hanging up abruptly.
But Hellquist claims the doctor, whom her family once revered as a “miracle worker,” underhandedly inseminated her unsuspecting mother, Jo Ann Levey, with his sperm in January 1985. And as a result of the alleged semen scam, she was born.
“My mom feels so violated,” Hellquist previously bemoaned to the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle. “She said, ‘I feel like he raped me.’ She feels like all of it is her fault.”
Levey and her husband, Gary, sought Wortman’s fertility help in the mid-1980s, shortly after a drunk driver smashed into Gary’s motorcycle, rendering him a paraplegic at age 20.
The couple, who were high school sweethearts, agreed to pay Wortman $50, three times per month, in exchange for an anonymous University of Rochester Medical Center student’s sperm.
The donor, per the lawsuit, was not to have any known physical or mental conditions that he could pass on to a child and was not to be of predominantly Italian or Jewish ancestry so that the child would blend in with Jo Ann and Gary.
And Hellquist — who, at age 8, learned that she was conceived through the help of a sperm donor due to Gary’s condition — grew up praising Wortman for helping her parents start their family.
She respected him so much that, in 2012, after welcoming her own two children, she left her own gynecologist and became Wortman’s patient for the next decade.
While under his medical care, Hellquist claims Wortman would burden her with tales of his personal thoughts and experiences, oddly complimenting her with comments like, “You’re a good kid. Such a good kid,” and that he once called her a “Jewish American princess,” per her suit.
Official papers even allege that once, during a doctor’s visit, Wortman asked his current wife to join them in the examination room so that she could “get a close look at [Hellquist] to see [Hellquist’s] physical resemblance to Defendant Wortman because [she] and Defendant Wortman both knew Defendant Wortman was [Hellquist’s] biological father.”
But in 2016, following Gary’s death, Hellquist allegedly took an Ancestry DNA test and discovered that she was Ashkenazi Jewish — like Wortman, who is “100% Ashkenazi Jewish” per her suit. Ashkenazi descendants, according to the legal paperwork, carry a higher risk of certain medical conditions such as cancer.
The suit, too, alleges that Wortman, his mother and a brother have been treated for mental illness.
During her DNA research, Hellquist also found a half-sibling, David Berry, 37, on the site.
And, after meeting in person, the pair were shocked to learn that they shared a swarm of half-siblings.
“Then there was five of us. And we were all the same age,” Hellquist explained to “GMA.” “And six, and then seven. And it started to feel like, well, if there’s seven there might be 20. And if there’s 20, there might be 100.
“And I started to feel terrified,” she said.
One of Wortman’s three children from his several marriages — a daughter whom he raised — agreed to take a DNA test. And the results confirmed that she, Hellquist, Berry and the others all shared the same father.
Berry, whose mother Karen claims she never gave Wortman permission to use his own sperm to inseminate her in the ’80s, says he “wrestles” with the tawdry truth of his existence.
“I am the product of something that should have never happened with an unconscionable violation of ethics, at a minimum,” said Berry, who grew up believing he was Italian-Irish, on “GMA.”
“[Wortman] is something I can’t escape, because his DNA’s in me,” he continued. “His DNA’s in my son. I wrestle with that. The first time I held my son, that man was in the room with me.”
The emotional trauma notwithstanding, neither Berry, Hellquist nor their moms and half-siblings are able to take legal action against Wortman for insemination misuse because the act does not rise to the standard of a sexual assault in the state of New York.
In fact, only seven states — California, Utah, Colorado, Texas, Arkansas, Indiana and Florida — recognize fertility fraud as a legally actionable offense; however, new laws to that effect are currently pending in New York.
Hellquist is the only one of her siblings who is able to sue Wortman for acting as her doctor.
“I do not have a fertility fraud case,” she tearfully confirmed Friday. “I have a case because he touched me without my consent.”
However, despite the pangs about their paternity, she regards her newfound family members as the silver lining in this existentially fraught storm that has literally upended her identity on a biological level.
“David and my siblings are … it’s not even bittersweet. It’s that they’re the shining glue that holds me together during all of this,” Hellquist said.
