Tag Archives: joe donor

Oh boy. Buckle up, buckaroos.

Not sure there’s all that much valuable law in this one – unless you happen to have a case with the man in question, but there’s a LOT to unpack.

https://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWFC/HCJ/2025/130.html

CA & Ors, Re (Children of Unregulated Sperm Donor) [2025] EWFC 130 (16 April 2025)

Now, you were already saying to yourself – why has Suess opened this blog post with a photo of tomato passata? And now you’re saying – well, I’ve read the title of the case and it makes EVEN LESS sense now.

Stick with me.

High Court case, the LA seeking Care and Placement Orders in relation to two children, CB and CX, and there were linked private law proceedings in relation to CA. What all three had in common was that their biological father is a Mr Robert Albon. (weird to name him, you’re thinking…).

Mr Albon is for want of a better term, a professional donator of sperm. He has fathered on his account 180 children. He opposed the making of the Care and Placement orders for CB and CX – the mother did not oppose but did not consent.

In analysing the right outcome for the children, the Court had to look at Mr Albon’s history and thus his parenting capacity. Mr Albon uses the pseudonym, Joe Donor. If you’ve just had a shudder down your back as you realise exactly why this blog post has the title it does, I’m sorry.

1. 
   Robert Albon is 54. He was born in the United States of America and was adopted with his twin brother at the age of three. His adoptive parents later conceived and gave birth to a boy themselves whom Mr Albon feels was favoured by them. The family lived around the world because of his adoptive father’s work. Mr Albon’s twin died in a motorcycle accident as a teenager. His adoptive father died a few years ago. Mr Albon has no contact with his surviving brother or his mother. He is fluent in Japanese and Chinese, speaks other languages, and has worked as a translator. He married a Japanese woman and they had two children who are now in their 20’s. During the marriage Mr Albon had an affair with a Chinese woman with whom he had two children. In or about 2013, he started acting as an unregulated sperm donor. He told the Court that he wanted to have more children whereas his wife did not. He enjoyed having brought further children into the world with the Chinese woman but not the complications that arose from having done that. Sperm donation allowed him to produce more children without complications.

Without complications…

Mr Albon seems to be quite the international jetsetter.

1. In 2017, Mr Albon was living in the US with his wife. The children of his marriage were their daughter, then aged 21, who he says had become estranged from the rest of the family by 2017, and their son, then aged 17. One day, when his wife was out of the house, Mr Albon drove to the airport and caught a flight to Argentina. He contacted his wife a few days later to tell her that he had left. He lived in Argentina for about three years. He told the Court that there were a number of reasons why he left, including that he and his then wife wanted different things in life. He said that he had chosen Argentina because he spoke Spanish, and there was a low cost of living there. He says that he sent about US$1000 per month to his wife but also revealed that the family home was repossessed and that an order for alimony payments to his wife was made against him. He complained that the order was manifestly too high due to an error made by his ex-wife when she completed the application. However, the order remains in force. They divorced in 2019 but he says that he speaks to her a few times each year. He says that he is on good terms with his ex-wife but produced no evidence to corroborate that assertion. They both remain estranged from their daughter. He met his son when he returned to the US to deal with the car he had left at the airport but now has no contact with him. He has no contact with the Chinese woman or their two children which he puts down to having lost their contact details and difficulties finding and communicating with people in China.
2. Mr Albon had carried on sperm donor services in the US before he left in 2017. One mother, from Wisconsin, pursued him for child maintenance and secured a court order. He complains that she harassed his daughter and that he applied for a restraining order against the woman to protect his daughter. He accepts that the maintenance order remains in force and that a warrant was issued for his arrest for breach of the order. The warrant remains in force. He is confident that he would be able to set aside the order if he returned to the US but he accepted that, between that order and the alimony owing to his wife, he is in debt for tens of thousands of dollars.
3. Mr Albon continued to act as an unregulated sperm donor in Argentina. Whilst there he made a trip to Australia visiting fifteen or so women for the purpose of donating sperm to them. His visit was reported upon in a news documentary programme called “60 Minutes Australia” which I have viewed as well as reading a Media Watch report, critical of aspects of the programme. He also made trips to other South American countries. He claims to have fathered multiple children in the US, South America, and Australia. At some point Mr Albon also started a sperm donor Facebook page in Africa. It is wholly unclear how many children he may have fathered there. The co-administrator of the page has reportedly used the expression “bleach Africa” which Mr Albon told this Court was a joke.
4. Mr Albon says that he left Argentina because of a change in government there, the effects of the pandemic, and because he wanted to travel to The Netherlands and Germany. He came first to the UK but was prevented from leaving for Germany or The Netherlands as planned due to the second wave of restrictions due to the Covid 19 pandemic. He arrived in September 2020 and has remained here since then. On 5 October 2020, he appeared on television on This Morning, claiming to have fathered 150 children “by personal insemination” and was interviewed by Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby. He was granted a visitor visa to the UK from 29 September 2020 to 30 March 2021 and initially lived in a hotel in Essex. His visa was extended to 3 November 2021 due to the pandemic. He then applied for permanent leave to remain.

This is not the first set of English family law proceedings Mr Albon has become involved with.

1. On or before 6 November 2020, Mr Albon was contacted by a woman, B, about his becoming a sperm donor to assist her to conceive. The circumstances of the conception and birth of their child are set out in the published judgment of HHJ Furness KC sitting in the Family Court at Cardiff, A v B and C (above), in which the child is referred to as D. I have seen other papers from that case. HHJ Furness KC found that D was conceived by artificial insemination performed on 8 November 2020. At the time, B was in a same-sex relationship with C whom she later married. D was born in July 2021.
2. HHJ Furness KC found that Mr Albon promoted his sperm donor service, both online and during his interview on This Morning, as being provided with no expectation of any paternal involvement with the child. Specifically, he had said, “Moms I help can choose no contact and I respect that.” The Judge found that B and C did not want Mr Albon to be involved in D’s life and that when Mr Albon contacted B about a fortnight after the birth asking to see D, she replied that she and C had already said to him that they did not want any contact. On 11 August 2021, there was what B and C thought would be a one-off meeting at which Mr Albon met D and photographs were taken. On 16 August 2021, Mr Albon applied for a declaration of parentage, an order granting him parental responsibility, and a CAO giving him contact with D. Later he applied to the court to change D’s name. On the day that B and C received the court papers there was a telephone conversation between them and Mr Albon which he recorded. Two years of litigation ensued before the Court dismissed Mr Albon’s applications. The Judge found that “the motivation for [Mr Albon] commencing the proceedings was principally to support his immigration position.” The Judge recorded that the mother, B, had a history of mental health problems made worse by the litigation. The Judge found that Mr Albon was dismissive of C’s role in D’s life, suggesting at one point that she could be called “aunty” by D. The Judge found that a CAO giving Mr Albon direct contact with D would lead to conflict and instability and be detrimental to D’s welfare. As agreed by B and C, the Judge ordered that indirect contact should take place by way of an annual updating letter from B and C to Mr Albon and an annual card or letter from Mr Albon which would be retained for D “for when he was of an age to understand from whom the document derived”.
3. HHJ Furness KC handed down a finding of fact judgment in July 2023 and a final welfare judgment in November 2023. He found that Mr Albon:
4. “… is a man who seeks to control, women and children appear to be almost a commodity to him as he sets about increasing the number of his children around the globe.”
5. Mr Albon sought to appeal all the decisions of HHJ Furness KC. He was a litigant in person. He put forward 47 grounds of appeal. Peter Jackson LJ refused permission on all grounds on 30 January 2024. Mr Albon then sought to apply to the European Court of Human Rights but that application seems to have got nowhere.

The High Court looked at material involving some of the women in the UK who have had Joe Donor’s service- remember that what he says he wants is to produce more children ‘without complications’

1. I have access to social services and police records concerning Mr Albon’s involvement with a woman, MC, from Norfolk. They met in January 2021 and agreed to undertake what Mr Albon likes to call “partial insemination” or PI. This is sexual intercourse without kissing, foreplay or affectionate touching. MC fell pregnant by February 2021 and Mr Albon and MC then started living together in Norfolk in March 2021. The following month they moved house within the county. Each of MC and Mr Albon alleges that the other was physically violent over the months from April to August 2021. Mr Albon made several complaints to the police about MC being violent towards him, stalking, causing criminal damage, and having assaulted her child. Nevertheless, on 1 July 2021 Mr Albon and MC appeared together on This Morning, announcing that they were now engaged to be married, under the story headline, “I slept with a Man for his Sperm.” On 4 August 2021, whilst pregnant with their child, MC moved out of their home but Mr Albon remained living there. The police imposed bail conditions on MC. Later that month, MC complained to the police that Mr Albon had been domestically abusive toward her including using physical violence, isolating her from her support network, and perpetrating emotional, sexual and financial abuse. Social Services asked Mr Albon to move out of the family home and he did so on or about 24 August 2021.
2. In November 2021, Mr Albon told Norfolk police that MC “suffers a personality disorder that causes her to act this way. He was aware of this at an early stage in the relationship…” . MC gave birth to her and Mr Albon’s child, a boy, in October 2021. Although MC wanted the police to pursue a prosecution against Mr Albon for domestic abuse, she did not attend an appointment to make a statement and in December 2021 the Norfolk Police closed the file on her complaint for want of co-operation. In January 2022, Norfolk Police also closed the file on Mr Albon’s complaints against MC for lack of further evidence from him.
3. In October 2022, MC reported to Norfolk police that Mr Albon was seeking access to their child and asking for a photograph and had threatened court action.

I think there may have been some complications here.

1. 
   There are common themes in relation to these six families who have had involvement with Mr Albon in the UK since his arrival here in September 2020. Five of the six women are known to have mental health issues or histories that make them vulnerable. Most of them are known to have believed that it was understood that Mr Albon would not play any parental role in the lives of the children he and they hoped to produce. All six relationships with these women ended in police involvement and/or litigation. All but one of the mothers do not want him to have anything to do with their children and the one that does, has agreed contact limited to one meeting a year, an arrangement not yet approved by the court as being in that child’s best interests. This is Mr Albon’s track record in relation to the six donor-conceived children in the UK of which the Court has evidence.

What do the Court say about Mr Albon?

1. 
   Mr Albon advertises his services as an unregulated sperm donor under the pseudonym Joe Donor. He has written self-published books about sperm donation. His account of his donor service can be summarised as follows:

1. a. He promotes himself as a sperm donor online using Facebook and Instagram including Facebook groups which he administers.
2. b. He makes no claims to a woman who contacts him about his health or the absence of hereditary conditions. In fact he has tests for HIV about once a year but not for sexually transmitted infections (“STI’s”). He has not been screened for any genetic conditions.
3. c. He does not enter into any oral or written agreements with the woman.
4. d. He offers natural insemination (NI), artificial insemination (AI), and what he calls partial insemination (PI) which is sexual intercourse without any intimacy (no kissing, foreplay or prolongation of intercourse for pleasure).

1. I have seen a number of examples of Mr Albon’s online postings and self-promotions. He has recently posted images and audio recordings of his offer to send out samples of his sperm by post for the purpose of artificial insemination. The images include him wearing latex gloves, holding syringes beside a centrifuge machine.
2. Mr Albon is frank about his sperm donor activities. He regards himself as performing a job which benefits women. He says that just over 50% of the women who use his service are inseminated through intercourse and the rest inject his sperm using a syringe. He says that he leaves it entirely up to the women who become pregnant whether they want him to have any contact with the child. He says that he maintains contact with upwards of 60 of the children he has fathered and that he is named on about ten birth certificates. When asked to name any of his donor-conceived children with whom he maintains contact he was unable to name more than ten and the Court is aware of six of those in England and Wales as set out above. It was difficult to believe that he maintains contact with 60 or so of his children and he produced no evidence to corroborate that claim. He told the Court that currently there are some six or seven women in the UK who are pregnant after having used his sperm.
3. The women who use Mr Albon as a sperm donor mostly fall into two camps: women in a lesbian relationship and women who are not in any relationship. The risks they take in using a prolific, unregulated sperm donor who operates as Mr Albon does, are obvious. They do not know anything about the health of his sperm, his genes, his physical or mental health, or his history. Like MA, many will not even know his real name. There is no record of his other children, their mothers, or where they live. There is nothing to prevent Mr Albon seeking declarations of parentage, parental responsibility, or child arrangements orders in respect of the children he fathers.
4. The three advantages of Mr Albon’s service for women who use it are (i) it is cheap, (ii) it is available almost immediately, and (iii) no conditions are attached and no questions are asked: the evidence before the Court shows that Mr Albon will have sex with, or provide his sperm for artificial insemination, to just about anyone who asks. I received no evidence of any occasion when he has declined to offer his donor service to a woman who has asked. He is indiscriminate in that respect.
5. Mr Albon’s motivations for acting as a prolific sperm donor have been questioned at this hearing. Is he motivated by the desire to have sex with many different women? Is he compelled to reproduce? Does he enjoy gratification from knowing that there are scores of his children on the earth? Is he simply attention-seeking? Does he want to secure his immigration status? It is difficult to look into the mind of Mr Albon because he is not self-reflective. He has a matter of fact attitude toward what he does. In the documentaries or interviews I have viewed, he appears to regard his “work” as a both a humanitarian service and a bit of fun. He uses cartoon type imagery to promote his service. He refers to his semen as “Joe’s juice” and “baby batter”, and joked with a reporter who had accompanied him at a hotel where he was due to provide a sample of his sperm for AI, that a mug he was holding was a “cup of Joe”. He even put down his co-donor’s sinister comment about “bleaching Africa” as a joke.
6. Mr Albon was given a warning about self-incrimination under CA 1989 s98 before he was asked well-targeted questions prepared by Ms Howe KC and Mr Simpson about the storage, processing and distribution of his sperm. In his statement of 15 March 2024 in the Durham proceedings, Mr Albon said,

1. “I survive month to month on the money left over from the reimbursement of the costs associated with private sperm donations that are provided to cover my expenses. This can vary, but I generally have £800 a month left over from the expenses.
2. I also get some payments from media for pictures and stories. This can vary but it generally works out at around £100 a month.”
3. Mr Albon was asked about this statement. He confirmed that he charges £100 for the delivery of his sperm by post. He explained that he puts his sperm into a syringe, packages the product and packs frozen passata (tomato puree) around it which, he says, defrosts slowly and keeps the product at a suitable temperature. He then posts or couriers the package to the recipient. Although he has described his charge as being for expenses only, he told me that the costs associated with this service are about £50 (including the passata). He has not produced any evidence to verify this claim but, even on his own account, he still has £50 left over after the payment of expenses. He said that he has to pay his utilities and rent but these are living expenses and even if he was treated as running a business and could claim some of his rent and other outgoings as business expenses, the total costs to him of producing, treating, packaging and posting his sperm would not amount to £50 for each delivery he sends out. He said that the balance of £50 after expenses was “opportunity cost”. That is an economist’s term for the profit foregone from alternative activities when a chosen activity is undertaken. It is not an expense or overhead of a business. If, in March 2024, he had £800 a month left over after the payment of expenses and was clearing £50 per package, he must have been sending out about 16 packages a month.

(Ah, that’s why the passata….)

1. I conclude that Mr Albon produces sperm and distributes it as a sole trader for profit. He uses terms such as “expenses” and “opportunity cost” to obscure the fact that sperm donation is, for him, a business. He has not produced any business records or accounts but on his own account the costs to him of shipping his sperm are no higher than 50% of the £100 he charges for that service. He advertises his services online using cartoon-like imagery and light-hearted terms, whilst at the same time creating the impression that his sperm is tested and packaged in laboratory conditions. He has used images of plastic syringes, a microscope, and a centrifuge machine in promotional material. He refers in such material to “quality controlled sperm”. He told the court that he uses a substance known as an “extender” added to his semen. He is in business and he makes money out of the business. As such, having regard to the provisions of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990 set out below, there must be a concern that he ought to have had a licence at least for distributing his sperm in the course of business to aid reproduction.

And here is one of the sentences of masterful understatement that only a High Court Judge can deliver…

1. 
   Mr Albon is not a man troubled by self-doubt. He invariably describes his own conduct positively and seems not to recognise the personal turmoil he has left in his wake. None of it seems to have made an impression on Mr Albon. He has moved from country to country and at times from family to family. More recently he has found that shipping his sperm is more profitable than travelling to have intercourse with women, but otherwise the disputes and difficulties in which he has been embroiled have not caused him to change the way in which he operates. The turmoil created has not had an impact on his behaviour.

Findings about Mr Albon

1. 
   I have given careful consideration to all the evidence before making any findings of specific motives for Mr Albon’s applications in relation to CA and CB. I have been greatly assisted by the expert evidence of Dr Young and by having the opportunity to see and hear Mr Albon give evidence over many hours at the hearing. There is no evidence before me of any diagnoses of a personality disorder or a mental health condition but there are traits to his personality which emerge clearly from all the evidence. First, he has very strong personal defences such that he appears to have rock solid confidence in his own judgment and decision-making. Second, he lacks empathy and only has superficial relationships with others. Third, he is dismissive of those who do not agree with him or who question his behaviour and beliefs. Fourth, he has a strong will and a determination to get his own way. Fifth, he needs to feel validated and recognised. Sixth, he seeks to control others to prove that he is right, to secure recognition, to get his own way, and to serve his own ends.
2. This sixth trait – controlling behaviour – is demonstrated in many different ways. He uses language to control narratives: he sought to do so in cross-examination and in his description of his business. He uses ambiguity to manipulate. Thus, he is ambiguous about his future involvement in the lives of his future children when he first has contact with their mothers. This allows him later to decide whether and, if so when, to seek to become involved. In many cases he chooses not to do so, but in others he does, as it suits him. When he needs a roof over his head he has crept into the lives of women to his advantage: he moved in to live with MB, with MC in Norfolk, and with MD in the North East of England. He uses others’ vulnerability and naivety to suit his own ends – for example persuading MB to send him messages she had received from MC, and seeking to exploit MA’s fear of losing her children to try to persuade her to register him as CA’s father. The evidence suggests that his practice as a sperm donor attracts a high number of vulnerable women. MA and MB have mental health issues, and MA has a borderline IQ. MC apparently had borderline personality disorder, MD and B had histories of mental health issues, and a referral was made to the police in Yorkshire after concerns that Mr Albon had had sexual intercourse with a woman not capable of giving consent (albeit that was not pursued further by the police). These are women whom he can seek to control. He has covertly recorded conversations, guided those conversations, and then sought to rely on the recordings for his own advantage. That is a means of exercising control over others.
3. I find that Mr Albon has sought to control five of the six women in England and Wales who have carried his children whose identities are known to the Court and whom I have identified earlier in this judgment. I exclude MC in the Chelmsford case because I am yet to conduct a final hearing in that case and I do not have evidence before me in these proceedings on which I could find that Mr Albon has been controlling of ME. Nor do I have any evidence that she is vulnerable to manipulation by him. It might well be the case that ME has made a fully autonomous decision to enter into a written agreement with Mr Albon, uninfluenced by him or anyone else. The arrangements they have reached may be in the child’s best interests. However, in the five other cases, including the two before me, there is evidence of Mr Albon exercising controlling behaviour. He has also used litigation as a means of control, as he tried to do in the Welsh proceedings and, I find, in both of the present proceedings. Pertinently, he told the Court that he is now making money by writing pre-action letters for others, in particular people who claim to have been defamed.

The Court did grant him the declaration of parentage that he sought, declined to give him parental responsibility, and gave him some contact with CA

For CB and CX the Court made Care and Placement Orders and directed that a copy of the judgment be provided to the Home Office and the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, both of whom I suspect will be in touch with Mr Albon.