Aussie dad devastated by shock DNA testing revealing his kids aren't his | 60 Minutes Australia

thanks to csi and the other cop shows dna tests are no longer a mystery gone is the suspicion they're just another weapon in tv's war on crime but it might be a different story if that weapon was turned on us and that's not impossible it's happening to australian families every day dna testing especially paternity testing is a booming business fired up by suspicious husbands determined to prove that the child they're raising is actually theirs and as you might imagine that's opened up a whole new domestic battlefield new charges of betrayal and revenge this is sean now sean is engaged to a woman named dorothy he was devastated when he found out that dorothy cheated on him but what makes the situation truly devastating is the fact that sean is here because he doesn't know if he's the father of their baby daughter emily nobody turns human tragedy into entertainment better than american daytime tv i just don't know if i can stick around because i can't look at her face every day and see that dna paternity testing has become a ratings bonanza for talk show hosts like mori povich but you would throw that away if this child's not you because i'm not going to deal with the pain again suspicions confirmed by science in the case of two-month-old emily sean you are not in america it's morrow who delivers the devastating news dorothy this was one big mistake unfortunately here in australia it's the humble postie there were a number of things that uh began to just not quite ring true people making comments that you didn't look like me whereas my older daughter did chris refused to believe it at first but the nagging doubts wouldn't go away the little one started talking about her other dad her other father and that made me well first i said i am your dad there's no other dad oh yes there is there's my other daddy who comes to visit so you've got suspicions about your child well as thousands of australians do every year you can have a dna paternity test done in secret and it's completely legal delivery for tara brown great thank you you can go to a private clinic or as we have order a home testing kit over the internet it's arrived from the united states in just four days and cost us three hundred dollars inside swabs for the child and the doubting father this is how easy it is you just take one of these swabs now do you mind opening your mouth for me please great and then you do your own and within a week you will know to within a 99 probability whether the child is really yours i think it was to satisfy my own my own curiosity i was so at that stage i was so dubious about the antics of my ex-wife what she'd been up to the fact that she'd had the men on the side and so forth i just wanted to know so without telling his wife chris took a mouth swab from his daughter and sent it to a dna lab for a paternity test now he's got the results back halfway around the country a single mum and her eight-year-old son are also anxiously awaiting the results of a paternity test how did joel come about what happened oh we met in this in a small town i used to live in a pub on a sunday afternoon i think it was and things just escalated from there we spent the night together and yeah that was about it did you want to get pregnant no i wasn't out to go and get pregnant it was quite a bit of a shock yeah i'd been seeing um another guy in manhattan that was a regular type of like a ongoing sort of casual relationship that i was in at the time um but that had finished like a week prior so it was a bit of touch and go of who it was at that stage michelle decided to raise joel on her own but then eight years on to receive the family tax benefit she's been forced to nominate the father and to tell joel the truth what have you told your mates about your dad or that i haven't had one before i thought i didn't have one what is it like not to have a dad um a bit sad a thousand kilometers away in mount isa 35 year old noel had all but forgotten that one night stand until out of the blue he was told he had to take a paternity test i was the first one that she's contacted because i was the easiest to find when you first got that letter and you're asked to take this test what was your reaction then oh it was like a it was like a joke it was like there's like no way that i could ever be the father you know i'd only known the girl for like a matter of hours and especially since he had other partners i just thought it was there was just no way it was me i couldn't believe that they sent me the letter in an instant noel's world was turned upside down i didn't think i was going to be the father so i was kind of pretty cocky about it you know i thought yeah i'll be right so it must have been an even bigger shock yeah it was it's pretty bad like receiving that letter saying you're the father that's that's pretty full basically your whole life changes forever as the biological father noel doesn't have any choice about paying child support but he does have to decide whether he wants to be a dad to a little boy who'd love to have one a little boy he's never met what do you imagine him to be like i'm a good man um that could play with me chris is about to find out whether his youngest daughter is really his the results came back and uh unfortunately she wasn't my daughter not my biological daughter anyway it's it's real shock when it comes the real shock when it hits you you think you're prepared you think oh what if the results are negative and of course you realize there could be that possibility but when that letter comes it just blows your way for chris like so many other men there's an added hurt the certain knowledge he's been betrayed there'd been no no sexual activity for almost a year and then one night out of the blue i was jumped jumped upon and you think you think that all your christmases have come at once and suddenly your wife has loves you again and believes that you know our marriage has got a chance and i honestly thought things were looking up and then of course very soon after that the announcement that oh i'm pregnant so we can't have any sort of sexual relationship anymore what you're saying is you were set up to believe that you conceived this child together yes i was set up to believe that that she was my child by now chris and his wife had separated he was financially supporting both daughters the youngest living with her mother the oldest with him faced with mounting bills chris questioned why he should pay for a child who wasn't his it was getting to the stage where i was almost going to have to sell my home or or start selling all my possessions so then you pulled out this trump card i did i did i would have been continuing to pay child support payments which if you do the sums works out to around about 140 000 and i think as soon as she turned 18 and child support stops i would have been told guess what she's not your biological daughter what do you think is the predominant motivation for men seeking paternity testing it seems to time with after separation so it seems to be a strategy to avoid delay complicate avoid child support responsibilities ellsworth mcginnis heads the national council of single mothers is there as much deceit and betrayal as some people believe we find that the deception most of the time is men who are wrongly and dishonestly denying their children there's now a move to make it a criminal offence to do what chris did take a child's dna without the permission of the mother or the family court the mother didn't ask my permission to have an extramarital affair and to to go out and have a child on the side out of out of marriage out of the wetlock so i don't believe you need their permission to have a test i wonder if it's working for some men knowing whether they're the father is everything okay zoe i love you very very much and alyssa your dad loves you more than anything in this world darling okay terry mitchell thought he had it all his girlfriend zoe had just given birth to a baby girl love his boss but behind these happy family scenes there were terribly destructive doubts are you happy joe are you happy zoe are you happy fine couldn't ask in the question terry told friends and family he didn't know if this little girl was here and he didn't believe the courts would let him do a dna test to confirm it so why do you think he chose this place because it's peaceful isolated it was terry's sister kathy who found his body terry had driven to his favorite beach and connected a hose to his car's exhaust pipe i jumped out and just started smashing his windows with a tackle box to try and save him and then daniel had to smash the window with a crowbar because they just would not break this is your younger brother yeah it wouldn't break we will never truly know what led terry to this all we do know from the suicide note he left is the night he took his life he got a phone call from zoe telling him his baby daughter wasn't his do you feel angry towards himself for giving up i do but i don't because the pain he must have felt to do that would have been unbearable for him how sure are you that he took his life because he couldn't confirm the paternity of this little girl he was frustrated with the system there seemed to be forces stopping him from trying to find out whether the child was actually his child he said i love that child dearly but i need to know as its father whether the child's mind hello and farthest association barry williams runs the lone fathers association and had counseled terry in the weeks leading up to his death how many other men are you aware of who've taken their lives because of this issue of paternity quite a few really what's quite a few oh probably a couple of dozen they found out that the child wasn't these and they just couldn't take it and did away with themselves [Music] back in mount isa noel is working long hours to meet his child support payments plus six thousand dollars in back pay a ludicrous penalty for missing payments he never knew he owed i guess you do tend to think of yourself as a bit of a sperm bank with a checkbook but a surprise this young man has made one of the most difficult decisions of his life he wants to be a real dad and he's about to set off on a 10-hour journey to meet his son for the first time i definitely felt like with walking away to start off with and just paying child support like it was a tax and getting on with my life but after thinking about it more it was the right thing to do to go and be a role model for your son especially if he hasn't got one and to help him grow up when i get there i just want to basically just meet him um take him out go to footy um maybe go see a movie today's a pretty big day for you isn't it yep how are you feeling a bit nervous because i'm seeing my dad for the first time i'll probably just uh shake his hand say g'day and i guess i'll be thinking about it the whole way that's for sure but just as noel is about to gain a son chris has lost a daughter and you still got her toys yes all the toys are here waiting she was told that i'm not her dad and she was never to call me dad ever again do you have any regrets about your decision to undergo that testing yeah it's very difficult to answer that because of course i do regret but i think overall no no i'm glad i didn't really did it yes you may have saved yourself 140 000 but you seem to have lost so much more i live in the hope that one day when she's older there'll be a knock at the door one day and it'll be a young lady coming in search of a dear old dad [Music] it's often hard to see how dna testing serves the best interests of the children the unseen victims in almost all these feuds but in one case at least it's given a little boy the father he never knew he had hey g'day joel how you doing mate hey yeah good got something for you in the way of all meetings between strangers this one is tentative oh wow it's cool now just walk around and hook it but within a few hours the awkwardness is gone not yet father and son but mates after all these two plan a lifetime of getting to know each other you can do that now do you feel like a father um it's really strange but um it's happened really quickly but um i kind of feel really good about it i wouldn't say i feel like a father yet but i'm really positive about the future [Music] hello i'm sarah arbo thanks for watching 60 minutes australia subscribe to our channel now for brand new stories and exclusive clips every week and don't miss out on our extra minute segments and full episodes of 60 minutes on ninenow.com.eu and the ninenow app

Channel: 60 Minutes Australia

Views: 3,583,443

Keywords: 60 Minutes, 60 Minutes Australia, Liz Hayes, Tara Brown, Liam Bartlett, Tom Steinfort, Sarah Abo, karl stefanovic, 60Mins, #60Mins, paternity test, DNA test, children, child support, parents, lies, fake

Id: dSI8ByZfaIo

Length: 16min 29sec (989 seconds)

Published: Wed May 25 2022