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 from ella in January 1985. And as a result of the alleged semen scam , she was born.
“My mom feels so violated,” Hellquist previously told 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.