A federal jury has awarded a Florida woman more than $5 million in damages in a lawsuit against a Vermont fertility doctor she accused of using his own sperm to impregnate her, despite telling her the donor would be an unnamed medical student.
The jury returned its verdict late Wednesday morning in federal court in Burlington, finding for Cheryl Rousseau on all counts in the lawsuit against now-retired Dr. John Boyd Coates III, including fraud, breach of contract, battery and failing to obtain informed consent.
The jury awarded Rousseau $250,000 in compensatory damages and $5 million in punitive damages.
That was the exact amount Rousseau was seeking, Celeste Laramie, her attorney, said after the verdict. She said it appears the jury was swayed by the repeated “lies” of Coates.
Laramie added that the damages will not only compensate her client for what she suffered, but also send a message to other doctors that such actions are not appropriate.
Coates’s attorney, Peter Joslin, was given 30 days by Judge William K. Sessions to file any post-trial motions. Joslin could not immediately be reached following the verdict.
Rousseau went to Coates for fertility treatment more than four decades ago, according to the lawsuit filed in December 2018.
Rousseau filed suit after her daughter, through online sites Ancestry.com and 23andme.com, found information about her biological father. The results from those sites traced back to Coates as the sperm donor, the lawsuit stated.
Coates took the stand Monday, the first day of the trial. He had admitted that, in earlier depositions in the case, he had said he did not provide the sperm used to impregnate Rousseau. However, he later changed his story after learning that a court-ordered DNA test found with a 99.99% certainty that he was the biological father of Rousseau’s daughter.
On the witness stand Monday, Coates testified that the reason for the conflicting stories is that he didn’t remember using his own sperm or that he even had Rousseau as a patient. Faced with the DNA results, he testified, he acknowledged he was the donor.
Laramie told the jury during her opening arguments that Coates went into an office, masturbated, and returned to an exam room where he impregnated Rousseau.
According to the lawsuit, the woman said she told Coates that she wanted the donor to have characteristics of her husband and that the doctor had told her the donor would be an unnamed medical student.
The story will be updated.
