A woman who accused a Vermont fertility doctor of deceitfully using his own sperm to impregnate her and won a $2.2 million judgment against him now alleges in a new legal action that he is hiding his assets to keep her from collecting that money.
Cheryl Rousseau filed the new lawsuit Monday in U.S. District Court in Burlington against now-retired Dr. John Boyd Coates III of Shelburne.
Rousseau was initially awarded $5.25 million following a jury trial last year, but Judge William K. Sessions III cut that figure to $2.2 million after finding that the jury erred in calculating damages in her initial civil lawsuit against Coates.
The new lawsuit accuses Coates of sheltering assets by creating a trust for his spouse, Barbara Coates, where the family’s more than $1 million Shelburne residence has been placed.
“Had Defendants Coates not created the Trust for purposes of fraudulently transferring their respective interests in the Property, the Property could have been subject to execution in order for Ms. Rousseau to collect the Final Judgment,” the lawsuit reads.
Rousseau’s lawsuit asks the court to declare that transfer void and unlawful, and to impose damages against both of the Coateses and the trust that was created after the jury verdict.
Celeste Laramie, an attorney for Rousseau, said Monday that Coates has not paid a penny to Rousseau of the $2.2 million judgment against him.
The lawsuit claims the actions by the couple were done “recklessly or wantonly without regard for the rights of Ms. Rousseau, were outrageously reprehensible, had the character of outrage frequently associated with a crime and were done with malice.”
According to the lawsuit filed in 2018, Rousseau went to Coates for fertility treatment more than 40 years ago when he was practicing in Vermont.
She filed suit after her daughter, through the use of online sites Ancestry.com and 23andme.com, learned information about her biological father that traced back to Coates as the sperm donor, according to the lawsuit.
Coates, who is now retired, took the stand during his trial. He admitted that he had denied during earlier depositions that he used his sperm 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.
According to the lawsuit, Rousseau said that she told Coates that she wanted the donor to have similar characteristics of her husband and that the doctor told her the donor would be an unnamed medical student.
Another woman also filed a lawsuit against Coates, alleging similar conduct. That case was recently dismissed after Coates agreed to a $100,000 judgment.
Susan Flynn, an attorney who has represented Coates in the past, could not be reached Monday for comment.
