The Lawyer Who Sold Babies

What if you discovered your adoption was never legal?

This week, Corey and Kendall welcome adoptee, author, advocate, and National Association of Adoptees and Parents (NAAP) board member Patricia Knight Meyer for one of the most extraordinary stories we've ever featured on Family Twist.

Patricia always knew she was adopted. But at 13, she learned she had no original birth certificate. At 18, she discovered there had never been a legal adoption. The attorney who arranged her placement had orchestrated an illegal black-market adoption, leaving Patricia to spend decades searching for answers about her identity, her family, and even her true birthday.

In this deeply personal conversation, Patricia shares what it was like growing up with unanswered questions, why she always feared someone might come to take her away, and how years of searching eventually led her to the truth.

We also discuss her powerful upcoming memoir, Wonderland: Memoir of a Black Market Adoption, a story of identity, resilience, and the lifelong search for where we belong.

This conversation is unforgettable. And somehow, it's only the beginning.

Next week, Patricia returns to share what happened after the reunion with both of her birth parents, the remarkable relationship she built with her birth father, and a surprise ending that neither she nor Corey saw coming.

Pre-order Wonderland now wherever books are sold.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Through a DNA test, a cousin found me. This would have been my birth mother's sister's child who was also put up for adoption, who also didn't receive a birth certificate. And her family had worked with the same attorney. Once I heard her story and realized that this attorney had done this to both my birth mother and her sister, that I realized that he truly was a nefarious guy and he was taking advantage of the system.

Corey 0:27

Hey everyone, it's Corey, and welcome back to Family Twist. Today's episode has just about everything we love talking about on this podcast: an illegal black market adoption, a lifetime of unanswered questions, reunion with both birth parents, the complicated reality of loving the family who raised you while trying to understand the family you never knew, and a memoir that somehow manages to capture all of it. Our guest is Patricia Knightmeyer, an adoptee author, advocate, and member of the NAAP board. Her upcoming memoir, Wonderland of Black Market Babies Rise from Adoption's Rabbit Hole, tells us a story that's unlike anything we feature about Family Twist. This is part one of our conversation, and trust me, you're going to want to stick around for part two. Here's Patricia.

SPEAKER_00 1:10

Thank God for DNA, right? What it has exposed. One thing I'd love to share it on the show is that I had the opportunity one afternoon, did not know I was about to meet this man. My boss, we're on a work trip and we're driving through California, and he pulls over to this house and he's like, I need you to entertain this woman's husband while I have some business with his wife, and we're going to be downstairs, you be upstairs. And I'm sort of like, what is that about, right? But okay. So I go upstairs and there's this older gentleman who just got back from surfing, welcomes me and pours a glass of wine, and my boss at the last minute says, Oh, and by the way, this guy's a Nobel Prize-winning chemist named Kerry Mullis who discovered the polymerase chain reaction, aka DNA testing.

Kendall 1:54

That's amazing.

SPEAKER_00 1:55

I think you guys have some things to talk about. I got to spend an afternoon with Kerry Mollis, and he told me all about his uh his life studying all of this and how he came up with the idea for polymerase chain reaction. He did a lot of psychedelics at Berkeley when he was testing chemistry and is a little controversial in his field. He was going to testify in the OJ trial. They never pulled him up for it. But I told him, I said, you know, without your discovery, I and so many people that I know would never know for certain if the people that we had found was our family. You have changed the lives of so many people through this discovery. He was like, you know, it never really dawned on me that it that it went that far. And and and then he he signed his book. His book is called Surfing in the Mind Field. Fantastic memoir. I just wanted to ask Kendall if you had that same feeling after your adoptive parents passed away of being like completely alone in the world. Because I did, even though I had six cousins, once my adoptive parents were gone, I had a daughter too, but I still felt like I am alone in this world. Like and I may still have people out there. Like that's really what drove me is this feeling of being well, that and needing a legal birth certificate. That empty well of like maybe there's still people out there who I can who are my parents. I had to go look. Did you feel that way? Did you sense that heaviness?

Kendall 3:29

I did. And it's interesting because thankfully I knew that my adoptive parents were very supportive of uh the the possibility that I would look. They they told me, I mean, before they both died, they were, you know, said we we know it's your birthright to know where you came from. If there's anything you can do to find your original family, then do it. And I think because I knew I had their support, my dad's my adoptive dad's second wife, Joyce, who was very good to me, was also super supportive. Really drove me to with all this uh parental support behind me. I just thought, you know what? I'm gonna go for it. I'm gonna try to find these people. Like Corey said, you know, you assume there's somebody out there, right? Like even if found only one parent with no children, you'd still be ecstatic. Two parents with six half siblings, you know what I mean? Like it's yeah, it's crazy. It's so funny because I used to always think, well, that that maybe the reason I was given up for adoption is because my parents were super young. Well, ironically, that's exactly why they were 15 and 16 when I was born. So neither set of grandparents was willing, I think is the nice way to say it, to entertain the idea of raising uh a baby. And you know, I mean, I have bits of resentment about that, but um at the same time, I can't imagine not knowing my adoptive parents. You know, they were wonderful people and um treated me very well. You know, I only have love for them, so it's all it's all good, and you can't change it anyway except and move on. Yeah.

Corey 5:24

And I think the whole the whole primal wound and thing hadn't come to the surface for Kendall Yup because Wake was 60. Um, yeah, he was a junior in high school, he was trying to be valedictorian. He'd already had four or five years with his stepmother and stepsister living in the house, plus had known them since birth. Since birth, family friends. So it was like he still did have family. I mean, not blood relatives living in the house. Stayed living there till after he graduated, and and then he and his uh girlfriend got married, their freshman year college. So I think it was like a life was like happening so fast that I don't think Kendall had the the bandwidth to start dwelling on, you know, the fact that he was essentially an orphan.

Kendall 6:10

And I, you know, as soon as I turned 18, I'd petitioned the court and I knew what the outcome was going to be. They they said, No, you can't know. There was nothing to do back then. You couldn't sue the straight.

SPEAKER_00 6:22

The other frustration is even and I experienced this, even if you found someone, and I found many someones who I thought could be my vert mother, they would say, No, no, that's absolutely not me. That's not my sister. That we're not those kind of people. And you're like, are they just lying? Do they just want you to go away? So what if what if I have found the person and now they're saying no, and I'm just gonna be doomed to keep looking my whole life? I may have already found them. And and I would literally say when I was talking to them or emailing them, if it's okay if you don't want to have a relationship, but please, if you are the right person, please tell me because if not, I will keep looking for the rest of my life. Please tell me the truth. That not knowing was frustrating. And I want to apologize. My neighbor has a generator. You can't hear it? Okay, okay, great.

Kendall 7:10

Yeah, our dog was digging on the couch a few minutes ago, too. Corey's to edit that out. It's like a Havanese thing. They they just love to dig when they find their little spot on the couch.

Corey 7:22

We have all of the six dogs are in the room with us when we record because we didn't, then you would hear them in their crates.

SPEAKER_00 7:29

The scratching and the howling. I give my dog a chew a bone to chew on while I'm in mine so that he's busy.

Corey 7:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 7:36

Yeah.

Corey 7:36

Yeah. What we've learned with this pack is that um everybody wants to have the same thing. So it doesn't matter if you've got if you give all six dogs something to chew on, they're gonna want each other's. All five of them are zonked out at this point.

SPEAKER_00 7:47

You know, it it's funny that you bring up dogs because I'm actually going to be on a podcast in a little bit about this woman who reached out to me and talks about having the ability for Pets to heal us, to heal trauma, particularly. And it made me think a lot. In my book that I wrote, I have several chapters that have dog stories in them. And I think it's because, at least when it comes to rescues, I have had such a place in my heart for animals that need homes and that have lost their mothers. And I am obsessed with this fear that my dog is gonna get lost and that it he's not gonna know why I where I went and that he's going to feel abandoned. And so I know that I'm projecting like all of my abandonment trauma on my puppy. And and I have this like obsessively this huge fear. I always have a collar on him, I'm always making sure that he's not gonna get lost because I couldn't live with my dog out in the world and me not knowing where he was. And I know that's tied to my own adoption trauma. Yeah. Right. And it's very hard for me to say no to a pet that needs a home.

Kendall 9:01

Well, Corey worked for uh the nine years we were in San Francisco, he worked for the same company. They were a for-profit pet supply company, but he led their mission when it came to rescue connections. That's how we ended up with uh at least uh gosh, four of our dogs came that way.

Corey 9:23

Two of the dogs that are yeah, that are still with us came from there. And and two of the cats. Two of the cats. It's funny that you say that, Patricia, because like my the nightmares that I have these days. I used to have like violent horror movie crazy nightmares. So now when I have a band dream though, it's like I'm trying to corral dogs because like there's like they're trying to get into a pool. I'm sure that has something to do with the whole the family twist stuff.

SPEAKER_00 9:47

I can also get on a soapbox about pet adoption. That's today I've gotten very and I'm not being critical of them at all. I love what they're doing. They make you intercontracts where they ask you what the size of your home is and do you have a backyard and how many children are in the home with you. And if you don't come back and bring your dog for all of its vaccinations and things on a regular basis, they write have right in the contract that they will come back and get your dog and you will lose custody of that dog.

Kendall 10:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:14

And I parallel that with the fact that vets and places that place animals do a better job keeping track of the welfare of those animals and making sure that the home is a b is a good fit than many of the adoptions that take place for infants today follow up. And so I can get on a soapbox about that.

Kendall 10:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:36

No, I and I wrote about it on social and then I got a lot of hate about it. People saying, do not compare adoptees to pets. But it's but I mean I'm trying to explain that that it's just ironic that people think so high, it's not a question for the annual the welfare of the animals, is always the top priority, right?

Kendall 10:56

Well, the parallels are there, regardless some people want to want to believe. But um, you know, you made me think of something that I hadn't thought about in a long time, and that's the fact that my parents in the state of Arkansas, my parents had to wait nine nine months. They had to have custody of me for nine months before the adoption could go through. So they had they got me at two months, and at 11 months I became their child. And my mother spent it, and my dad did two. About after those 11, like during those nine months, the the adoption agency was involved and asked lots of questions and there was follow-up. But man, the moment I was theirs, nothing. Nothing.

SPEAKER_00 11:42

Yeah.

Kendall 11:42

Um, and it's a good thing they were good parents because I think if they hadn't been, I would have been doomed.

SPEAKER_00 11:49

And so I I am sort of in favor of like annual having a therapist or someone like that in charge of that adoption and annually checking in, just to see, you know, has anyone recently in the family been arrested for drugs or, you know, are they in prison now? You know, has the is the family living in a car these days? People assume that the families that adopt children are wealthy and and gonna be just fine and the child's in the in the hands of beautiful, safe people. Right. But that's not always the case, and not everyone who adopts has any real not everybody's in control of their situation, first of all. Sometimes things happen, but also some people adopt for not so good reasons. And or they're adopting to try to fill holes or wounds in their own heart that they're also medicating at the same time. And then there's like, oh, guess what? A baby didn't solve my problems, and it didn't fix my marriage. Like things should be followed. Yeah, things should be followed out.

Kendall 12:50

To your point, my dad was contacted after my mother passed when I was 10. And my dad didn't do well uh after that. He was a mess. And a couple of years later, you know, he gets I've forgotten what how it happened, but he got contacted by the child protective service, whatever that organization was called, and they were questioning no 13 years I'd been adopted, asking how things are going. He's like, Well, my wife was and died, so thanks for asking. You know what I mean? Like it it seemed so frivolous.

SPEAKER_00 13:32

That's so interesting that they followed up after all that time. Like, that's really weird.

Kendall 13:37

Yeah, it could have been haphazard. I don't know, but yeah, my dad was not impressed by that. You know what? Yeah, we're dealing, we got this. Uh, you know what I mean? Like it was kind of insulting at that point, you know. Like, wow. I've been he had been personally dealing with so much horrible stuff for years, and yeah, for somebody to ask way after the event was like, all right, you're very efficient at your job. You know, it was like anyway.

SPEAKER_00 14:06

Did it feel like they were calling to tell him his car warranty had just gone out to re-app?

Kendall 14:12

You know, I'm I'm good. We, you know, we're dealing, and thanks for your concern.

Corey 14:18

Patricia, you did bring up something interesting that I would love to touch on before I forget about it, in that so we haven't really had to deal with too much negativity pushback from the Adopte community on our podcast. And I don't know if that's just because we have people on and tell their stories and we push back and we don't argue like everybody's truth is their truth, but you know, you're now putting yourself out there in a very public way, and and your book is getting some attention already and some buzz. So have you had to deal with negativity from the Adopte community?

SPEAKER_00 14:49

Not yet. And I hope never. Good. It's scary though. It is really something scary. You do worry that you're gonna say something wrong. My story, though, like per certain parts of my story that I have put out on my social media. I had one that I put it up, and then after I got the attention of a couple people in our community that are just really, you pretty much assume that almost everything they that they I'm not gonna name names, but it's very aggressive and very angry responses from certain end of people, extreme people. Yeah. I say I was adopted, but as you know, I grew up and found out that I was never legally adopted, but I was adopted and raised by a biracial couple. And so my mother was white, but my father was Hispanic. And in addition to being tan-skinned, he also suffered from morbid obesity. And he was probably about 350 pounds when I was adopted. I think the stress of raising a paperless child, and we can talk about how all that went down in a little bit. He he gained more, he gained more and more. I think he gained up at the time when I was five, six years old, he was probably 400 pounds. And so I know growing up in the 70s, there we suffered a lot of discrimination. He would get pulled over by the police because there was a little white girl riding in the car with him. They would question me about who this man is and do I know him. And even in standing in line in grocery stores, I would be standing right next to him, and a lady would look down and say, Honey, where are your parents? I'm like, right there. And so I wrote a blog post about that. And I was basically saying that in many ways, even though I'm white, I identify with a lot of the similarities of the transracial adoptees, but from a different perspective, right? I was a white child growing up and half of my family was Hispanic. So I got exposed to all the Hispanic culture. I had pinatas on my birthday. My grandmother made homemade tamales and homemade salsa and homemade tortillas. And although she suffered so much discrimination when she was a young girl, she didn't teach her children to speak Spanish. Other than the fact that my immediate family on my father's side didn't speak Spanish, the culture was still very much there. And we lived in a Hispanic neighborhood and that sort of thing. I remember one particular Thanksgiving, we were all sitting together and somebody mentioned that Hispanic people who are susceptible to diabetes will get dark lines on the back of their neck, and that that's something that tells you that you could have diabetes. And then everybody gets up and starts looking at the back of each other's necks. Of course, nobody's checking mine. And I I talk and write, I was talking and writing about things like that, about how you know you go from being on the outside being on the inside to suddenly being on the outside looking in. And when I wrote about being profiled in the car, people came online and said, you are not a minority, you don't have a right to speak for us. And I'm like, but I was the child of a minority, and I watched him be profiled for being Hispanic, but also for being obese. People had these assumptions that he was a lobinly, dirty, not productive person in society. There was a lot of negativity around that. And I was like, okay, this is a super hot topic. I want to protect my brand. I'm happy to share the story, but obviously I can't do it here. And so I just pulled it down and walked away. Because I think I've learned that the one thing that the worst thing that you can do in our community online is to try to debate with people who aren't open to hearing a broad a broader message. Right. Yeah. That's been tough. And I've also suffered a lot of through the book and the stories in the book, the only heat I've really gotten is from a few of my adoptive family members who really didn't like the idea of the fact that I painted my raising parents as people who were unvetted and probably would have never been approved to adopt if there had been a home study. And they were now they were put at the end of many long waiting lists, probably because my father was overweight and they were a biracial couple and it was the late 1960s. He also didn't make a ton of money. He was a self-employed businessman slash meat inspector. That didn't sell well. And so they went around the system and hired a private attorney. I don't think they realized that they were entering any kind of illegal situation. A lot of people in the late 60s were seeking out private attorneys to do what they were calling gray marketed options. And I think it slid into black market territory when they realized that this attorney was not delivering them the paperwork. I think that sort of like you, Kindle, I was handed over to them. They had didn't sign any paperwork whatsoever. They picked me up outside of a hospital along along the curb because they were told they weren't allowed to go inside. The attorney's secretary handed me over and then they said, we'll be in touch. And then they're waiting for the papers and they keep getting these bills from the attorney that they owe more money and owe more money. They ultimately paid him twice what they had agreed to, a sum approximately around 30K. And by the time I was a year and a half, they realized no papers were coming. And so they decided they just weren't going to have anything to do with him anymore. But they couldn't go to the police because they knew that if they went to the police, I'd be taken away. And I think that attorney knew that. And that's why he was working them the way he did. If they had been a well-funded white couple, maybe he wouldn't have tried to work the system with them the way he did. And for a long time, I wasn't sure that the story they told me about that, which I didn't learn until I was 13 years old, and I needed a social security card. And they told me they never got my birth certificate, so they weren't sure how they were going to get me one. But ultimately later on, through a DNA test, a cousin found me. This would have been my birth mother's sister's child, who was also put up for adoption, who also didn't receive a birth certificate. And her family had worked with the same attorney. And so once I heard her story and realized that this attorney had done this to both my birth mother and her sister. So it wasn't just one baby in one family, that I realized that there's that he truly was like a nefarious guy and he was taking advantage of the system. And so now I wonder how many other babies that were born in town. Exist in the 60s and 70s, had the same sort of thing happen. I'm not sure what his the benefit to this guy would have been to do this, other than that he did charge them a bunch of money, and my birth mother said she never received a dime, and that he was telling my adoptive parents that it was for her housing, it was for her food, it was for her hospital bills. He told them that she had been in the hospital for five days, which is pretty uncommon, right? Mothers usually stay in for two days, and she said I was in the hospital for no more than two days, and I was picked up in front of that hospital on January the 11th of 1970, but she swears she gave birth December the 22nd at that hospital of 69. So we don't know where I was for those three weeks. I may have been a sickly baby, I may have been in the hospital, maybe that money went to pay the hospital bills. But she mentioned to me that she had this is my birth mother when I found her, that the friend had come to visit her the day after she gave birth, and she sent the friend to the nursery to look in on the baby me. And the friend said, I don't know if it's a boy or a girl, but it sure has a head of dark hair. So that tells me I couldn't have been that sickly because I probably would have been in a different unit and been in a um whatever incubator. Right. So I don't think that's the case either. Did I go to a different home and then something happened? So then I got moved over to this other family. Was I being was the attorney trying to see who was gonna pay him the most? I have no idea. That's the point, right? Right. We adoptees we'll never know the whole scope of our story. And oftentimes, adoptees who haven't been through the seeking and finding, they have this naive thought or fantasy that you know, I'm gonna find my adoptive family, and then all my questions are gonna be answered. But the irony is oftentimes finding your people only leads to a whole new set of questions, many of which are even more disturbing than just the kind of broader questions, these vague, cloudy, broad questions we grew up with our whole life. And then we also have to more all of the beliefs and fantasies that we created about who these people were gonna be and why we were relinquished. All that comes crashing in on the reality of what really went down, right? And there's grieving for that, and then there's grieving if it's a good reunion, there's grieving for the lost years, and if it's a bad reunion, it's grieving for the fact that now you realize you're never gonna have the parent that you had hoped to have. I can get on a soapbox, you're gonna have to stop me.

Corey 24:52

Wow, we've covered a lot of ground already, but in many ways, part two is where this conversation really opens up. Patricia shares what reunion was actually like with both of her first parents, including the remarkable relationship she built with her first father, the inspiration behind her memoir, Wonderland, and the advocacy work that's become such an important part of her life. And then, right at the end of the conversation, something happened that neither of us saw coming. It's one of those moments that reminds you just how connected this community really is, and I have a feeling you won't see it coming either. We'll see you next week for part two. And remember, Family Secrets are the ultimate plot twist. The Family Twist Podcast is produced and presented by Mosaic Multimedia LLC.