Man Learns He’s Not The Father Of His Three Sons, Realizes What Wife Has Done
Now, a man who discovered after being diagnosed with the life-limiting illness cystic fibrosis that he couldn’t be the father of his three sons because the condition causes lifelong infertility. The doctor had to be wrong. The awful news he just heard couldn’t possibly be true, could it? Richard had always been so devoted to his sons, but now he was being told they weren’t his. This successful businessman would soon find out that the life he’d been living was built on a lie. And once he learned the full truth, he had to decide what to do about it. His answer: make her pay.
55-year-old Richard Mason was a businessman and millionaire living in the United Kingdom. He had co-founded moneysupermarket.com, a popular British price comparison website. At that time, Richard was married to a woman named Kate. The two had first met while working together back in the 1980s. Together, they had three sons. Or at least, that’s what Richard had always believed. The three sons were Will, who was 23, and 19-year-old twins Ed and Joel.
By 2007, Richard and Kate’s marriage was falling apart, and things felt very tense between them. In 2008, they finally decided to get a divorce. Richard had no regrets about the marriage itself. He had three sons he continued to support even after they separated. In the financial settlement, Kate received a lump sum of $5 million, and the private school fees for all three boys were covered.
“Even so, Kate kept asking me for more money for years,” Richard later said. In Richard’s mind, those three sons from that cold and joyless marriage were the only good thing to come from it. But there was a surprise waiting for him just around the corner. He just didn’t know it yet.
It was in 2016 when Richard finally discovered the truth about his old life, almost 10 years after the divorce. One morning, he got up and got ready for what he thought was a regular doctor’s appointment. That appointment was about to change everything. When he walked into the doctor’s office, he had no idea he’d be leaving there furious. Richard had gone in for a routine checkup, but it turned out to be anything but ordinary. The doctor ran some tests, and the results completely turned his world upside down. Everything changed the moment the doctor told him he had cystic fibrosis.
The disease causes regular lung infections that slowly damage the lungs and make breathing harder and harder over time. Sadly, cystic fibrosis is a genetic condition. Richard’s own sister had passed away from it several years earlier. As devastated as he felt, Richard also grew scared. Could he have passed this on to his three sons? Luckily, the doctor quickly reassured him there was no way he could have given them the disease.
Richard felt a wave of relief wash over him, but it didn’t last long because the doctor wasn’t finished talking yet. The doctor then gave him some shocking news. There was a very specific reason why he couldn’t have passed the disease on. In that single moment, Richard felt his whole life start to fall apart. When the talk turned to fertility, the doctor said, “Look, with cystic fibrosis, as a man, you’re infertile. You and your wife are going to have difficulty having children.”
But that was impossible, right? Richard held onto a small spark of hope. Could this be some kind of medical miracle? Or maybe the doctor had simply gotten the diagnosis wrong. “Well, you must have the diagnosis wrong because I’ve already got three boys,” Richard said proudly. “I actually felt glad to be able to tell him that because in my mind it proved he was mistaken,” he later recalled. But the doctor just shook his head sadly, looking awkward and stunned. And right then, Richard knew he had been holding onto false hope.
The realization came over Richard slowly at first. Then the truth hit him hard. He started replaying his life with Kate and seeing every detail differently. He remembered moments that now felt like clear warning signs, and then he began to feel sick inside. This could not be happening. Had something been going on right under his own roof? If it had, Richard had been too busy to notice. After all, he worked late most nights. He hadn’t thought twice when Kate once called him late from a hotel in London saying her flight had been delayed. She told him it was a work trip.
Richard snorted in disgust now, but other small details started coming back to him that he hadn’t paid much attention to before. When the twins were born, people naturally made comments. But now, even the innocent remarks like, “Oh, look, they have your eyes,” felt different and darker in his mind. There was another warning sign that Richard hadn’t thought much about at the time. Right after Kate found out she was pregnant with their first son, she suddenly showed interest in something she had never mentioned during their 7 years of marriage.
Kate was overjoyed to be pregnant for the first time. She read all the maternity books and went to birthing classes. But then she started getting interested in Judaism. Richard was surprised. Both he and Kate had been raised as Christians. Kate even gave all three of their children Jewish middle names, and she refused to have them christened. She had also been seeking advice from a rabbi. Maybe this was a glimpse into the double life she had been living. And maybe it pointed to the man she had been seeing.
Richard knew that his boys didn’t look like him at all, but their faces did look familiar. The clues were starting to add up, and he was beginning to think he knew who the man Kate had been seeing might be. But maybe he was getting ahead of himself. There was still something else he had to consider. Would Kate admit the truth? Or was this all just a terrible mistake?
Richard thought about everything and turned it over in his mind. He had three clues to work with. The first was that his ex-wife had probably been meeting the man during her business trips. The second was that his children resembled a man he had met before, one of Kate’s business colleagues. That would make sense. And the third was that the man was Jewish.
Twins are pretty rare, after all. In the general population, identical twin pregnancies happen about 0.45% of the time, or once in every 250 births. It’s also known that fertility treatments can raise the chances of having twins. Had Kate known they were having trouble conceiving long before he did? After all, they had been married for 7 years when she finally got pregnant.
But that was enough guessing for one day. It was time to confront her. He sat down and angrily typed a message to Kate asking for an explanation. “Hi. I went to the Liverpool Chest Hospital today and got my diagnosis. I have cystic fibrosis. In their experience, they’ve never had a man with CF who has fathered a child, let alone three. It’s 98% certain that I’m not the father of any children,” he wrote. Kate had read the message, but she wasn’t replying.
When being straightforward didn’t bring any answers, Richard decided to take a firmer approach. “I was hoping you could spare me the extra test by just telling me now if I’m the father,” Richard wrote. “I’m happy to follow your lead on how best to tell the boys, but if you make me go through more tests, then I’ll tell them in my own way.”
Kate, feeling cornered, sent her reply just a few minutes later. “Of course the boys are yours, no matter what the science might suggest,” she wrote. Richard couldn’t believe it. She was denying everything outright. “Okay,” he thought. If Kate wanted to play it that way, he could, too. He went to his eldest son, who was a university student at the time, and told him the whole story.
But how did the young man take the news? “I told him that I’ve been diagnosed with cystic fibrosis, which he took surprisingly calmly,” Richard explained. “And as I said, yes, but one of the things I’ve just been told is that it’s extremely unlikely someone with cystic fibrosis could father a child,” he replied. “I’m already ahead of you, Dad. You’re saying you’re probably not my father.” Richard, heartbroken at the thought that he wasn’t his son’s biological father, later recalled, “That would have been the hardest sentence to utter, and he did it for me.”
Then Richard told his eldest son that of course he was still his dad, but that he didn’t think he had conceived him. “It was very emotional, but I was also very angry, right?” Richard said. He had been hit with a double blow that day. So, what was he going to do about it? Richard believes that your children define who you are. So, not only had he been diagnosed with a serious disease, but now he knew he didn’t actually have any children. His legacy would stop with him, and that thought was almost too much to bear.
Then, 2 days later, he finally heard from Kate. It turned out that Kate had been confronted by her eldest son. She called Richard and confessed. She admitted that she had been seeing another man during their 20-year marriage. And to make matters worse, Richard had even met him in passing. The man worked at Barclays Bank. She and the man would meet at a hotel in London while she was traveling for work as a union official. But she still insisted that Richard was their children’s father.
He had no choice but to get an expert’s opinion. He knew the last 20 years of his life had been a complete lie. He was going to make her pay. Richard decided to seek advice from paternity fraud expert Roger Terrell. After he went through numerous tests, it was confirmed that Richard was indeed incapable of fathering children. The next step was to get DNA samples from his sons. The DNA test results showed that the twins weren’t his.
But to complicate things further, his eldest son refused to provide a sample. Richard’s eldest son said, “As far as I’m concerned, he’s my dad and that’s that.” But Richard still had all the proof he needed to start a legal case against Kate. In December 2016, he began proceedings at Birmingham County Court. But Richard’s oldest son had another message for the man he knew as his father, and the young man stayed true to his word.
Of course, this caused Richard immense heartache. The ripple effect of Kate’s lies had been huge, but the reaction from the twins as the case went on was quite different. The twins still see Richard as their dad, even though they know he is not their biological father. One of the twins even sent Richard a heartfelt message as a show of support. The message read, “Dad, as I explained from the beginning, you would never not be my dad to me, regardless of all this. Of course, I’ll stay in touch. That will never change. I’m always here for you, too, and you will always be dad. Love you, X.”
When Kate’s lies were exposed in court, Richard won the case and Kate was ordered to pay him over $300,000. Kate agreed to settle, but on one condition: the man who is the real father of their sons must remain anonymous. But it was a hollow victory for Richard. And he has a message for the boys’ real father, too.
Richard said he would like the biological father to read this and come forward. He believes the boys have a right to know who their father is. “Not the least for the boys’ sake, because they will want to know who their real father is, even if hopefully they will always think of me as their dad,” he added.
