Los Angeles County prosecutors have charged Guojun Xuan, 66, and Silvia Zhang, 39, with conspiracy to commit child abuse after a two-month-old boy, Walter, arrived at a hospital in May 2025 with head injuries a doctor said were consistent with a car accident or shaking, not a fall from a bed as his mother claimed. The couple, who deny the charges, remain in custody on $20 million bond each as authorities investigate the treatment of up to 15 children living in their Arcadia mansion, a residence prosecutors described as a “house of horrors for these incredibly young children who had been brought to this house through this surrogacy process.”
The Scale of the Operation
The case has expanded rapidly since the October arrests. Prosecutors initially identified 14 children, ranging from six months to three years old, living in the home. That figure has since grown to 26 children total, all but one born via surrogates. A criminal complaint alleges the couple installed 32 surveillance cameras throughout the property. Footage reviewed by investigators reportedly shows nannies carrying children into rooms without cameras before the children scream, and children sitting at desks for extended periods. One nanny, Chunmei Li, has been charged with child abuse under circumstances likely to cause great bodily injury or death but remains at large.
How the Surrogacy Pipeline Worked
The technical reality of how Xuan and Zhang built a family of this size reveals the regulatory gaps at the heart of the US surrogacy industry. According to court filings and reporting by AOL, the couple operated a private surrogacy agency from the same mansion where the children lived, paying women around the country $45,000 to $135,000 per pregnancy. Amber Applegarth, a nursing student and single mother in Riverside, California, signed a $45,000 contract in 2018 after an evaluation and a conversation with Xuan through a translator. She became pregnant via embryo transfer at a California hospital that September.
Applegarth’s experience illustrates the detachment built into the commercial model. Despite an agreement for regular contact, she received only a handful of WeChat messages and a gift basket during the pregnancy. Xuan missed the birth; Zhang arrived a day late. “I was just the surrogate, so I had no rights to have him with me,” Applegarth said. “The poor baby had to be by himself in the nursery until Silvia showed up to pick him up.” The contractual relationship ended at the hospital door. There is no statutory requirement in California for intended parents to maintain contact with the surrogate post-birth, nor for agencies to monitor the welfare of the child once custody transfers.
The Regulatory Vacuum
California is a global hub for commercial surrogacy because its courts reliably enforce gestational carrier contracts and establish legal parentage before birth. But the law treats the process as a private transaction. Once a pre-birth order is signed, the child is legally the intended parents’ responsibility. No state agency conducts home studies for intended parents in private surrogacy arrangements, unlike adoption or foster care. The detail that matters here is that Xuan and Zhang were able to repeat the process 25 times without a single welfare check on the household where the children would be raised.
The couple’s attorney, Mitchell Krems, has disputed the allegations, calling them a “mischaracterisation” of the evidence. He told CBS News that authorities were punishing his client for wanting a large family: “He is being targeted for exercising his constitutional right to have a large family.” If convicted, Xuan faces up to 17 years and four months in prison; Zhang faces up to 11 years and eight months.
What Comes Next
The case has thrown the laws and ethics of the US surrogacy industry into question. Legislators in Sacramento are now facing pressure to close the oversight gap between contract enforcement and child protection. The next court date for Xuan and Zhang will determine whether the surveillance footage and medical records are sufficient to move beyond conspiracy charges to substantive counts of abuse for each of the 15 children identified as victims.
Sources
- List of federal political sex scandals in the United States
- Articles written by Isaías Alvarado | EL PAÍS
- Inside the California ‘House of Horrors’ Where Parents of 26 Children Born Mostly by Surrogates Are Accused of Abuse – AOL
- 26 Kids, a $100M Fortune and a Nanny on the Run: Inside the Criminal Case Exposing a California Couple’s Surrogacy Empire
- Inside America's surrogacy scandal: The couple with 27 children – World News
- A California foster-care survivor says he reported abuse as a child in 2006 but officials failed to act; nearly 20 years later, an appeals court reversed the dismissal of his negligence lawsuit against Alameda County
Photo: Brendel (CC BY-SA 2.5)
