Judge denies bail reduction for Chinese couple accused of abusing their 21 children

According to a recent lawsuit, 66-year-old Guojun Xuan had "an obsession with impregnating women and amassing an extraordinary number of children."LOS ANGELES (CN) — A Superior Court Judge, on Friday, declined to reduce bail for a pair of Chinese nationals who raised more than two dozen children and who are accused of a long pattern of child abuse.Bail was previously set at $20 million each and will remain at that amount.Guojun Xuan, 66, and Silvia Zhang, 39, were charged last week with conspiracy to commit child abuse and multiple counts of dissuading a witness. Prosecutors say the two Chinese nationals with dual U.S. citizenship had 21 children, 19 through surrogates. They raised the children in a large Arcadia home with six live-in nannies, one of whom is charged with beating a 2-month-old infant, causing a brain bleed. Zhang and Xuan did not seek medical treatment for the boy until two days later.Both have pleaded not guilty. Last week, Xuan’s attorney, Mitchell Krems, called the charges “patently false” and said the abuse was “all the nannies’ doing.” He has also said his client is “gravely ill.”Xuan, who is battling a rare form of leukemia and recovering from a recent bone marrow transplant, appeared in court in a wheelchair. Krems asked the court to reduce his bail to $5 million or release him without bail, arguing that remaining in jail posed a serious risk to his life and that he could not receive all of his prescription medication.“There is no actual facts or evidence to suggest that there is a flight risk,” Krems added.Prosecutors had asked for bail to be raised to $100 million, citing records showing Xuan had at least $76 million in two money market accounts.Though Xuan and Zhang presented themselves to potential surrogates as a struggling married couple unable to conceive, prosecutors say they were none of those things. Xuan is believed to be worth tens of millions of dollars, and their 10,000-square-foot home in the affluent Arcadia suburb is reportedly worth more than $4 million.The house had more than 30 cameras monitoring the children and nannies. Surveillance footage obtained by law enforcement showed nannies subjecting the children to an array of brutal punishments, including, according to the criminal complaint, “bare-buttock spankings, kicks, repeated strikes to the hands with sticks, blows with shoes, hits to the head, body and hands and prolonged squatting as punishment.”“The screams — I had to watch the video on mute,” Deputy District Attorney MacKenzie Teymouri told the judge on Friday. “The screams, it is constant.”Teymouri also said that when the parents were interviewed, Xuan couldn’t recall all of his children’s names and “had to pull out a spreadsheet” to do so.Zhang’s attorney, Matt Koohanim, said his client and Xuan had no intimate relationship, describing it as “more of an employer/employee arrangement.”Last month, five surrogate mothers sued Xuan and Zhang for, among other things, fraud, negligence, “nonconsensual use of gametes or embryos in assisted reproduction,” and sexual battery.“Behind the facade of a struggling couple was defendant Xuan, a wealthy man driven, as publicly reported, by an obsession with impregnating women and amassing an extraordinary number of children,” the women say in their complaint, filed in LA Superior Court. “To feed that obsession, defendants used plaintiffs’ bodies as the raw material of an assembly line, treating their wombs not as their own but as instruments of production and sexual obsession. Because defendants procured plaintiffs’ submission to these deeply invasive contacts with their sexual and reproductive organs through deception and coercion, each such contact was a nonconsensual, harmful and offensive touching of the most intimate parts of Plaintiffs’ bodies, a sexual assault and battery.”Though the U.S. surrogacy industry is not strongly regulated, a typical firm would still have conducted background checks on Xuan and Zhang. The pair avoided those checks by creating their own firm, Mark Surrogacy Investments. According to the criminal complaint, they made false statements to at least two women who became surrogates, telling them Zhang was struggling to conceive.Prosecutors say that before police raided the house last year, the couple instructed some children to deny they had been beaten, and Zhang told them to hide sticks used to hit them. On Friday, Judge Lugo cited indications that Xuan and Zhang may have tried to hide or destroy evidence and move witnesses out of the country, along with Xuan’s possession of four passports, including a Mexican passport, as reasons not to reduce their bail.If convicted, Xuan faces up to 17 years and four months in prison, Zhang up to 11 years and eight months, and their co-defendant, nanny Chunmei Li, 58, up to 12 years.Categories / UncategorizedSubscribe to our free newslettersOur weekly newsletter Closing Arguments offers the latest about ongoing trials, major litigation and rulings in courthouses around the U.S. and the world, while the monthly Under the Lights dishes the legal dirt from Hollywood, sports, Big Tech and the arts.Additional Reads