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Survivor winner Richard Hatch is in the news again, this time with the shocking revelation that he might have fathered as many as 200 children while earning money as a sperm donor during his time in college.
The CBS reality competition’s inaugural champion — he won the first $1 million prize on the show 13 years ago — tells Inside Edition that he believes he may have fathered dozens, if not hundreds, of children. He says he donated his sperm hundreds of times at the Cryobank in Fairfax, Va., and was paid $30 per donation.
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“I did it for two years, about two or three times a week,” Hatch says of his time at George Mason University in Virginia.
The reality star — he returned to Survivor in 2003 for the All Stars edition and also competed on NBC’s The Celebrity Apprentice in 2011 — recently met two of the children whom he fathered. The pair, Emily Kidd and Devin O’Neill, both 24, tracked him down on a website called the Donor Sibling Registry using information their mothers shared with them.
O’Neill reached out with an e-mail that read, “This may be weird, but you might be my biological donor. Hi!”
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Kidd’s mother, meanwhile, confirmed to her that Hatch was indeed her father. Kidd was somewhat familiar with him, having watched Survivor with her mother.
“I didn’t remember much from when I was 11, but I do remember the naked man and the hype of it,” she says, referring to Hatch’s tendency to spend much of his time on Survivor unclothed.
O’Neill, meanwhile, had no idea who Hatch was.
In addition to gracing the covers of national magazines when Survivor became a massive hit in 2000 — thanks in part to Hatch’s machinations and scheming — the reality star also made headlines in 2006 when he was sentenced to three years in jail for failing to pay taxes on his Survivor winnings. He was ordered to serve an additional nine months in 2011 for violating the conditions of his release from jail.
Hatch, who is gay, has a son whom he adopted in 1998. He lives with his husband, Emiliano, in Newport, R.I. He says he’s getting to know O’Neill and Kidd, who spent part of the Christmas holiday with Hatch.
Said Hatch: “It’s an exciting time. It’s a great time.”
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