Article By Steven Ertelt
A California couple who assembled a household of surrogate-born children was arrested Tuesday after prosecutors said nannies beat children as young as 2 months old inside what they called a “house of horrors,” while the parents watched on camera.
Guojun Xuan, 66, and Silvia Zhang, 39, were taken into custody at their Arcadia mansion after a 17-month investigation, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said. Prosecutors allege that live-in nannies physically abused at least 15 children — 14 of them born through surrogacy — with the couple’s encouragement.
“This case is unprecedented, it is horrific, and the physical abuse, beating and punishment that these very young children received is despicable,” Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan Hochman said.
Both are charged with conspiracy to commit child abuse. Xuan is also charged with child abuse under circumstances likely to cause great bodily injury or death. Each faces additional counts of accessory after the fact and of preventing or dissuading a witness or victim from reporting a crime. They pleaded not guilty.
Bail was set at $20 million apiece after prosecutors sought $100 million, citing flight risk, the gravity of the charges and the defendants’ means. If convicted, Xuan faces up to 17 years and four months in prison and Zhang up to 11 years and eight months.
The investigation began in May 2025, when Zhang brought a 2-month-old boy to a hospital with a head injury.
“She appeared to be untruthful with hospital staff about how the injury was sustained, and the hospital staff notified law enforcement authorities,” Sheriff Robert Luna said.
Before police reached the home on May 7, 2025, Xuan and Zhang allegedly instructed some of the children to deny they had been beaten, and Zhang allegedly told a nanny to hide sticks used to strike them, the complaint says. Investigators found 14 surrogate-born children, from 2 months old to about 4 or 5, living in the house, along with two other children. Hochman said five more children had been part of the couple’s “initial surrogacy operation.” Zhang kept a spreadsheet tracking 21 children.
The couple founded a surrogacy company in 2021 and ran it from the residence, hiring women across the United States to carry the pregnancies.
Prosecutors say they gave those women false information. One surrogate was told Zhang was a single mother struggling to conceive. Another was told the couple had only one daughter. Parentage, and why the couple sought so many children this way, remain under investigation, Hochman said.
Inside the mansion, children spent hours each day seated at desks in three rooms the couple called “learning centers.” Thirty-two motion-activated cameras fed a large screen in the couple’s office. Prosecutors say the two watched the nannies’ discipline and at times laughed. Hochman said what the cameras recorded “is nothing short of absolute physical abuse, beatings, and punishment on a daily basis.”
In one episode, Xuan allegedly told a nanny to strike a child harder, then joined in and repeatedly struck the child’s bare buttocks and head. Between April 27 and May 7, 2025, cameras allegedly captured nannies spanking, slapping or hitting children. One room had no camera. The complaint says children were carried into it and could be heard screaming from inside.
The hospital case involved a boy named Walter.
Nanny Chunmei Li allegedly struck him in the head on May 4. Two days later, Zhang took him in and, prosecutors say, claimed he had fallen off a bed the day before. Li was previously charged with child abuse likely to cause great bodily injury or death and remains at large. The accessory counts allege that Xuan and Zhang harbored and aided her to prevent her arrest. No other nannies have been charged.
Mitchell Krems, an attorney for Xuan, denied the allegations.
“My client is innocent,” he said. “It is the nanny’s wrongdoing who went on the run. He is being targeted for exercising his constitutional right to have a large family.”
He also denied the allegations against Zhang and told KABC that any accusation his client is abusive “is categorically false.” He said Xuan wanted the children out of “altruism,” and added: “The reason he has all these children is because he wants them to contribute to society. He is not a man who is self-indulgent. Some who are wealthy might spend on jewelry or cars, but he is actually spending his resources to help his children become educated so that they can be the philosophers, the physicians, the researchers and the inventors that help society.”
The children have been in the care of the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services since May 2025.
The case lays bare what pro-life advocates have warned is a lightly regulated trade in the creation and transfer of children in the surrogacy industry.
In a July public comment on a proposed federal fertility-benefits rule, Liberty Counsel Action urged the government to prohibit surrogacy, bar anonymous sperm donation and embryo selection for preferred traits, and recognize that “human life begins at fertilization,” with embryos treated as human beings entitled to legal protection.
The group called the American IVF industry a “wild west” and said a conservative estimate, drawn from American Society for Reproductive Medicine data, put embryos lost or frozen in perpetuity in 2024 at about 3.9 million — “nearly four times the estimated number of induced abortions in 2024.”
Chairman Mat Staver said then: “IVF conceives many precious human lives. However, millions are tragically destroyed in the process.”
The same comment cited a registered sex offender, convicted of child sexual abuse, who became the legal parent of a surrogate-born child without a background check.
Liberty Counsel Action argued that fertility policy should “promote family formation while upholding human dignity and ethical medical practice.”
The Arcadia charges — false statements to the women who carried the children, no meaningful screening, and infants allegedly beaten under camera while the intended parents watched — are the kind of harm those limits were meant to prevent.
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