I have fathered 190 children. It’s my duty to populate the planet and I don’t care what people say about my methods: Blasted as a ‘predator’ who takes advantage of desperate women, ‘natural’ sperm donor ROB ALBON breaks his silence

What has Rob Albon – a man of slender means who lives in a small terraced house in North East England – in common with tech billionaire Elon Musk, the richest person on the planet?

Not a lot, you may imagine. But actually in one fundamental respect they agree: both are intent on fathering hordes of children, on spreading their genes and populating the world with mini versions of themselves.

Back in 2021, Musk – who at last official count had 14 children, although some suspect the true number could be close to 100 – said low and rapidly declining birth rates were ‘one of the biggest risks to civilization’.

He was, therefore, duty bound to set a good example, he reasoned; to practise what he preached.

What he would make of Albon, is anyone’s guess. His tally stands at a staggering 190.

That’s correct: there are 190 children and young adults scattered across the world bearing his DNA – and he couldn’t be more proud.

‘I’m the poor man’s Elon Musk,’ says Albon, a stocky, balding 54 year old, who speaks in a soft American drawl.

‘While he [Musk] has reached the pinnacle in business, his technology will have become obsolete by the time he dies, so his children will be his most enduring legacy.

‘Like Musk, I’m a very creative person. I feel I have to give back to the world and this is my way: to be productive. It’s something I feel I should accomplish. I have some responsibility to my ancestors and their descendants. Filial piety is what it’s called. I’m doing it for posterity.’

Others may have a less grandiloquent way of describing it. Certainly Albon has helped create babies on an industrial scale, but he is doing so as a private sperm donor, advertising via his Facebook page.

And his preferred method of donation is by what this growing and unregulated industry terms natural insemination (NI) – that’s straightforward, penetrative sex – or partial intercourse, (PI) which apparently only involves penetration at the last minute.

He prefers these methods because fresh semen, he argues, is far more effective than frozen, and also because certain sexual positions – as opposed to using a syringe – increase the chances of pregnancy.

That he enjoys his work is purely a perk of the job, he insists.

‘Of course I like sex. It’s a creative thing,’ he says. ‘The women enjoy it, too. Some of them have told me.’

Some experts, however, such as the internationally renowned andrologist Professor Allan Pacey, who received an MBE for services to reproductive science in 2016, see Albon as nothing but a predator, who uses his unproven claims simply ‘as a ruse to have sex’.

Not an unreasonable assessment, many would agree. Yet, Albon’s riposte? ‘Of course he doesn’t like me. Maybe he sees me as a competitor.’

Albon arrived from his native America in the UK in 2020, and has fathered around 40 children here since. However the majority of his offspring are in the States and Argentina, where he also lived and worked as a translator.

During a 30-year marriage in the US, he had two children: a daughter Mimi, 29, who has decried him as ‘manipulative’ and ‘dangerous’, and a son. Both children are now estranged from him.

Of Mimi he says: ‘She is very strong-willed and independent. I applaud this. We have different views socially and politically; we’ve had many disagreements but I’ve never manipulated her.’

He fails to grasp that Mimi’s denunciation of him is due to his activities as a donor and, specifically to a recent court judgment against him, when the whole world learned what he’d been doing – and the true number of her half-siblings out there.

The judgment came in February after, in an unprecedented move, a family court judge in Cardiff made his name public in order to warn vulnerable women about the threat he poses.

Before then, while ‘working’ as a donor – charging £100 per donation plus expenses – he hid his true identity under an alias, using the pseudonym Joe Donor.

Yet in 2023 he applied for parental rights, and to be named on the birth certificate, of a child he fathered to a same-sex couple, via sperm donation, when he first arrived in the UK.

The women objected, and the case ended up before the court, where they described how their encounter with Albon wrecked their lives.

It led to the breakdown of their relationship, they said, and mental health struggles for the biological mother, who suffered from anxiety, depression and suicidal thoughts.

It’s normally unheard of for a father to be named in a family court, but Jonathan Furness KC, sitting as a deputy high court judge, described Albon as man with ‘a complete absence of sensitivity or empathy, who is wholly self-centred and will stop at nothing to obtain what he wants.’

Albon remains unapologetic: ‘It’s ridiculous,’ he says. ‘The judge is definitely wrong. A child has the right to an accurate birth record. My name should have been on the birth certificate but another person’s name was on it and she had no right to be there.

‘That is the law, but the judge said nothing wrong had happened.’

Smiley and charming – when he wants to be, he has a way of expressing his troubling beliefs as if they were absolute facts.

You can see how the impressionable might be won over by his decisiveness.

Often during our interview in a London hotel, he oscillates between obfuscation and absolute dogmatic certainty.

He is vague, for instance, about when he graduated from university, but convinced of his grasp of the law and medicine.

He objects that the judge publicly identified him: ‘There was no reason to name me. Even a private donor in a clinic has a right to remain anonymous.’

And he has a habit of turning the tables on his detractors, accusing them of the faults they observe in him: ‘I have empathy… he is describing himself: he lacks empathy. He said I’m controlling but he wants to control me through this negative judgment.

‘He said he was naming me to protect women from me, but it drew me to the attention of more people who wanted my help.’

Since the judgment against him, he insists he has, in fact, scaled down his activities as a donor, although his Facebook page is still live and he is happy to provide siblings for existing ‘recipients’.

Instead, he has now turned his amateur attention to the law.

He is operating as a ‘McKenzie Friend’, charging £50-£60 per hour to help litigants who cannot afford legal representation in the family courts.

‘I advocate for the unrepresented, most often fathers trying to get access to their children, sometimes in care proceedings. I help with appeals. I’ve had successes with family law,’ he says.

Would anyone want such a man batting for their side? It is hard to see how.

The last time the Daily Mail interviewed Albon, he’d moved in with one of his British ‘recipients’, Ellie Ellison, 33.

Their transactional relationship became personal after he supplied his sperm – by two sessions of natural insemination – for her second child in 2021.

In a jaw-dropping interview, they spoke of their hopes of marrying and raising a family together, but within six months or so, before the baby was even born, they had split up. Albon has never seen his son who is now four years old.

The fault, he says predictably, was Ellie’s. ‘Maybe I didn’t know her very well,’ he observes without irony.

‘When I first got into a relationship with her she said: “You are welcome to continue being a donor and to have natural intercourse with other women.”’

‘She said she didn’t mind as long as no feelings were involved. But later I discovered she was not that tolerant. She started to object.’

Small wonder, you may think, but Albon still insists the blame lies with her.

‘She said I could do natural insemination then she changed her mind. I didn’t tell her that I was going to stop.’

Did Ellie issue you with an ultimatum? ‘No, no, no,’ he objects. ‘There were criticisms from her family, who were quite unhappy to see her with me.’

Quite extraordinarily, he does not concede that the family’s lack of enthusiasm for him as a prospective husband for Ellie was down to him having no-strings-attached sex with strangers, to make them pregnant.

Absolutely not, he insists: ‘No, it was because I was more capable than Ellie’s former partner and her grandmother, who raised her, saw her slipping away. So she said, “How can you be with him with all the stuff he does?” But the real reason she was so critical was jealousy.’

I ask if he will try to see the child he has with Ellie. ‘I’m not ready to take her on in a legal battle. I have seen the biases of the courts,’ he says darkly.

He is, at once, intelligent and astonishingly lacking in self-awareness. It is a combustible mix.

Adopted, with a twin brother who died, aged 20, in a motorbike accident, his adoptive parents were ‘conservative’; his mother a housewife and a ‘proselytising Episcopalian Christian’.

The family moved from West Virginia to West Africa with his father’s work in the Foreign Service when Rob was a child, and he attended missionary school there, imbuing the pro-natal belief that humanity must propagate and multiply.

Back in the USA he took his first degree in theoretical linguistics at Wisconsin-Madison University, then attended the Mormon Brigham Young University in Utah, where he studied for – but failed to complete – a master’s degree.

He says he is fluent in Chinese, Japanese, French and Spanish, and that he has served in an elite unit of paratroopers, claiming not to remember precisely when: ‘It seems like a different life.’

While at university he met the woman who was to become his wife. They were together for 30 years yet he admits – with breathtaking insouciance – that he fathered several children outside their marriage before, covertly, becoming a sperm donor.

‘There were a few illegitimate children here and there,’ he says with such breezy indifference he could be describing the acquisition of a succession of cars.

‘I was just a person going through life. I didn’t think about it much.

‘A lot of men would be extremely upset if they found out the women they’d been having affairs with were pregnant. But I felt satisfied. One woman wanted to get rid of the baby and I had to convince her not to abort it.

‘I bought her an apartment so she could have the child. I don’t think it is right to kill babies. But it wasn’t like I was planning to marry her. I didn’t even want to be with her. It wasn’t that kind of relationship.’

It seems almost redundant to ask if he ever sees the child he persuaded the mother not to abort, but he confirms: ‘No, she got married to someone else and moved on with her life so we lost touch.’

Drill down into the reasons for his infidelity – and the subsequent urge to donate sperm – and he says: ‘Most often people cheat because there is something emotional missing in their relationship. They may not feel noticed or appreciated. That wasn’t the case for me.

‘And sex was not an issue. I never felt that was lacking.

‘I just felt the need for more children. My wife wanted two. That was enough for her but I wanted more – and I wasn’t going to leave her just because she didn’t want any more children.’

So 20 years into his marriage – around 2010 – his solution was to become a sperm donor, communicating at first with prospective clients on Yahoo messenger. Then, with the advent of Facebook, he says the surge in demand was ‘monumental’.

It’s easy to see why women who are desperate to have children but cannot afford treatment in a regulated, licensed clinic – where, in the US, a cycle of IVF can cost up to £15,000, and £5,000 in the UK – turn to him.

Yet, inevitably word got back to his long-suffering wife. ‘She was angry, as you can imagine. She made a decision: she could not tolerate it.’

Does he feel any remorse? ‘I can see it isn’t a very nice thing to do to your partner,’ he admits with understatement. ‘But I got married when I was quite young. It was a different world. I came from a conservative background and if you wanted sex you had to be married.’

They separated, but it was not actually until shortly before he arrived in the UK five years ago that their divorce came through.

Meanwhile, he has left a trail of destruction in his wake. There is an arrest warrant for him in Wisconsin, USA, for six counts of not paying support for a child born from one of his sperm donations.

‘I have not met that child and I don’t know the full circumstances,’ he prevaricates, ‘but you’re innocent until proven guilty.’

Despite the fact that he has embraced fatherhood on an epic scale, he has no relationship with his legitimate offspring.

Yet he says he still harbours a hope that they might be reconciled: ‘One day they’ll have their own children and maybe they’ll want to see me.’

Of the 190 children he has fathered, he says he is in touch with 50 or 60 of them.

‘I meet them in person for an hour or two. Every week I see one of them. We go to a restaurant, play. I’m a fun guy! It’s like being an uncle.’

He does not – could not – support them financially, of course.

And he is still seeking that illusory woman to settle down with. I ask if there is anyone on the horizon.

‘There could be,’ he says cryptically. ‘It’s a very firm maybe.’

It is a measure of his compulsion to populate the planet that he is still seeking a partner of child-bearing age: ‘I probably wouldn’t be involved with anyone who is too old to have kids. I might want another one, one day,’ he says, unrepentant to the last.