A woman has spoken of her shock after she found out she could have over 100 secret siblings and may have accidentally dated her half-brother.
Chrysta Bilton grew up in Los Angeles in the US and it wasn't until she was 23 that she discovered that dad Jeffrey Harrison had fathered many more children besides her.
Jeffrey donated sperm to Chrysta's mother Debra in the early 1980s, who only told her daughter about her father, AKA 'donor 150', when she realised her eldest daughter Bilton could be dating her own half-brother.
"[It] is what happens when sperm donation isn't regulated and you have a lot of half-siblings," Chrysta said.
In a wild childhood, Chrysta and the rest of her family went between moments of living with plenty of cash to none at all as their lesbian mother dated a number of women, joined cults and indulged in pyramid schemes.
She told The Guardian: "My mother was incredibly loving and magical, but also incredibly complex. She struggled with alcoholism and drug addiction, and cycled through several [spiritual] cults in her own life."
Chrysta has detailed her life in a book released in the UK this week called 'A Normal Family: The Surprising Truth About My Crazy Childhood (and How I Discovered 35 New Siblings)'.
She added: "Through my upbringing she often paid the bills through wild get-rich-quick schemes. So the book is also about what it’s like for a child to grow up in that kind of instability."
Debra had asked Jeffrey to stick around after she bought his sperm for the equivalent of around £1,600, desperate to have a child as a single gay woman.
Agreeing to never donate sperm again, the former stripper and Playgirl centrefold piece was also paid by Debra to fulfil some of his fatherly duties.
He decided not to tell the family he had continued to donate sperm, bringing himself in up to £330 a month through the scheme.
Now married to a British journalist, Chrysta believes she could have well over 100 siblings, but has around 40 she knows about.
She still meets her father a few times a year. A colourful character, Jeffrey apparently talks of aliens and the end of the world.
Chrysta said: "A coffee while I listen to him warn me about Armageddon or, you know, the aliens that are going to come harvest my eggs.
"What was interesting interviewing him for the book was that he’s incredibly lucid about the past. He calls himself the ‘soul caller’."
Meeting her siblings, the family has recognised the similarities in each other such as the same dimples, arms and eyebrows.
