Twenty-year-old Allyson “Ally” Shapiro was in for the shock of a lifetime when she learned that her biological father was actually a sperm donor — a secret her mother, Jill Zarin, had worked hard to keep hush-hush throughout Shapiro’s entire life. The story goes that Zarin and her ex-husband Steven Shapiro experienced fertility struggles while trying to conceive naturally, and that’s when they decided to take another route: artificial insemination via a sperm donor. “We were going to take it to our grave, nobody knew,” Zarin revealed in March 2020 during an episode of comedian Heather McDonald’s “Juicy Scoop” podcast. “We had no plan to tell [Ally].” Alas, it appears the universe had a different plan.
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According to Zarin, a family member (whom Ally later revealed to be her ex-step-mother) began blackmailing both herself and her ex-husband, Shapiro, about the private information, and that’s when they resolved to tell her after she graduated from college. But in a haphazard turn of events, Ally just so happened to come across the information all on her own after perusing her mother’s private emails. “I never in a million years would have thought that. Like, I had no inkling,” Ally said about learning the shocking information. “Yeah, I had blue eyes, and I’m shorter than everyone else, but never would have guessed it at all.”
