Arcadia surrogacy mansion parents left years-long trail of red flags before child abuse case

In 2019, two years before Guojun Xuan and Silvia Zhang began amassing a family of more than 20 surrogate children, Zhang was accused of misdemeanor child abuse after leaving her then-8-year-old daughter in a hot car for hours.

That case — detailed in a recent motion by prosecutors opposing bail for the couple and a spokesperson for the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department — could have affected their ability to engage in the surrogacy process, if a surrogacy firm conducted a diligent background check of the aspiring parents, according to two civil attorneys.

But Xuan and Zhang, the attorneys said, were able to sidestep what few safeguards exist in the generally unregulated U.S. surrogacy industry by creating their own firm, Mark Surrogacy Investments. While there are almost no rules governing who can and cannot acquire a child through the surrogacy process — which involves paying women to receive embryo transfers and carry the babies to term — independent firms still conduct due diligence on prospective clients and surrogates, according to Maya Shulman, a Calabasas-based surrogacy lawyer.

By launching their own firm, Xuan and Zhang were able to ensure no one looked into their backgrounds, Shulman said.

“No respectable agency and no respectable attorney would have represented her,” Shulman said.

A Sheriff’s Department spokesperson said the child left in the car was not seriously injured, and court records show Zhang entered into a diversionary plea agreement with L.A. County prosecutors, the terms of which were completed in 2023, allowing the case to be dismissed. All records in the case are sealed.

Last week, Xuan, 66, and Zhang, 39, appeared in court to answer charges in another child abuse case. They stand accused of operating a “house of horrors” at their nine-room Arcadia mansion, allegedly subjecting their surrogate children to beatings and other punishments at the hands of several nannies. Prosecutors charged both with conspiracy to commit child abuse and witness intimidation. Xuan is also charged with delivering one of the beatings himself.

Guojun Xuan, 66, and Silvia Zhang, 39, were charged Tuesday with conspiracy to commit child abuse a year after police rescued 14 of their biological children.

They have pleaded not guilty and remain jailed in lieu of $20 million. Xuan’s attorney, Mitchell Krems, has blamed the alleged abuse on the couple’s nannies and suggested Xuan and Zhang are being heavily scrutinized because of anti-Chinese sentiment in the U.S.

The case has raised questions about how Xuan and Zhang were able to collect so many surrogate children — and what took so long for authorities to intervene.

A Times review of civil lawsuits, police records, restraining order applications and interviews with law enforcement officials shows that the couple was repeatedly the subject of scrutiny by local authorities and child services investigators over the past few years.

The records and interviews show that during the four years that Mark Surrogacy Investments operated, from 2021 to 2025, Zhang was accused of threatening to sic “gangsters” on a tenant in a property dispute, while Xuan allegedly hurled rocks at people and using a Taser on someone’s dog during an argument. Police asked prosecutors to charge Xuan in separate cases in 2020 and 2021 where he was accused of vandalism, brandishing a weapon and throwing a brick at a renter, but prosecutors declined to bring charges either time.

Asked about the past cases, Zhang’s attorney, Mark Koohanim, declined to comment. Krems noted his client had never been convicted of a crime.

“Any type of accusation that my client is violent at this point has not been adjudicated,” he said.

In total, the L.A. County Department of Children and Family Services received seven referrals involving Xuan or Zhang between 2019 and 2025, but acted to remove the children from the couple’s custody only last year, after an infant was allegedly beaten so badly they suffered a brain bleed, according to a motion seeking to hold the couple in jail in lieu of $100 million and a law enforcement source who requested anonymity to discuss child services records, which are generally not public.

In 2022, Department of Children and Family Services investigators visited the Arcadia mansion to check on the health of a 5-month-old the couple had taken custody of through surrogacy, according to prosecutors’ bail deviation motion in their pending case. After the visit, the child was relocated to China, prosecutors said.

Krems suggested the Department of Children and Family Services referrals — including an incident in which Zhang took a 2-month-old to a hospital to be treated for a brain bleed — were simply the result of public scrutiny of their unconventional family.

“Anytime you have 21 kids you’re going to be a target for public speculation,” Krems said. “The fact that there are seven referrals, I’m surprised there aren’t more with a family this large. … I don’t think that’s something that’s perplexing.”

Arcadia Police did not respond to a request for comment. A Department of Children and Family Services spokeswoman said state law barred her from discussing individual cases.

The Arcadia surrogate parents and their nanny, who are accused of child abuse, are seen on a display board during a news conference at the Hall of Justice in Los Angeles on Oct. 6. (Ronaldo Bolaños / Los Angeles Times) The Federal Bureau of Investigation is now also probing the couple’s so-called rent-a-womb operation, according to a civil lawsuit filed by several women against the couple and two law enforcement sources with direct knowledge of the investigation. FBI agents were involved in a search of the mansion last week and one plaintiff in the lawsuit has been interviewed by federal agents. The bureau’s investigation focuses on potential money laundering and surrogacy fraud crimes, according to the two law enforcement sources, who requested anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation.

Xuan and Zhang face multiple counts of conspiracy to commit child abuse and witness intimidation. According to a bail deviation motion filed last week, prosecutors recovered 10 days’ worth of CCTV footage that streamed to Xuan and Zhang’s bedroom which showed the nannies carried out a “pervasive system of physical abuse” at the couple’s direction.

The tapes, which spanned from April 27 to May 7, 2025, “show individual children being struck more than 20 times during a single incident.” Some children were struck on their hands, bodies, and legs more than 150 times, prosecutors said.

One of the nannies, Chunmei Li, was charged with assault for beating a 2-month-old boy named Walter so badly that he suffered a brain bleed. That incident triggered the 2025 investigation that led to the removal of the children from the Arcadia mansion. Li fled to Mexico and then China to avoid arrest, and Xuan and Zhang are accused of helping her, according to a criminal complaint and the prosecutors’ bail deviation motion.

Xuan and Zhang’s desire to have a large family stemmed from their experiences in China, according to Krems. The couple both immigrated to the U.S. in the shadow of the country’s one-child policy, a population suppression initiative. Enforcement of that policy ended in 2015, one year before Zhang immigrated to the U.S. with the help of her ex-husband, according to a divorce filing.

Two law enforcement sources previously told The Times that Xuan and Zhang hold dual citizenship in the U.S. and China.

While the hot-car case loomed against Zhang, Xuan founded Mark Surrogacy Investments LLC in May of 2021, listing the Arcadia mansion as its headquarters, according to business records.

Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Nathan Hochman said last week there is no evidence the firm ever arranged a surrogacy that didn’t involve Xuan and Zhang.

Shulman, the surrogacy attorney, said surrogate mothers and the parents they intend to deliver a baby for normally are required to have independent legal advocates who negotiate a contract between the parties.

But with Xuan and Zhang controlling the firm that arranged the surrogate births, no one looked into their backgrounds.

“A case like this stains the whole industry and that’s the problem,” Shulman said.

Jamie Mejarus, the civil attorney representing five surrogates suing Xuan and Zhang for fraud, has alleged in court filings that the couple also presented an attorney of their choosing to the mothers.

When several of the women refused to surrender the children to Xuan and Zhang after abuse allegations surfaced last year, Mejarus said the couple’s attorney discouraged them from fighting for custody.

“He basically was feeding our clients information that everything is fine, these are good people,” Mejarus said.

The attorney said those allegations are untrue and declined to comment further.

The father of some 22 children discovered by Arcadia police in May also owns a property in El Monte where authorities found evidence of illegal gambling and drug activity, court records show.

In the civil suit, the mothers accused Xuan and Zhang of building a “mass surrogacy operation” that “could function only if every professional safeguard designed to surface the truth was quietly owned by the people the safeguards were meant to check.”

Apart from the child abuse charge, the couple were allegedly involved in other troubling incidents.

In late 2021, Zhang was accused of threatening a Northridge family during a property dispute, according to an application for a restraining order. The home had recently been foreclosed on and purchased by FGH Investment LLC, a company registered to an El Monte property that also housed offices for Xuan’s surrogacy business, according to California secretary of State records and a civil lawsuit.

“For you and your family’s sake, you should consider moving out of the premises, and giving us the keys or else we will send some gangsters to force you and your family to move out,” Zhang said to the man, according to the application for a restraining order. “Trust me, you don’t want to mess with any of us.”

The man claimed in the application that two men showed up at the house and tried to break down a gate months later. The order was dissolved in April 2022, court records show.

Xuan also faced allegations of violence on multiple occasions between 2020 and 2022. L.A. County sheriff’s deputies investigated him for vandalism and brandishing a weapon in 2020, but L.A. County prosecutors declined to file charges due to insufficient evidence. The next year, Xuan was accused of throwing a brick at a tenant in Venice Beach, according to a police report.

An LAPD spokesman said detectives referred the case to the L.A. City attorney’s office, which declined to prosecute. An email to the renter seeking comment was not returned.

In May 2022, Xuan faced similar allegations in a civil lawsuit. Alejandro Diaz, whom Xuan hired as an eviction manager for his real estate firm, accused Xuan of trying to break down a tenant’s door in Apple Valley and using a Taser to shock another renter’s dog, according to the civil suit. When Diaz challenged what he called Xuan’s “illegal eviction practices,” Xuan allegedly threw rocks at him and tried to punch him, the suit alleged.

The case was settled in 2025. In a counter claim, Xuan accused Diaz of being drunk at work and trying to strangle him. Diaz’s attorney did not respond to an email seeking comment.

The women who sued Xuan and Zhang gave birth in Georgia, Texas, Virginia, Pennsylvania and California. In the suit, they accused the couple of lying about owning the surrogacy firm and failing to disclose that they already had more than a dozen children. The suit accused Xuan of having a “sexual obsession” related to fathering children, but did not elaborate.

“The surrogacy enterprise was … a scheme by which one man used the bodies of many women, without their informed consent, to reproduce his own bloodline on a mass scale,” the suit read.

A view of the Arcadia home, shown at center, of Guojun Xuan and Sylvia Zhang. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times) After news of the raid on the Arcadia mansion became public last year, the women fought to prevent the children from being turned over to Xuan and Zhang, who responded in alarming fashion, according to the suit.

Stacey Raelyn King, who gave birth to a surrogate child in Virginia in July 2025, said Xuan and Zhang filed “a false report that Ms. King was attempting to ‘kidnap’ the baby” and later filed a million-dollar breach-of-contract suit against her for refusing to grant them custody in the wake of the May 2025 revelation that the family had more than 20 surrogate children.

Kayla Elliot, who gave birth to a child named Walter for the couple in March 2025, said Zhang arrived at a Texas hospital to take custody of her newborn son with “nothing for the infant, not even a diaper bag.” While Elliot was still recovering in a maternity ward the next day, Zhang demanded she buy a car seat and drive Zhang and her newborn son to the airport, according to the suit.

Majerus said none of her clients would have carried Xuan and Zhang’s children if they knew even a shred of their alleged history.

“If an independent agency had been involved, they would have found all of this information and my clients would not have been surrogates,” she said.

James Queally writes about crime and policing in Southern California, where he currently covers Los Angeles County’s criminal courts, the district attorney’s office and juvenile justice issues for the Los Angeles Times.

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