“Certainly, [she] has gorgeous eyes she got from her biological father. That’s for sure.”
When asked if Ally had plans to meet the sperm donor, Zarin said, “I hope so. Yeah. … I hope to meet him myself. I won’t meet him before Allie does.”
Jill said the situation is “absolutely reality TV-worthy,” calling it, “100 percent get the cameras rolling for that one. I know someone will call me now.”
Despite Ally finding out that her parents used a sperm donor to have her, Zarin added that the reveal “didn’t change anything at all” in their mother-daughter relationship. “Not for the good, not for the better. Nothing. Zero.”
Earlier this year, Zarin has revealed that she and ex-husband Steven Shapiro used a sperm donor to conceive their now-27-year-old daughter, Ally Shapiro. Jill revealed that she and Steven had planned to tell Ally the truth about her origins after she graduated from college.
However, Ally ended up finding out on her own while going through Jill’s emails before her senior year at Vanderbilt University.
“We were going to take it to our grave, nobody knew. We had no plan to tell [Ally],” Jill said on a recent episode of Heather McDonald‘s “Juicy Scoop” podcast, according to Us Weekly.
Zarin explained that she and her ex-husband decided to use a sperm donor to conceive Ally after they struggled with fertility issues. However, it wasn’t a topic that they wanted to discuss at the time because of the stigma surrounding using a sperm donor.
“This was many many years ago … and in those days it was very early on in this whole sperm donor business. At the time people said, ‘You just don’t say anything. Do the insemination and then have sex and pretend that’s how you got pregnant then,’” Zarin recalled. “Because there was, like, a shame to it back then.”
Although Zarin and Steven tried to pick a sperm donor that resembled him, Ally looked different than her father because she was shorter than him and had blue eyes.
Jill claimed that a relative became suspicious and tried to blackmail her into telling the truth by emailing all of Ally’s extended family. According to Zarin, the relative asked the other family members, “Why is Ally the fattest in the Shapiro family?” and “Why does Ally have blue eyes and no one else does?”
Zarin and Steven decided to tell Ally after she graduated college but their plans were derailed when Ally discovered her mom’s emails with the relative on the computer.
Ally told McDonald that her mom explained to her: “We were never going to tell you like this and we didn’t know when the right time was, but basically, your dad’s your dad, but we had a difficult time having you and we used a sperm donor.”
During the interview with McDonald, Ally shared that she was going to take her time when making a decision about whether she decides to reach out to her sperm donor or meet any potential siblings.
“I didn’t have a say in when I was told and how I was told or who my siblings are now,” she said, according to Us Weekly. “I feel like I can choose now when I want to meet this guy and what our relationship is and boundaries … I think I want to meet him when the timing is right for both of us. I feel like now’s not the right time.”
Zarin and Steven divorced in 1998 after nearly a decade of marriage. Jill re-married for a second time in 2000 with Bobby Zarin, who passed away in January 2018. She is currently dating Gary Brody five months after her late husband’s death.
Photo Credit: Scott Roth/Invision/AP/Shutterstock
