8A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN FRIDAY, MARCH 18, 2016
Schnitzer: His only marriage ended in divorce in 2005
Continued from Page 1A
The woman
That woman is Cory Noel
Sause, 37, an executive at her
family’s Coos Bay barge and
tugboat company.
Sause and Schnitzer’s baby
emerged from the genetic
material of two Oregon busi-
ness dynasties.
In Portland, the Schnitzer
family’s two branches — one
in the steel business, the other
in real estate — have been
outsized players in economic
and philanthropic circles for a
more than a century.
In Coos Bay, the Sause
Bros. operation is nearly as old.
The family runs a fourth-gen-
eration tugboat and barge busi-
ness that stretches from Alaska
to Mexico.
When Schnitzer and Sause
decided to try a surrogate preg-
nancy, Schnitzer left nothing
to chance, employing a contro-
versial approach to select the
sex of the child.
He also took legal
precautions.
His attorney drew up a
contract specifying Schnitzer
would not accept just any baby
— he’d only take a boy.
“Schnitzer hereby relin-
quishes any claim to or juris-
diction over any female
embryo from Sause and any
resulting female offspring that
might result from the use of
Sause’s eggs,” reads the con-
tract, dated June 2, 2014.
On Dec. 22, Schnitzer’s
dream came true: his son
arrived.
On March 3, that dream
turned into a nightmare when
Sause challenged him in Mult-
nomah County Circuit Court,
saying he was violating their
contract by denying her par-
entage of their son.
Filings in that case provide
much of the information pre-
sented in this story.
Parentage in dispute
Sause declined to com-
ment. Schnitzer, however, sat
down for a two-hour inter-
view during which he often
grew emotional. He proudly
displayed cellphone photos of
his young son and of himself
as a baby. The two are nearly
identical. “This is a wonderful
story and one people can learn
a lot from,” Schnitzer says.
Schnitzer and Sause’s
experience shows that for peo-
ple with ¿nancial resources,
science can reduce the uncer-
tainty and physical challenges
of pregnancy.
Despite the sophistica-
tion of the boy’s genetic par-
ents and the legal precautions
they took, however, the issue
of the baby’s parentage is now
in dispute.
That disagreement, pitting
powerful family against pow-
erful family, may have the trap-
pings of private planes, mas-
sive ocean-going vessels and
multimillion-dollar estates, but
at its essence, is still about pri-
mal human impulses.
grant from Russia, founded
the Alaska Junk Co. in 1906
and brought his ¿ve sons into
what is now one of the nation’s
largest scrap metal businesses,
publicly traded Schnitzer
Steel, based in Portland.
In 1950, one of those sons,
Harold Schnitzer, split from
the scrap business and started
Harsch Investment Proper-
ties. By the time of his death in
2011, Harold had amassed 21
million square feet of commer-
cial real estate in ¿ve states —
the equivalent of 21 Big Pink
towers. He also owned 1,000
apartment units.
Harold’s widow, Arlene, is
a longtime patron of the arts.
Her name adorns the city’s
best-known concert hall. She
and her husband gave more
than $80 million to charity
during his lifetime.
Art, and is a major benefactor
of the Portland Art Museum
and Oregon College of Art and
Craft.
In 2014, when Schnitzer
gave $5 million toward a new
art museum at Washington State
University, the school named
him commencement speaker
and awarded him an honorary
doctorate in humanities.
Being a dad
But Schnitzer says that the
accumulation of wealth, art
and accolades pales in com-
parison to the joy he felt when
his daughters were born —
and that he wanted to feel one
more time, with a son.
“I loved the emotion you
feel when you have a little
baby and they put their little
¿ngers around yours,” he says.
“I loved being a dad.”
they were in some ways an odd
couple.
He was a Democrat and
a leading benefactor of Jew-
ish causes. He belonged to
the ultra-exclusive Bohemian
Grove club in California and
often Àew in his 16-seat Bom-
bardier Challenger 300 jet to
his home at the Vintage Club
in Indian Wells, Calif., where
his neighbors include Bill
Gates and Charles Koch.
Sause, 27 years Schnitzer’s
junior, had never been married.
A graduate of a Catholic high
school and college, she was a
Republican living in a small
town far from Schnitzer’s
West Hills world. A keen dis-
tance runner, she kept a low
pro¿le, hiding behind over-
sized sunglasses in the few
pictures available on social
media or online.
‘It seems like a really unfortunate situation
brought about by new technology and a man harking
back to a previous era of male progenitor rules.
What can you say? It’s just bizarre.’
Marcy Darnovsky
director of the Center for Genetics and Society in Berkeley, Calif.
For Sause, it’s the desire
to be a mother to a child
whose genes are half hers. For
Schnitzer, who already has two
daughters, the imperative is to
have a son he can raise without
interference and who can carry
on his family name.
Selecting the sex of a
baby for nonmedical reasons,
although possible, is contro-
versial. People who study the
ethics of surrogacy are uncom-
fortable with Schnitzer’s
approach.
“It seems like a really
unfortunate situation brought
about by new technology and
a man harking back to a pre-
vious era of male progenitor
rules,” says Marcy Darnovsky,
director of the Center for
Genetics and Society in Berke-
ley, Calif. “What can you say?
It’s just bizarre.”
Schnitzer Steel
Samuel Schnitzer, an immi-
Harold and Arlene had one
child: a son named Jordan.
Jordan Schnitzer inherited
his mother’s passion for art.
The Jordan Schnitzer Museum
of Art at the University of Ore-
gon bears his name, and he
owns a collection of 9,500
prints, which have been exhib-
ited at 75 museums across the
nation.
Schnitzer’s board mem-
berships and civic contribu-
tions are too numerous to list.
In 2009, he honored his mater-
nal grandparents by donating
nearly $2 million toward the
construction of Director Park,
just west of Fox Tower in
downtown Portland. His alma
maters, the University of Ore-
gon and Lewis & Clark Law
School, have heaped awards
on him.
He spearheaded the reno-
vation of the Astoria Column,
helped ¿nd a new home for the
Paci¿c Northwest College of
As a young man, Jordan
Schnitzer struggled to prove
himself as independent from
his family.
A toy company he bought
in 1981, Northern Specialty
Sales, Àopped, causing the loss
of about $30 million. In 1989,
he bought Casablanca Indus-
tries, an electric fan company,
for $60 million. The company
declared bankruptcy two years
later.
Eventually, he came back
into the family fold, working
alongside his father at Harsch’s
headquarters on Southwest
11th Street. He’s continued to
build Harsch’s holdings across
the West.
Schnitzer’s only marriage
ended in divorce in 2005. Since
then, he’s squired a succession
of women around town.
An odd couple
When he and Cory Sause
started dating in January 2014,
Sause made headlines in
2006 when she was sentenced
to 40 months in prison for neg-
ligent homicide.
In 2004, while she was
a student at Lewis & Clark
Law School, a very drunk
Sause was speeding along
South Shore Boulevard in
Lake Oswego when she col-
lided with another car, kill-
ing the driver, a 21-year-old
Lake Oswego man, and leav-
ing his younger brother criti-
cally injured.
The man who died in the
crash, Patrick Kibler, was an
honors student at George Fox
University, recently engaged
and working part-time as a
model for Abercrombie &
Fitch. His parents continued to
pay his cellphone bill for years
so friends could hear his voice.
When Sause and Schnitzer
met, she’d been out of prison
for ¿ve years and coming out
of a relationship with Chuck
Engle, a Coos Bay man who’s
won more marathons than any
other runner. Schnitzer had
recently broken up with Sally
Hopper, a mysterious ex-Play-
boy model whom a former
boyfriend had accused of
being an art thief.
Schnitzer recalls their
¿rst date being at the Port-
land Brewing tasting room
in Industrial Northwest Port-
land. “She was lots of fun,”
Schnitzer says.
Next generations
For all their differences,
Schnitzer and Sause did share a
bond: the desire to create their
families’ next generations.
Sause recalls in her March
3 court ¿ling that her thoughts
were focused on the future:
“I had recently turned 35
years old, and although hav-
ing a child was not part of my
immediate plan, I believed
it was in my best interest to
freeze genetic material in case
I or one of my siblings had dif-
¿culty conceiving a child in
the future. I paid OHSU for
the retrieval and storage of my
eggs.”
For Schnitzer’s part, he
had two daughters from his
marriage. One daughter is in
high school and one in col-
lege. He was eager to add a
son. “I have two wonderful
girls, and I thought it might
be nice to do some balanc-
ing,” he says. “And, frankly,
being a divorced dad was
complicated. The idea was
that I’d have this son without
complications.”
Schnitzer had already
begun exploring less tradi-
tional ways of obtaining a son,
working with doctors at OHSU
to mix his sperm with eggs
from an anonymous donor.
See SAUSE, Page 9A
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