When it comes to family secrets, few have a better vantage point than my favourite legal source, the razor-sharp New York divorce attorney James Sexton.

On a recent call, he confided that DNA tests and paternity bombshells are practically his stock-in-trade – and men are almost always at the centre of the storm.

Sexton says his caseload falls into two scandalous categories. First, the love child.

‘The mistress gets pregnant, the guy throws money at it and hopes it disappears,’ he told me.

The second: secret families.

One of Sexton’s wildest cases involved an athlete who paid his mistress $5million to have his baby in silence and relinquish all rights. The contract was ironclad – if she ever breathed a word to anyone, even the child, she had to pay it all back.

Here’s the twist: If he later decided he wanted to be part of his son’s life, she kept the money and he was still liable for full child support. When that kid turns 18, he’ll be able to discover the truth for himself. Imagine the fallout at that birthday party.

I’m not going to lie – I never wanted children, but with $5million on the table, I would have seriously considered it.

Then there are the men living double lives. Sexton is currently representing the wife of a property mogul who was in the middle of a divorce when she uncovered the ultimate betrayal – her husband had another family living just a few floors below in the same apartment building.

A girlfriend and two kids, literally right under his wife’s nose. You couldn’t make it up.

When I asked Sexton why this happens so often in his world, he just laughed – ‘They always tell me, “I didn’t mean to… I just got carried away.”‘

Covid, he said, was the worst possible time to keep a secret family going – lockdowns meant no excuses, nowhere to hide. ‘I remember thinking, my clients are f***ed,’ he said.

One cop kept his double life hidden for years, using shift work as the perfect cover. But when lockdown hit, he ran out of excuses for disappearing overnight. Suddenly, juggling two families became impossible.

And then there’s technology – the ultimate snitch. Sexton says Apple devices are a divorce lawyer’s best asset – shared iClouds, kids playing around on iPads, Apple Watches buzzing with texts from the other woman.

At least once a month, he sees sloppy tech habits blow clients’ secrets apart. ‘Honestly, sometimes I think they want to get caught,’ he said.

It made me reflect on my own family’s skeletons. While Sexton’s clients write multimillion-dollar cheques to hide their affairs, our bombshell arrived via an unexpected phone call.

A few years ago, my dad got the news from his eldest brother: it turned out they didn’t just have a sister – they also had another brother, kept secret for decades. My dad’s reaction was pure shock.

It turned out, before my grandma met my grandpa, she had her own ‘oopsie daisy’ moment, resulting in a child. Nine months later, he was adopted out – and never spoken of again. That secret only surfaced thanks to a DNA test kit.

Our God-fearing grandmother had carried the secret her entire life. It sparked a scandal within my family and broke my heart that she had to grieve in silence. Those were different times – thankfully, things have changed.

And we’re far from alone. After sharing this on socials, the DNA horror stories flooded in. Let’s just say I’m now seriously rethinking ever taking an Ancestry test.

The sibling collector

One man discovered he had enough siblings to fill a football team after taking a DNA test and seeing some of his close matches.

He had been adopted, and after his adoptive parents died, he tracked down his biological mother and five half-siblings through government records.

But his birth mother refused to reveal anything about his father. The only detail she gave was that the man had lost a leg. For years, he joked he must be part-pirate.

Eventually, he did an AncestryDNA test.

Not long after, a woman who had also used AncestryDNA messaged to say they could be first cousins. When he shared his one-legged pirate dad story, she replied right away: ‘Oh, that’s Uncle Jimmy.’

His biological father had already died, but not before having four more daughters. That brought the sibling tally to nine.

Add his adopted brother, that’s a party of ten.

The ex-husband’s surprise

One woman I spoke to revealed she was carrying a secret about her ex-husband.

‘I discovered through my children’s DNA tests that their father – my ex-husband – has a half-brother he never knew existed,’ she said.

‘Here’s how it played out: my children’s results pinged with a “close relative” match we couldn’t place.

‘After some digging, we realised it linked back to a man in his forties who had no idea why he was connected to us.

‘Turns out, back in 1980, my ex’s dad was sleeping with both his wife and the married woman next door, and got them pregnant at the same time.

‘The neighbour’s son had grown up thinking the man who raised him was his real dad and had built his whole identity around that. Then, with one little saliva swab, the truth came crashing down.

‘The poor guy went to his mother for answers, and instead of honesty, she cut him off. She told him the tests were “lies”, blocked his calls, and has now iced him out of her life. The denial is so extreme it’s like watching someone gaslight their own child.

‘I haven’t even told my ex about any of this yet. But, given his dad moved house 32 times during his marriage – something that always seemed odd but now makes sense – I’d put money on there being a string of secret siblings scattered across the state.’

The DNA test that wrecked Christmas

One reader thought a DNA kit would make a fun Christmas stocking stuffer.

Instead, the results revealed her two sisters – the ones she’d grown up braiding hair with and fighting over bathroom time – were actually only half-sisters.

It turns out her mum had had a secret fling decades earlier and never said a word.

Suddenly, all those family photo albums seemed awkwardly different. After persistent questioning, they learned their real dad was Mum’s married boss, now deceased.

‘Christmas lunch hasn’t been the same since,’ she told me. Ouch.

The married cousins

This story is about a couple who were married for more than a decade, with kids and a mortgage. For fun, they both took DNA tests, expecting to confirm Irish or Italian heritage.

Instead, the results dropped a bombshell – they were cousins.

Imagine building a life together only to discover you’re related. They were devastated.

One of them locked themselves in the bedroom for days, unable to even look at family photos. It’s the kind of twist even Jerry Springer would have found too much.

For those wondering, they’re now divorced.

‘I slept with my half-brother’

This one from a traumatised young woman is pure Netflix fodder.

Her mother’s fertility doctor had secretly used his own sperm during IVF, impregnating dozens of women in the area, which was already disturbing enough.

But the real horror came later: one of her high school boyfriends, the boy she had lost her virginity to, was actually her half-brother.

She cried for weeks, feeling dirty and violated, even though she couldn’t have known.

She cut off contact with her ex-boyfriend immediately, but the trauma still haunts her.

A new sibling at 90

Another story concerns my friend’s grandfather who decided to do an AncestryDNA test in his late 80s to trace his heritage.

Instead, he found a half-brother he never knew existed.

The results revealed that his late mother had had an affair before marrying his father – and kept it a secret for nearly a century.

Imagine being nearly 90 and suddenly discovering you have a new sibling.

He said the worst part wasn’t the shock, but the grief that his mother never felt safe enough to tell him, even after his father’s death. ‘She carried it to her grave,’ he said.

After hearing these, I think I’ll skip the AncestryDNA kits for now – and actually, even marriage for that matter.

Because while a tequila-fuelled one-night stand might leave you with a bad hangover, a DNA test might just blow up the entire family WhatsApp chat.