Sure, it’s pretty petty, but this papa paid a pretty penny for his pretty kiddies.
To avoid fathering “ugly” children, millionaire Barrie Dewitt-Barlow forked over $50,000 to a professional model, hiring the hottie as an egg donor who’d pass on her flawless features and runway-ready allure to his brood.
But the bigwig’s now catching virtual flak for his “weird” baby-beautifying hack.
“Nobody wants an ugly kid,” insisted Dewitt-Barlow, 54, a business mogul, from the UK, during a recent appearance on the series “Stacey Dooley Sleeps Over.”
The tycoon, with an estimated net worth exceeding $200 million, explained that he and fiancé Scott Hutchinson, 31, spotted their unnamed donor on a catwalk in Miami, and immediately wanted her genes to ensure the attractiveness of their future tots.
Footage of Dewitt-Barlow’s controversial confession scored over 521,000 TikTok views from a divided digital audience.
While a faction of supporters agreed with the magnate’s stance on only wanting good-looking little ones, detractors deemed his parenting position “vain,” “horrendous” and the “weirdest” thing they’d ever heard.
A handful of Dewitt-Barlow haters even likened his process to eugenics — selective breeding meant to increase the occurrence of choice characteristics (such as prettiness or intelligence) in order to improve the human race, per the National Institute of Health.
Despite being largely pooh-poohed, it’s a practice that is hotly en vogue in Silicon Valley, where moms and dads-to-be are paying up to $50,000 for embryo screenings to determine which is most likely to grow into a “baby genius.”
But to Dewitt-Barlow and Hutchinson — the ex-boyfriend of Dewitt-Barlow’s eldest daughter, Saffron — beauty outweighed brains when selecting a donor for their now four-year-old daughter, Valentina, and three-year-old son, Romeo.
“It was her looks, completely,” said Dewitt-Barlow when asked what drew him to the model he cherry-picked for the job.
“When I saw her on the catwalk, I looked at Scott and went, ‘Oh, f- -k, she is stunning,’” he recalled. “I tell you, her legs were six feet in the air.”
But the baller Brit — who, alongside ex-husband, Tony, became UK’s first gay dad to welcome children via surrogacy in the 1990s — makes no apologies about his superficiality.
“[I’m] just buying a baby, that’s what people say,” said Dewitt-Barlow. “But most people could do a lot worse than spend one month of their life on drugs to give some embryos for $50,000.”
And he isn’t backing down from trolls who feel that a child’s looks shouldn’t matter to a loving parent.
“Well, what do you want me to say? We need ugly [kids] as well?” questioned the VIP. “I’m sorry, I just can’t lie.”
He then doubled down on his anti-ugly kid crusade, saying, “Sometimes we get them, but we don’t always want them. We deal with it and carry on.”
And when it comes to opposing opinions, Dewitt-Barlow — a memorable guest star on Bravo’s “Below Deck” — emphatically stated, “I really don’t give a flying f- -k about rubbing anybody the wrong way.”
“In an honest world, you want your kids to have a chance.”
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