If things had gone to plan Kayla and Kellie Bingham would have fulfilled their shared childhood dream to have qualified as doctors by now.
But life, as the saying goes, has a habit of happening when we’re making other plans and so it was for these identical twins from Columbia, South Carolina.
Today, instead of a career in medicine, the now 33-year-olds have carved out careers in law – a path not spurred by youthful ambitions but born of the adult trauma that derailed their medical dreams amid a scandal out of which they are still pulling themselves to this day.
Because when Kayla and Kellie were second year students at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston they were accused of cheating in crucial end of year exams and everything unraveled from there.
Speaking in an exclusive interview with The Daily Mail, Kellie says: ‘It was one of the worst moments of my life. My heart sinks to my stomach just thinking about the panic and confusion at having to defend ourselves for something we didn’t do.’
The exam was multiple choice and according to authorities the sisters’ answers were so similar they could only have been achieved by cheating.
The girls, who were 24 at the time, were summoned to appear first before the Dean and then, one week later, before the university’s honors council.
The panel told them that a professor had raised questions of them cheating during the exam while remotely monitoring the answers of the whole class.
Pictured: Kellie (left) and Kayla Bingham on their graduation day from Furman University in South Carolina where they both majored and minored in medical sciences
Pictured: Kellie (left) and Kayla Bingham at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) before they were accused of cheating in a vital exam and their future as doctors began to unravel
He asked a proctor to ‘keep an extra eye’ on the girls as the testing went on. She reported that she’d seen them nodding their heads as if exchanging signals.
She said one had pushed back her chair and the other had ‘flipped’ a piece of paper on the table for her sister to see.
Today Kayla remains as passionate in her denials as she was then. She says: ‘There was absolutely no signaling. We never looked at each other and there was no secret language or kind of twin telepathy.’
Kayla says people have frequently commented on their similar body language.
Meanwhile Kellie insists that the twins are so bonded by nature and nurture that their grades have been almost as identical as they are throughout their schooling.
They’d graded within a fraction of each other in high school and their SAT scores had been the exact same.
The two had regularly achieved the same results when they’d taken exams on different days and in separate locations.
But their arguments fell on deaf ears and the council found them guilty of cheating.
‘It was as ridiculous as it was devastating,’ Kayla says.
They appealed to the dean. And, after what Kellie describes as the ‘most excruciating week of our lives that felt like an eternity,’ he cleared them of all charges.
But the damage was done. Word of the twins’ ‘cheating’ had already leaked. Few on the campus paid any attention to the fact that the university had found them innocent.
For the vast majority of their peers in Charleston, it was a case of no smoke without fire.
Kayla pales as she recalls how college Facebook groups shredded their reputation.
‘We couldn’t bear to look at the vile comments ourselves,’ she says. ‘But we heard about them from Kellie’s boyfriend and our cousin, another student at MUSC, who had access to the groups.’
Vicious rumors circulated across the university. Their peers were judge, jury and hangman, calling for them to be expelled.
In reality, if the twins had been found guilty, they would have had to repeat their second year of med school.
‘Not that it mattered because, despite us being innocent, our “punishment” was much worse,’ Kayla says.
Pictured: Kayla (left) and Kellie Bingham. They often used to dress alike and have the same passion for dogs. Kayla says people have frequently commented on their similar body language
Pictured: Kayla (left) and Kellie Bingham were always together growing up and excelled in sports such as soccer. They attended the same grade schools before going to the same college and medical school in South Carolina
Gossip gathered pace and reached community blogs in Charleston. Next, a city newspaper highlighted the case, giving identifying details of the twins in a sensational, front-page article.
‘They didn’t name us, but might as well have done,’ Kellie says of what became a series of stories.
That summer, the twins spent an emotionally tumultuous three months at home with their parents in Columbia and prayed that things would die down.
The girls had wanted to become doctors since the age of 12, whether it was working directly with patients or undertaking medical research.
‘Our hearts and passions were in medicine,’ Kayla says.
They had enjoyed their first two years as students, despite the increasingly heavy workload, and made good friends.
But that all fell away in the heat of the scandal that blew up on campus. Both suffered panic attacks — Kayla developed facial and verbal ticks which she still has to this day — and gained and lost substantial amounts of weight.
Still, they returned to UMSC in late August 2016. They had no choice, Kellie explains, ‘Our first love was medicine, and we couldn’t just walk away.’
But the twins were naïve if they thought the prejudice would dissipate.
They say they walked into student hangouts in Charleston and the place would go silent. People nudged each other and pointed with hostility.
It got so bad that the pair had to order delivery rather than eat at restaurants. They were disinvited from two weddings.
One bride dispatched a generic-sounding email, saying there had been some kind of mistake. The other simply didn’t follow up after sending a save-the-date card.
‘We’d been known as two of the most social people on campus, but now we were treated like pariahs,’ Kellie says.
Pictured: The Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC.) The institution accused the twins of cheating and its board of honors initially found them guilty. The dean overturned the judgement and declared them innocent. But the damage to the women’s reputations was done
Pictured: Kayla and Kellie Bingham. The sisters had wanted to become doctors since the age of 12, whether it was working directly with patients or undertaking medical research
The incident that horrified Kayla the most occurred when a male student deliberately barged into her as she walked along a corridor at school.
‘He literally pushed me into a wall, and I had to go into a maintenance closet because I was so scared,’ she says. ‘I called my parents from the closet, saying, “I can’t deal with this anymore.”’
The twins withdrew from UMSC in mid-September. Kayla says: ‘It was at the recommendation of the dean who said it was “better for our safety” to remove ourselves.’
Life would never be the same. The twins were consoled by their tight-knit family but cried in each other’s arms.
‘Kayla was the one person who’d been through what I had,’ Kellie says. ‘Only she could understand how dreadful it was.’
In early 2017, the pair filed a lawsuit against UMSC and sued them for slander and defamation. They accused the institution of allowing the cheating allegations to leak and doing nothing to defend the students.
‘We knew the truth and it was a matter of principle,’ Kellie says of their determination to clear their names.
It took five years for the suit to come to court in Charleston in November 2022, partly due to delays caused by Covid.
In the interim, the twins abandoned all ambitions to become doctors. Instead, they pivoted to law enrolling in the University of South Carolina’s law school as they became increasingly involved in the machinations of their own case.
They gave evidence about the day of the fateful exam and the distressing aftermath describing the trauma that, they maintain, still affects them to this day and changed the course of their lives.
Meanwhile the sisters’ lawyer presented their education records to the court. They showed how they’d received identical or near-identical scores in exams over the years.
A professor from their high school sent a letter saying that they’d submitted the exact same answers — some correct, some not — for an exam he’d supervised a decade earlier.
They’d been sitting at opposite ends of the classroom, and it would have been impossible for them to collaborate.
Psychologist Nancy Segal, who specializes in behavioral genetics and the study of twins, was called as an expert witness.
She told the jury about the ‘very close intertwining’ of twins and said cheating complaints are common in academia.
Pictured: Kayla (left) and Kellie Bingham. ‘We knew the truth and it was a matter of principle,’ Kellie says of their determination to clear their names. They were shocked at the prejudice against them, despite being found innocent of cheating.
Segal, the director of the Twins Studies Center at California State University, Fullerton says that in testifying, she was helping ‘put a terrible wrong right.’
‘For a medical establishment, UMSC showed an astonishing lack of familiarity and knowledge when it comes to twins,’ she says, noting how they’re raised in the same environment and are ‘natural partners in life.’
‘Studies have found that identical twins have very similar interests, abilities, achievements and test-taking skills because they are genetically predisposed to perform and behave the same way,’ Segal adds.
The jury took less than two hours to decide in the Binghams’ favor, awarding them $1.5 million in compensation. The sum, Kayla says, was mostly absorbed by legal fees and taxes.
‘But it was never about the money,’ says Kayla, who held hands with Kellie as the verdict was delivered. ‘What price tag can you put on your reputation and name?’
Today the twins work for a major law firm, specializing in relations between companies and state and federal government.
‘We miss medicine tremendously and it’s been tough for us,’ Kayla, who, in common with Kellie had been considering anesthesiology, says. ‘But our work is very rewarding, and we feel as if we’re where we belong.’
MUSC appealed within the mandatory 30 days challenging the decision on procedural grounds. ‘It’s still hanging over us,’ Kellie says.
But the twins are fiercely proud of their victory in this battle of David and Goliath. Kayla says, ‘It was an agonizing process, but we refused to bow down.” We can always hold our heads up high.’
The Medical University of South Carolina told the Daily Mail it would not comment on the Bingham case because it involved ‘pending litigation’.
