The Man With 1000 Kids Has Unlocked A New Fear
Over the weekend, Netflix dropped the three-part docuseries, The Man with 1000 Kids. It is, quite frankly, terrifying.
The show follows serial sperm donor Jonathan Jacob Meijer, and his global quest to impregnate as many women as possible. I can’t even make the obvious “I reckon I know a few sperm donors” dating life jokes because this guy is so fucked up that it feels wrong.
Hailing from The Netherlands, Jonathan Jacob Meijer is for some unknown reason considered to be quite the catch in the sperm world. He’s got this blonde, Viking aesthetic that people seem to be drawn to, and I’m not saying I find him unattractive, but I am saying that Netflix shows us footage of him playing acoustic guitar on his YouTube channel and it made me want to rip my hair out.
Nevertheless, many prospective customers seem to be buying what Jonathan is selling (quite literally). The series interviews many of the women (predominantly lesbian couples and couples struggling with fertility) who find Jonathan’s profile via Cryos, one of the most prominent sperm banks in the world. He messages with the prospective sperm recipients, makes arrangements with them for insemination, and assures them that he’s hoping to donate to five families only as a sperm donor.
Seems pretty normal, thus far.
Well, things get pretty fucked.
The Dutch Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport conducts an investigation after being sent an anonymous letter about one of their donors evading regulations and donating over 100 times using several aliases. Mothers in the local town who have utilised sperm donations start noticing how similar their children look. Facebook Groups are created for these women to try to connect their kids to potential siblings, and people start coming to the terrifying realisation that Jonathan is not to be trusted.
Finally, The New York Times publishes an article in February 2021 titled, The Case of the Serial Sperm Donor which exposes Jonathan’s actions and how he admitted to a single mother that “he had produced at least 175 children and conceded that there might be more.” It is later noted in the series that it’s estimated Jonathan could have fathered up to 3000 kids.
After these revelations, The Man with 1000 Kids documents the plight of dozens of mothers across the world trying to stop Jonathan legally from donating any more sperm. It’s an infuriating game of cat and mouse, where Jonathan’s travel blogging coincides with his donations to new women in new countries.
If you’re a little confused as to why this is all so scary, I was too, so let me break it down for you.
Firstly, there’s the potential for consanguinity, which as Time explains, is “when blood relations have sexual contact.” The women in The Netherlands discuss how their town is relatively small, and as one mother explains in the series, “Children who haven’t been brought up together are more likely to get attracted to each other because they see some familiarities in the face of the sibling.” While it sounds far-fetched, this is one of the main reasons sperm donations are regulated.
Secondly, there is the utter manipulation of it all. This man comes into the lives of vulnerable women, convinces them he’s safe and to be trusted, and genuinely believes he’s doing the right thing. To say that Jonathan is a narcist with a God complex is an understatement.
The women monitor him through his YouTube channel and keep an eye on sperm donation Facebook groups of the countries he visits. When Jonathan goes to Kenya, the women discover a local Facebook group seeking European sperm donors and have good reason to believe that a new member of the group is Jonathan, given he refers to himself as a lion and had previously spoken of his love of the animal on his channel and donor account. We see absolutely abhorrent messages between him and other “super donors” discussing how they want to “bleach Africa”, one later adding that countries are “colonised by [his] glorious and mighty white seed.”
In the most shocking moment of the series, we learn via an anonymous whistleblower that Jonathan and fellow Dutch sperm donor Leon worked together to deceive women. How, you ask? By mixing their sperm samples together. Both men had multiple fake accounts on the donation websites, so essentially had a monopoly on sperm donation. “Women thought they had a choice, but they didn’t,” we’re told by the anonymous interviewee. “The only reason why you would do that is to maximise your offspring.”
One of the mothers who used Leon revealed that she grew close to him after the donation experience, and that he admitted everything to her. “It’s just a game for them, and that’s how it got dangerous,” she explains. “Leon told me that they’d meet at a parking space, that they’d put their sperm together, mix it and give it to the women who wanted to get pregnant. ‘Let’s do a sperm roulette and see who wins’.”
BEYOND FUCKED UP.
The series concludes with Jonathan being legally forbidden from donating sperm to new parents and facing €100,00 fines per violation. The women and legal teams who represented them are all ecstatic, and in the final scene, we see dozens of Jonathan’s children meeting up in The Netherlands and instantly bonding.
However, as the text at the end of the series reminds us, “Private recipients rely on the honesty of donors. This is also true of the global sperm market. These clinics still have no way to check how many children a donor has.”
The Man with 1000 Kids is a complex, infuriating watch humanised by the dozens of women who, as Time author Charlotte Lytton put it, “are left to battle a dichotomy that will be with them for the rest of their lives; sheer joy that they have the offspring they craved, and horror that it happened this way, and that they may never know why.”
Written by Lil Friedmann. You can follow her at @lilfriedmann on socials.
Image credit: Netflix + Punkee