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Jonathan Jacob Meijer, the prolific sperm donor at the centre of Netflix’s new documentary The Man with 1000 Kids, says he’s disappointed in the show as it misrepresented his goals as a donor to scores of families.

The doccie, which is currently the No. 1 show on the streaming platform, recounts the true story of multiple couples and single women who discover that their sperm donor was serial, fathering hundreds of children across various countries and continents.

The 42-year-old Dutch YouTuber donated to 11 sperm banks in the Netherlands (which boasts a population of around 17 million) and also to women he met privately, per Forbes.

“You get one life on this Earth — why has he chosen to use his charm and his intellect and his creativity in order to try to procreate on a mass scale and deceive all these people?” the docuseries’ director Josh Allott asks Tudum.

“Speaking to lots of different parents that have met him and people that know him well, it seems like it almost became an addiction for him.”

Jonathan allegedly has upwards of 500 children worldwide from sperm donation, although, as Vanity Fair points out, that number is pretty hazy.

“They deliberately called [the documentary] The Man With 1000 Kids, when it should be ‘the sperm donor who helped families conceive with 550 children’,” Meijer told BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour. “So already from the start, they are deliberately deceiving and misleading.”

In a New York Times report from 2021, Jonathan provided an even lower number, saying “I have approximately 250 children,” then, while telling the Independent that he stopped donating sperm in 2019, so it’s unclear where those additional 300 kids came from.

Among his YouTube videos where he speaks about cryptocurrency and trying a raw-meat diet, he revealed in a video from February 2024 that he was inspired to become a sperm donor after a classmate told him he was infertile, but then things just went way too far.

In 2023, The Hague District Court banned him from sperm donation over fears of inbreeding after he admitted to fathering over 550 children globally.

During that trial, the Dutch judge asked Meijer about the risk of incest. According to court documents presented in the series, his lawyers responded: “The defence argues that if they are worried about incest, his donor children can use a social media symbol to identify themselves as one of his children.”

As his efforts to donate sperm have been stymied by several countries across Europe, Jonathan tells the Independent that eventually, he became “hooked” on providing sperm to aspiring families.

“Sometimes I would think: ‘It’s a lot [of children], maybe you should stop’ but then I’d get a new message saying: ‘Wow, you are really the donor we’ve been looking for.’”

“I found it hard to say no. You’re the guy that comes along with the winning lottery ticket, that’s the feeling you bring these people. It’s something magical.”

Ultimately, Jonathan reckons the Netflix series did a fab job of cherry-picking dissatisfied recipients, saying the show selected “five families [who are unhappy] out of the 225 families that I’ve helped, and they [the other families] will definitely tell you something else.”

Meanwhile, when told about some of the claims in the series, which he said he never watched, including allegations that he competed with fellow donors to see who could father the most children, and that he mixed sperm with another donor to see whose might ‘win’, he seemed shocked.

“Is that in the documentary?” he asked. “No, that’s total slander. It’s insane. Why would I do that? Why should anyone do that? If it’s in the documentary, be prepared, I will definitely sue the hell out of the whole Netflix crew.”

The executive producer Natalie Hill is standing by the show, though, arguing that she’s spent the last four years speaking to families who have been impacted by Jonathan’s lies. “I’ve personally spoken to 45 or 50 families,” she told the BBC.

Dutch medical guidelines stipulate that a donor can only father 25 children to avoid possible incest and psychological problems.

The Man With 1000 Kids also details how Jonathan used several names like Jacob, Ruud, Walter, and Maarten to communicate with the parents of the children he would help to conceive.

More than 150 parents of Meijer’s children connected online and contacted the Donorkind Foundation for help. The organisation, which helps children of sperm donation trace their roots, received more than 30 calls in a single week from mothers concerned that their children had the same father.

When hundreds of children share the same genes, a problem arises called consanguinity, which involves sexual relationships or marriages between people with common biological ancestors. This becomes more likely when, like Meijer, you make numerous donations within a small geographical area.

Three of his offspring have already ended up in the same daycare; god forbid some of them have already fallen in love or had kids of their own.

[sources:forbes&independent]