Lesbian couples share sperm donation ordeal in Netflix’s The Man with 1000 Kids
Mothers Suzanne and Natalie were one of the many couples lied to by sperm donor Jonathan Meijer. (Netflix)
Lesbian couples have opened up about a sperm donation ordeal in Netflix’s latest documentary, The Man with 1000 Kids.
The Man with 1000 Kids is an investigative three-part series on Netflix that tells the story of Dutch man Jonathan Meijer, a serial sperm donor, and the families who tried to stop him after releasing the extent of his donations.
Meijer, who used several names when communicating with couples he would go on to help, donated sperm all over the world, fathering hundreds of children despite saying he would only help five families in total.
Suzanne and Natalie, from the Netherlands, thought that they were one of only a few couples he was helping to become parents. In the documentary, they said they were told he only had 25 children.
‘I tried so hard to find a reason in it’
It was a “huge shock” for Suzanne after she read a newspaper article and realised he had provided sperm to many more families.
Natalie said: “I tried so hard to find a reason in it, but I still can’t.”
Parents connected through a Facebook group and exposed Meijer’s lies.
Lesbian couple Kate and Laura, who have two sons thanks to a sperm bank to which Meijer had donated, said “it was like someone swung a sock with a brick in it” when they realised their child was one of many.
Concern of incest were raised by the parents, with some of the children becoming attracted to their half siblings.
They “cried their eyes out” and believe donating had “become an addiction” and “obsession” for Meijer.
“He’s meeting parents at their most desperate and vulnerable stage of life and the more children he creates in his image, the more powerful his legacy will become,” they said.
Donating sperm gives Meijer a “God-like complex”, they claimed, adding that they feel “failed by the donor” and the sperm bank.
But Meijer has told the BBC the documentary is “misleading”.
Speaking on Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour on Wednesday (3 July), he said: “They deliberately called [the documentary] The Man With 1000 Kids, when it should be ‘the sperm donor who helped families conceive with 550 children’. From the start, they are deliberately deceiving and misleading.”
He claimed that Netflix selected five unhappy families out of the 225 families he claims to have helped.
The Man with 1000 Kids is streaming on Netflix now.
