As she walked down the aisle in her local supermarket in March 2021, Natalie, 41, answered a call on her mobile.
“You need to come home now,” said her partner Suzanne. “Don’t panic, but there’s something that you need to see.”
When she walked through the door, Suzanne handed her a newspaper article about a sperm donor who had fathered 272 babies in the Netherlands, breaking guidelines that state a donor can only father a maximum of 25 children across up to 12 families, The Sun reported.
The more Natalie read, the more she became consumed by a sickening suspicion that the serial donor, whose name wasn’t revealed, was the father of her son.
“My mouth fell open,” remembers Natalie. “I was so shocked.”
“We had so many feelings,” adds Suzanne. “We trusted him. We felt betrayed. We felt sad. We felt angry. We just knew it was him, because the article was illustrated with a drawing – and it had a very strong resemblance.”
But the 272 babies the report mentioned were just the tip of the iceberg. As recounted in new Netflix documentary The Man With 1000 Kids, Natalie’s sperm donor – Jonathan Jacob Meijer – had fathered many, many more.
Eleven years earlier, in 2010, Natalie – a teacher who lives in the Netherlands – and her former same-sex partner decided to start a family.
She found Meijer on a Dutch website, where donors advertised with a small description of themselves along with an email address.
They began corresponding and once she had his full name, Natalie naturally Googled him. Her search returned his YouTube channel, where he posted as a musician and crypto investor and regularly uploaded video blogs from glamorous locations around the world.
Meijer had also talked on his channel about how he was introduced to the concept of sperm donorship. “I befriended a guy in college and he told me that he was infertile and it made a huge impact on me,” he revealed. “I was imagining, what if I became a donor so that I can really help build families?”
After their email exchange, Meijer and Natalie arranged to meet at a restaurant. “I wanted to look him in the eye to see if we had a connection,” she said.
“It was like a first date and he checked all my boxes in terms of looks, with long curly hair and blue eyes. He was very talkative, and he explained he was a teacher, so that was an instant connection between us.
“He talked about how he wanted to do good for humankind and showed me pictures of him in Kenya, helping to build orphanages. He also told me he wanted to donate privately, because he didn’t want the sperm banks to make money.”
Meijer told Natalie that he was willing to help no more than five women start a family of their own. “I felt really lucky that I had just found him in time, because he told me he had already helped three other women,” she says.
Following five failed insemination attempts, Natalie finally conceived and gave birth to her son in October 2012, occasionally emailing Meijer photos as he grew up.
After her relationship ended, Natalie got together with Suzanne in 2017, and in 2019 the couple decided they wanted to give their son a sibling.
“Natalie sent [Meijer] a text to see if he would be up for it, because we were unsure if he was still an active donor,” recalls Suzanne.
“He replied straight away and a week later he was sitting on our couch discussing baby number two.”
However, there was something that Natalie had to know: “I asked him straight up how many children he had fathered to date and he told me 25. I was surprised, but then he began to explain it, saying it had been almost 10 years since we’d first met, and there were some mothers who wanted to have a second child, like us, so the number seemed plausible.”
The insemination was unsuccessful, however, and Natalie and Suzanne decided to devote their time to their son, resolving to tell him the truth about who his father was when he was old enough to understand.
Meanwhile, Meijer was making donation after donation after donation.
He’d been doing so since 2007 via 11 different clinics around the Netherlands, even though guidelines in the country limited donors from using more than one clinic. Not content with this, he had been donating privately, too.
Suspicions first started swirling in 2017, when the Dutch Society for Obstetrics and Gynaecology warned that Meijer had already fathered 102 children through Dutch clinics.
The same year, after an anonymous email was sent to one of the clinics exposing a sperm donor active on the internet and listing Meijer’s many aliases, an investigation was launched by the Dutch Donor Child Foundation, which advocates for sperm donors’ children. They determined that Meijer had privately fathered at least 80 children in the Netherlands, leading to a governmental order that all Dutch sperm clinics stop using his semen.
Concerned parents set up a Facebook group, Donorkind 102 JJM, to share their experiences.
‘Assortative mating’
Speaking in the documentary, one of the mums from the group, Nicolette – who has one child with Meijer – said: “We organised a siblings’ day and then it became very real. My daughter met a lot of her brothers and she really liked one of them because they have the same interests, they have the same humour, so they really connect. My daughter was saying: ‘Hey, I really like him … I might love him,’ and I said: ‘Well, that’s not an option, he is your half-brother.’ So that’s a big problem.”
It’s a problem based on a scientific theory called assortative mating, which refers to choosing a mate with similar or familiar traits.
“What this means for Jonathan’s Dutch children is that this could happen because they share genetic traits they may be attracted to,” explains Eve Wiley, a fertility fraud campaigner and advocate for many of the mothers involved.
“And if they live close to one another without knowing they are half-siblings, the law of proximity would increase these encounters.”
The investigation by the Dutch Donor Child Foundation revealed that Meijer had also registered with Cryos, the world’s largest international sperm bank, based in Denmark, under the alias Ruud.
“For four years, he’s going to Copenhagen once a month for four days,” explains Eve. “That’s roughly 200 donations, and you can get about 15 straws of sperm per ejaculation.
If every straw makes a baby, that could be 3000 potential children. “Jonathan is a donor in demand, so when Cryos sees that he’s met his quota in one country, they can just start selling it in another.”
In fact, the Netflix documentary has uncovered women from Austria, Italy, France, Serbia, Ukraine, Germany, Poland, Hungary, Switzerland, Mexico, South Africa, Russia, Romania, Denmark, Sweden, US, Canada, Kenya, Argentina and the UK, who had all used Meijer as a donor.
By 2023, many of the mothers from the Facebook group were actively messaging him, pleading with him to stop donating because he was gambling with the futures of so many children.
Their pleas fell on deaf ears.
“From reading the news article to now has been a real journey,” reveals Suzanne. “Joining the Facebook group, meeting other mothers, learning about the ways that he operates …
“One thing that became clear was the sheer number of children running around with Jonathan’s genes.”
Suzanne and Natalie also decided they had to break the news to their son. “It’s sad that we needed to do this – he was only eight years old.
“Normally, you would talk about it when your child is ready, or asking about it, but this is such a big story, with such a big number of siblings, with such big consequences,” says Suzanne.
“We had a conversation with him and asked him: ‘How big is your class? How big are two classes combined?’ We used the school setting to make the number of children involved easier for him to grasp, as he’s a bright young boy who’s good with numbers.”
In early 2023, one mum, known only as Eva, who had a child by Meijer in 2018, decided she’d had enough and, along with the advocacy organisation Donorkind Foundation, filed a civil suit against Meijer – the first of its kind – arguing what he was doing increased the risk of incest for his children.
“Going to court was the only option left to stop him,” explains Mark de Hek, the lawyer for the foundation.
“When I spoke to various mothers and heard how misled they felt and how concerned they were, I knew I had to do everything possible to prevent these risks from becoming bigger.”
In April 2023, Meijer arrived at court in The Hague, met by many mothers and families he’d lied to. They’d provided statements that his serial donating was in violation of the kids’ human rights.
‘This is a global problem’
“It was really encouraging to see that dozens of mothers supported this case, and having a courtroom full of mothers let me know what I was fighting for,” says Mark.
In court, Meijer argued that the children could reduce their chance of accidental incest by having a symbol on their social media pages and by wearing a badge with his name on it, to identify them to one another.
“I was totally shocked when he said this,” Natalie, who was one of the first mothers to arrive at the court, remembers. “The fact that he was placing all the responsibility on these blameless children … And how would it work when they were going out in public? They would need to put the symbol on their forehead?”
In his testimony, Meijer admitted to having between 550 and 600 children, while the court said he may have fathered up to 1000 across several continents.
When the judge questioned if he had given any thought to the dangers that he was exposing so many children to, he replied: “That depends on the parents. We are dealing with a new concept, and it is up to us, the adults, to shape it.”
The judge didn’t see it that way and Meijer was banned from donating sperm to new parents anywhere in the world. If he was caught donating again, he would be fined $160,000 per donation.
Meijer, who relocated to Africa last year, was also ordered to request that sperm banks destroy any of his semen. “The children needed to have a voice and the judge was the voice of these children,” says Natalie.
“Hopefully, the ruling will change the regulations around the world, because as Jonathan has proven, this is not just a Dutch problem. This is not just a European problem. This is a global problem.”
The Man With 1000 Kids airs on Netflix from Wednesday.
This story originally appeared on The Sun and was republished with permission.