Jonathan has impregnated more than 1,000 women around the world. He won’t stop.

Sydney couple Laura and Kate (not their real names) had always dreamed of welcoming a child into their family. 

One day when the couple were scrolling through Cryos, the world's largest sperm bank, they came across the profile of Jonathan Jacob Meijer, a sperm donor from the Netherlands listed under a pseudonym. They were drawn to Jonathan's good looks, long blonde hair, warm smile, charisma and the fact that he was a world traveller. 

Laura and Kate paid for the Dutch man's donation to be sent all the way to Australia and following a successful insemination, they welcomed their first child together. This should have been the happiest time in their lives, but after the couple started inquiring whether their child would have any siblings, they came to a horrifying discovery.

Jonathan was a serial sperm donator. In fact, he is predicted to have been responsible for more than 1,000 children all around the world, stretching from Australia to Mexico, the US, and all across Europe. 

The story of the families impacted by Jonathan's deceit is told in the new Netflix documentary The Man With 1000 Kids, which features many women and couples who are raising Jonathan's children. 

Watch the trailer for The Man With 1000 Kids. Post continues after video.

Who is Jonathan Maijer?

Jonathan is a Dutch YouTuber in his early 40s, who began donating sperm in 2007 in the Netherlands. The man managed to evade the Dutch law limiting donors to 12 mothers and 25 children, as he donated to 11 different clinics around the Netherlands using various aliases before he started donating privately to parents across the world. 

Some have speculated that he had a 'God complex' or simply wanted to break a Guinness World Record. By 2017, Jonathan was already making a name for himself after the Dutch Society for Obstetrics and Gynaecology warned that this man had already fathered 102 children. 

The true story behind The Man with 1000 Kids. 

Laura and Kate found out their child was part of an illegal sperm donation network after they joined a Facebook group to locate their baby's donor siblings. From here, they received a mysterious message that alerted them to Jonathan's notoriety in the donor community. 

"It's been very overwhelming," Laura says in the documentary. "We just wanted to have a child, and now we find out that our child could have hundreds of half-siblings out there."

Parents affected by Jonathan's scheme set up a Facebook group, Donorkind 102 JJM, to share their experiences. Mothers messaged Jonathan to plead for him to stop and to ask how many children he had fathered, but he replied with different numbers to the women starting as low as 25. 

Laura and Kate spoke candidly about the loss they felt over discovering the father of their child had manipulated them. 

Australian couple Laura and Kate from the Netflix documentary. Image: Netflix. 

"We feel like we were lied to," Kate says. "We trusted him, and he took advantage of that trust. It's not just about us – it's about all the other families out there who are now dealing with this." 

As if this story couldn't get more disturbing, a whistleblower from a donor website revealed that in the Netherlands, Jonathan had been working with another man named Leon. The men were running a sperm donor ring by posting a range of fake profiles on a donor website that were actually just the two men. 

Most chillingly, some of the women who had requested Jonathan's donation had actually allegedly received Leon's sperm, the men would compete against each other for who could donate the most, and they'd sometimes mix their sperm together before giving a donation to the women. 

The ethical ramifications of Jonathan fathering so many children are wide-ranging but the documentary highlighted a scientific theory called 'assortative mating', which refers to people being attracted to each other due to similar or familiar traits.

This is a cause for concern as Jonathan's half-siblings could be drawn to each other and have sex without realising they're related. "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," said Natalie, a mother featured in the series. 

This could result in incest which is why there's a limitation on how many children any man can father. 

"What happens psychologically to these children that have 700, 800, 900 brothers and sisters?" asks Kate in the documentary. "How are they psychologically going to be able to deal with this information?"

Jonathan is estimated to have fathered 1,000 kids. Image: Netflix. 

The women and couples who had been victimised by Jonathan continued to speak out. 

In April 2023, a Dutch court ruled that Jonathan could face fines of up to £88,000 ($141,452 AUD) for donating sperm again. However, there's a lack of international regulations governing sperm donation which makes it tough to prevent similar abuses outside of the Netherlands. 

Some of the affected mothers, like Laura and Kate, hope to bring about change.

"We want to make sure this doesn't happen to anyone else," Laura says. "There need to be better laws and regulations in place to protect families and donor-conceived children."

Despite this small victory, there remain serious concerns that Jonathan is still donating sperm through other avenues overseas. On his YouTube channel, he's still posting videos from all over the world. 

"He ain't gonna stop... It’s an obsession," one of the Netflix documentary subjects Vanessa told The Guardian.

"I wanted to participate in this documentary to make women aware… and I really, really want him to stop."

In court, he claims to have "nearly 600" children, but the Netflix series estimates as many as 3,000 children could have been born from his private and sperm bank donations

For Laura and Kate, they hope that by sharing their stories, he can be stopped. "We hope that by speaking out, we can help prevent something like this from happening again," Kate said. 

"No one should have to go through what we've been through."

You can stream The Man With 1000 Kids on Netflix.

Feature image: Netflix.