On a January morning in 2007, a young man called Jonathan Meijer entered the doors of a private clinic in the Netherlands to register as a sperm donor.
It was an act he insists was underpinned by pure altruism: having seen a male friend confront the heartache of infertility, he wanted to do his bit to help others complete their dream of having a family.
Seventeen years on, few can deny that Meijer, now 43, has more than fulfilled his calling — and then some.
By his own admission, he has fathered ‘around 550 children’ across the globe, although there are others — among them the creators of a hit new Netflix documentary — who believe the number could be at least double that, hence the arresting title of their three part series, The Man With 1,000 Kids.
It’s not just the title that gives pause for thought, however. The documentary features a number of women and couples, who have had Meijer’s children, making a number of extraordinary claims about him.
Jonathan Meijer, 43, has fathered ‘around 550 children’ across the globe, although there are others who believe the number could be at least double that
Accusing him of, variously, extreme narcissism and harbouring a ‘God-like complex’, they suggest Meijer deliberately lied to those he helped about the extent of his activities, revelling in the control it gave him.
In what is surely the most startling and unsettling accusation, one woman claims Meijer secretly mixed his sperm with another donor to play ‘sperm roulette’ with families’ lives.
It’s a claim that, today, in his first full interview since the series began, Meijer calls ‘rubbish’. ‘Complete b******s, to use a word you English like,’ he says.
Meijer insists that not only has he done nothing wrong, but he’s been woefully misunderstood.
If he is guilty of anything, he claims, it’s of getting carried away with the thrill of helping others create the family they yearn for.
‘Not that I regret helping anybody, but it was more — I don’t like to use the word ‘addiction’ — but you feel so rewarded, it’s absolutely wonderful,’ he says of his prolific donations.
‘It’s a blessing if you can experience it only once in a life, but I was experiencing it on many days, and still am, because people update me about what is happening with their children.
‘It’s a blessing, but I guess it got very hard to then just abruptly say: ‘OK, I am this guy that is making all these people completely happy, but now I am going to stop.’ ‘ Although stop he has. Meijer’s last donation was in 2019, a development prompted in part by external forces.
In 2017, the Dutch Society of Obstetrics and Gynaecology banned him from donating any more after it emerged that he had 102 children in Holland alone.
Six years later, a court in the Netherlands then banned him from making any further donations globally, after a civil lawsuit brought by the Donorkind Foundation, a Dutch charity which helps children from sperm donation trace their roots, argued that he was raising the risk of incest.
In 2017, the Dutch Society of Obstetrics and Gynaecology banned Jonathan from donating any more sperm after it emerged that he had 102 children in Holland alone
It drew a legal line under a ‘career’ during which Meijer has — whatever the disagreements over the exact number — by his own calculations, produced hundreds of half siblings (the oldest 16 and the youngest five) dotted all over the world.
And so we have a sprawling web of relations stretching across the world, from Europe to Australia emerging from one ordinary Dutch man. And in some ways that is the point. Speaking to me last week, Meijer emerges as neither the sinister seed-spreading archvillain portrayed in the documentary, or a thoughtless renegade.
Genial and laid-back, he seems, more than anything, a conundrum: a self-described conservative, Christian churchgoer, but also a ‘free spirit’; close to his parents and siblings, but a man who, despite his bountiful contribution to the global gene pool, has yet to have a family of his own.
Certainly, Meijer’s background was traditional. One of eight siblings, he was raised in The Hague by an artist father, who combined his creative output with blue-collar jobs to help make ends meet, and a homemaker mother.
‘They did an excellent job,’ he says of his parents. ‘People in the documentary suggest I didn’t get attention, or I was unhappy. But I have the best memories.’
Initially hoping to pursue his love of music professionally, Meijer settled on a career in education, working for nearly a decade teaching social studies, before exiting the profession for a more laid-back life, juggling odd jobs with international travel and occasional work as a musician. ‘I keep my expenses really low,’ he explains. ‘So it’s not necessary for me to have a nine to five job.’
He was at university when he first came across the idea of sperm donation, courtesy of a friend who confided in him about his infertility.
‘He was a really nice guy, and it was shocking to me that this had happened. It was causing problems with his girlfriend, and he became depressed,’ he says. ‘He talked about adoption and sperm donation. I’m always curious, so I wanted to take a look.’
Meijer says in the course of his research he came across donor and recipient stories which struck a profound chord. ‘I wanted to do something meaningful with my life. This was a way to give somebody something that’s extremely valuable,’ he says.
And so, aged 26, he signed up with his first clinic on that January morning in 2007, three years after the country changed the law giving children born from donor sperm the right to know the identity of their donor (the UK followed suit in 2005).
‘For me, this was a good thing. I didn’t want to donate anonymously: I wanted for the children and the parents, and also myself, to have a chance to meet in the future,’ he says.
‘On Netflix they portray me as this crazy person, but I was very aware of the consequences of being an ‘open identity’ donor.’
The new three-part Netflix documentary, The Man With 1,000 Kids, features a number of women and couples, who have had Jonathan’s children, making a number of extraordinary claims about him
Jonathan says that ‘on Netflix they portray me as this crazy person, but I was very aware of the consequences of being an ‘open identity’ donor’
His family, too, would, indirectly, be affected.
‘That was the hardest thing of all my decisions,’ he says. ‘I didn’t want any of them to feel it’s a burden or make them feel sad. So I kept it fairly strict and separate.’
It is a rule that is maintained today. ‘Some of the family are more on the positive side and others are more, ‘This is not my cup of tea.’ But we respect that because we are family first, and everybody makes his own decisions as long as someone is not committing horrible crimes.’
Four children swiftly resulted from Meijer’s interaction with his first clinic. But he did not stop there: while under Dutch guidelines, donors are not allowed to father more than 25 children, Meijer then went to ten other clinics throughout the Netherlands, a country with a population of just 17.7 million.
He also joined Cryos, the international clinic based in Denmark — although he stipulated that his sperm ‘could not be sent to the Netherlands’.
Why was one clinic not enough? Meijer struggles to say, although he refutes the idea that his actions were driven by narcissism.
‘I think, if you looked at my day-to-day life, and spoke to my friends, they would not recognise that,’ he says. ‘I try to be a nice person, and to me I was helping in different parts of the country.
‘None of the individual clinics, except one, asked if I had donated anywhere else — and the one that did, when I said yes, told me they could not accept me. Sure, no problem. But the others didn’t ask. If they were so concerned, the clinics could have picked up the phone to each other.’
Perhaps he was too valuable an asset: while donors to clinics receive little more than £30-£50 per donation, families who use their services are charged many multiples of that.
And, to be blunt, it seems that a man described by one clinic as looking like ‘Brad Pitt’ was always going to be in demand.
Either way, by 2017, prompted by an investigation undertaken after one clinic received an email from an anonymous whistleblower, it emerged that Meijer had fathered 102 children in the Netherlands alone.
A court in the Netherlands has banned Jonathan from making any more donations globally, after a civil lawsuit brought by a Dutch charity which helps children from sperm donation trace their roots, argued that he was raising the risk of incest
Some were the result of ‘private’ donations, made after he joined a Dutch website which allows families to search directly for individual donors. Posting pictures of himself with piercing blue eyes and a mane of blond hair, he quickly found himself inundated with requests.
‘I thought maybe I would get two or three messages; I was getting ten a day,’ he says, adding that he signed up because he yearned for a more ‘individual’ connection with his recipients.
He certainly seems to have got that, according to one lady called Vanessa who appears in the Netflix documentary claiming Meijer offered to donate ‘in the traditional way’ — a claim Meijer notably does not deny.
She is one of five sets of interviewees — two lesbian couples, a heterosexual couple and two single mothers — in the programme who claim that Meijer consistently downplayed the number of donations he was making, telling them he was helping either ‘a couple’ of others, or ‘a maximum of five families’.
‘In the beginning I was very open,’ he insists now. ‘But I started to run into problems because some of them wanted exclusivity. They want their donor to themselves, which would not be an option if they went to a clinic, where they have no obligation to tell you how often the sperm has been used.
‘I found out the hard way. I’ve had a woman at my door threatening me because I wanted to help one of her friends. So I decided to give an estimated number. And I know, in an ideal world, maybe it would have been different.’
Aside from his acknowledgement that he may have got carried away, it is the closest we come in the interview to an admission of some sort of responsibility.
As we have seen, he is more robust when confronted with the suggestion, made by a woman called Patricia, that he had mixed his sperm with another donor before handing it over in order to see which genes proved the strongest. ‘It’s disgusting,’ he says. ‘And I will sue Netflix over something which is not true and about which I know they have no evidence at all.’
It is the one black-and-white statement in a conversation full of grey areas. Despite Meijer’s assertions that he ‘kept track’ of the children born from his donations — the list, he says, is ‘in a safe’ — and that he took pains to ensure the children are in multiple locations across the world, some have ended up in bogglingly close proximity. In the documentary, it emerges that three of his offspring were found to be attending the same Dutch daycare centre.
Which brings us to perhaps the most disturbing aspect of Meijer’s ‘work’, which has, in the Netherlands at least, resulted in multiple children sharing the same genes, raising the risk of consanguinity (sexual relationships or marriages between people with common biological ancestors) and resultant potential birth defects.
Once again, Meijer is untroubled. ‘I do not agree with anonymous donors, because it’s not very good for children. I think they need to have identity,’ he says. ‘My donor children, immediately from the moment they ask, they have a picture of me; they know my name; I meet with a large number of them. It takes one question to another person to find out who I am. So I think this is blown out of proportion.’
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The Dutch courts did not think so. Meijer’s 2023 ban on donating his sperm — which does not cover providing sibling donations for existing children — was accompanied by a €100,000 ban (£85,000) for any future violations. ‘To me, it was ridiculous, as I had already stopped making donations four years before,’ he says. ‘For me, it was driven by a small group of women — many on the documentary — who had become obsessed with my movements.’
Others he has helped, he insists, are more sanguine. ‘It is like a bell curve — you have the small unhappy group at one end, another group at the other end who think what I am doing is great, and then lots of others who are ok — some more happy, some less happy,’ he says.
‘From what I have seen, the children are happy. Some have met half siblings; they go on holiday, they meet each other.’
As for his change of heart — this came gradually, prompted in part by wanting to focus on his own future. ‘I was also really longing for this off-grid, traditional, natural life, which I am working on at the moment. I also felt I really need to settle down and have my own family.’
In his case, of course, that perfectly ordinary undertaking comes with a complex web attached: any child he raises would soon learn that they have hundreds of half siblings, and even if you are not on birthday card terms, that fact is a lot to take in.
There’s also the small matter of getting a girlfriend. While coy on the subject of his love life, Meijer confides that his last two liaisons were with women he had initially met in his capacity as a donor. ‘They just didn’t work out,’ he says. ‘I would like to meet someone, and she will have to be strong to understand everything that has happened and be ok with it.’
Can anyone be ok with it? And should they be? Either way, the reality is that, whatever the motivation of Meijer — and anyone else like him — whether it be well-intentioned or otherwise, the criminal courts are ultimately powerless to stop them.
And that is, perhaps, the most unsettling part of this story.