The subject of “The Man with 1,000 Kids” has some issues with the viral Netflix documentary series.
“They deliberately called [the documentary] ‘The Man With 1,000 Kids,’ when it should be ‘the sperm donor who helped families conceive with 550 children’,” Jonathan Jacob Meijer told BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour last Wednesday. “So already from the start they are deliberately deceiving and misleading.”
Meijer also said that he sees “absolutely nothing wrong” fathering hundreds of children.
Though Netflix declined to comment on Woman’s Hour, Natalie Hill, an executive producer for the documentary, disagreed with Meijer that the majority of the families he donated sperm to were happy. Specifically, she called the claim “completely untrue.”
“I’ve 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,” Hill said, noting that 50 families made impact statements to the court, pleading for Meijer to stop. “This continued platform for Jonathan to talk about it being a handful of women is completely untrue.”
The three-part docuseries is currently the No. 1 show on Netflix in the United States. It sheds light on the story of Meijer, a prolific sperm donor who has fathered hundreds of children across countries and continents. Altogether, he donated to 11 sperm banks in the Netherlands while also making private donations.
The docuseries accuses Meijer of lying to parents about how much he donated. Serial donors, such as Meijer, increase the risk of consanguinity, which has to do with sexual relationships or marriages between people with common biological ancestors. That risk is especially concerning in a country like the Netherlands, which is geographically small and has a population of roughly 17 million.
“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 told 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.”
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