In a scene from Netflix’s new “stranger-than-fiction” documentary “The Man with 1000 Kids”, a woman explains why she chose Jonathan Jacob Meijer as her sperm donor, pointing out his thick curly hair, bright blue eyes and good teeth. “It sounded like she was judging at Crufts”, said Anita Singh in The Telegraph.
The mysterious Dutchman at the centre of the show made it his life’s work to travel the world donating sperm privately and to as many clinics as possible. When he “finally wound up in court” he confessed to fathering almost 600 children. The real number could be as high as 3,000.
Most of the women were given a sperm sample but he also offered to impregnate women the “natural way”. “Some of them said yes,” said Singh. The documentary is told from the point of view of just a handful of the parents who were “duped” by Meijer (he told them he had only fathered up to 10 other children).
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
Sign up for The Week’s Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Over the course of the three-part series, said Lucy Mangan in The Guardian, we follow the women’s stories from the “initial joy” of discovering they are pregnant to the “unravelling of the horror” as it emerges Meijer is not who he seems, and the eventual court case brought against him.
A story to “chill the blood”, it’s a “cautionary tale about the perils of the modern age”, said Vicky Jessop in the London Evening Standard. As scores of children fathered by Meijer start “popping up” across the Netherlands and abroad, the women begin to confront their sperm donor – only to be met with a hostile response.
The word “incest” is used a “staggering number of times” (unwitting incest among the siblings is one of the biggest issues) and stock footage of syringes, scans and crying babies flash on to the screen repeatedly as if the show is “trying to pound it into our eyeballs”.
While it’s “undoubtedly fascinating viewing albeit in a very grim way”, we never hear from Meijer (he refuses to comment for the documentary), which leaves the show feeling like there’s a “void at its heart”.
“I think we could all do without the reconstruction scenes of a long-haired actor playing Meijer simulating masturbation into a small cup,” said Carol Midgley in The Times.
But it is an oddly intriguing story about a man “so blinded by self-love” that he seemed to have convinced himself he was “doing the world a favour”.
