Dutch sperm donor with 550 kids pushing incest, trad life on YouTube, parents say

Jonathan Meijer, a Dutch man who conceived at least 550 children through sperm donation, is using his YouTube channel to influence children, according to mother Natalie Dijkdrenth and Stichting Donorkind. He promotes harmful ideas like incest and traditional gender roles. Today, they will ask the court to take Meijer’s YouTube channel down and order him to stop addressing “his” donor children via social media.

“He vlogs a lot on YouTube. In his videos, he regularly addresses the children with all kinds of advice about how they should approach life. He also says nasty things about parents who have been critical of him in public. Then he tells the children directly and indirectly what they should think about it,” Ties van der Meer, director of Stichting Donorkind, a foundation that stands up for the rights of children conceived through sperm donation, told RTL Nieuws.

Natalie Dijkdrenth and Suzanne Daniëls have a son conceived through Meijer and they are very concerned about the things he promotes on YouTube, which they believe include incest. “For example, he advises children to choose a partner who looks like them and who thinks the same as them. He openly disapproves of certain parenting styles and promotes large families,” Dijkdrenth told the Volkskrant.

Titles of his YouTube videos include Blessed are the trad wives and Trad man power. “Trad” is short for traditional and the phenomenon promotes a traditional division of roles between men and women, where women take care of children, the household, and the vegetable garden, while men are the breadwinner. He implies parents nowadays are weak because they complain about the load of caring for two children, while past families had up to 15 children.

“Some children are very impressionable because of their age,” Dijkdrenth said. “As parents, we can do our best, but as a donor, he still has a certain appeal to them.”

The summary proceedings filed by Dijkdrenth and Stichting Donorkind will appear in court at 11:00 a.m. on Tuesday.

The Netflix documentary The Man with 1000 Kids was made about Meijer. The documentary makers claim he conceived 3,000 children with his sperm. He says there are 550.

In 2023, another mother took Meijer to court to force him to stop donating sperm. The judge ruled in her favor and banned the man from donating to new parents. He is now only allowed to donate to parents who already have a child conceived from his sperm and want another one.

According to RTL Nieuws, the man said in September that he does not adhere to the court ruling and still donates to families “who ask for it.”