‘YouTuber and Spermdonor“Jonathan Meijer calls himself. With 25,000 followers online and around 500 to 3,000 children in the real world, two professions now seem to cross each other. In his online content, he gives advice on eating raw porkerses, the alleged nonsense of sunscreen and makes calls to ‘Teenage Boys‘To a’trailwife‘To look for themselves.
This week he stood in court opposite the Donorkind Foundation, who accuses him in summary proceedings of undesirable contact with and influencing donor children and their parents via his YouTube channel. Donor contracts prescribe that donors are not allowed to make contact with children. Meijer would bypass these measures with his public videos and so the foundation demands that he will stop his channel.
Ban
In 2023, the two parties were already opposite each other in the Hague court. Then the judge decided that Meijer was no longer allowed to donate seed to new wish parents and that he had to immediately remove all his advertisements, including those under pseudonyms. Between 2007 and 2019, Meijer, who became internationally known by the Netflix documentary ‘The Man with 1000 Kids’, donated sperm through official spermabanks and unofficial forums and websites worldwide. How often he donated and where is unknown. He started with this because he said he wanted to do “something good”. He says to women who use his services that 25 children, the Dutch guideline, are his maximum.
It is not clear how many donor children are eighteen years later. Meijer himself says that there are 550 and that he finds it reprehensible to talk about children in numbers: “They are unique individuals with their own souls.” In the Netflix documentary there is the estimate around the three thousand donor children. Meijer calls the documentary, in which an injured mother attributes him a “God-complex”, a “propaganda film full of lies.”
Ties van der Weer, himself donor and affiliated with Stichting Donorkind states that his course of action is reprehensible and harmful. “There is scientific evidence that this can cause incest and that it can have negative psychosocial consequences for donor children.” Many children are curious about their origins and are actively looking for it. “It is quite what if you suddenly turn out to have hundreds of brothers and sisters,” says Van der Weer.
From a different country, he advises young people not to follow training and not to look for a job: that would be slavery
The self-proclaimed ‘Ooievaar from The Hague’ cooks on his YouTube channel ‘the best and most noble, loyal and fairest sperm donor’. What he still vlogged about in crypto and malignant dentists in the beginning, he now mainly gives tips about life in a broader sense. He records his latest videos in Zurich, Toronto, Rimini and Winterberg. From a different country, he advises young people not to follow training and not to look for a job: that would be slavery. Girls do well to become a ‘Tradwife’, a traditional woman who gives birth to many children and takes care of the family at home while her husband works. He teaches boys how to bind such a woman to herself, and then have as many children as possible and to live in nature, where they can feed their families with raw meat and raw milk.
According to lawyer Lotte van Schuylenburg, who assists the Donorkind Foundation, Meijer has responsibility to keep in the public domain to the people and children’s access wishes, as laid down in the donor contracts. On May 22, 2024, for example, Meijer posted a video with the title “Important message for all my children”, in which he calls on contact with him if children feel poorly treated by their parents.
“The fact is that he is the biological father of all these children. This means that he automatically has a certain influence on them, “says Van Schuylenburg. In the current summary proceedings, she demands on behalf of the Donorkind Foundation that Meijer removes his YouTube channel. “The lives of these parents and children is difficult enough because of the choices of Meijer. Through these messages he deprives them the right to an undisturbed family life without involving the donor. ”
Lawyer Van Meijer
Kaspar Ripken, Meijer’s lawyer, argues that he does not address his donor children with his messages and that the removal of his YouTube account is a far-reaching restriction of Meijer’s right to freedom of expression. He is said to have removed the videos that the foundation finds in the meantime, and Meijer would have promised to “limit his public expressions.”
In recent months, several videos indeed disappeared from Meijer’s channel. Van Schuylenburg says he has put it on private, so he can still share them. Under one of his videos, someone asks what he would do if his children would see these images in the future. Meijer replies: “Many of them are already watching my videos.”
The summary proceedings are still ongoing. On Wednesday, the judge gave both parties another chance to get out of it together. If that fails, the judge will still rule.
In a recent video on his YouTube channel with the title ‘Most important step to put on a Tradwife’, the now 43-year-old Meijer says in a Hawaii shirt from Marbella himself also likes to found a traditional family. On his Facebook page he says he is still single.