Mass donor Jonathan Meijer drags Netflix to court, Spong and Plasman deem case 'utterly hopeless'
Dutch mass donor Jonathan Meijer is going to file a lawsuit against Netflix. He wants the streaming platform to make the documentary made about him The man with 1000 kids, taken offline. He said that Tuesday night on the talk show Eva on NPO 1.
According to the sperm donor, the film damages him, the donor children and their parents. At the table with Eva Jinek, he said, among other things, that the documentary is not based on figures and that no proper background check was done. He denied that he would have fathered 3,000 children, as stated in the documentary, but that it was 550. "Anything after that is speculation," Jonathan said.
Last year, he himself was in court, which ruled that he had to stop providing his sperm. According to the court, Jonathan had lied about his sperm donations. He told people who wanted to use his donation that he had a maximum of 25 donor children, the maximum number that individual clinics use for sperm donors.
Hazardous to health
The case had been brought by the Donorkind Foundation. Mass donation is dangerous to the children's health and bad for their well-being, the foundation says. For example, donor children may unknowingly have a child later in life with someone who is genetically their half-brother or sister, which again can be harmful to their offspring.Jonathan said Tuesday night that he has stopped donating in 2019, except to families who want another second or third child from him. By filing a lawsuit against Netflix, he wants to "protect the children from the media's lust to make some kind of spectacle out of this," he said.
'Case is utterly hopeless'
Lawyers Gerard Spong and Peter Plasman consider the case against Netflix "completely hopeless," they told Eva. According to them, the documentary serves a social interest because prospective wish parents are made aware of the mass donor. Netflix would have done thorough research with plenty of non-anonymous sources. Jonathan was also allowed to comment, but he did not want to. "I don't want to cooperate with such a shadowy company," he said of it. "I can share everything myself on my YouTube channel."
