The Man with 1000 Kids uncovers the gripping tale of a charming Dutch man named Jonathan Meijer, who is accused of serial sperm donation at countless clinics and via numerous private donations around the world. The three-part series shares the stories of a number of families who claim they were deceived by Meijer, including Suzanne and Natalie, a couple from the Netherlands who thought that they were one of only a few couples he was helping to become parents; Joyce and John, a Dutch couple who were unable to conceive due to an irreversible vasectomy that John had during his first marriage — Meijer helped them have two children; and Laura and Kate, a Sydney, Australia, couple who learned of their donor’s actions in a Facebook group. The families in the doc are just a small representation of who Meijer may have affected. 

How many children does Jonathan Meijer have?

According to the families in the series, despite their best efforts to get Meijer to tell the truth, they say he continued to refuse to admit the total number of children that he’d fathered. In court, he asserted the number is “nearly 600,” but Eve Wiley, a fertility fraud activist, ventures a far larger guess.

“So with Jonathan and [sperm bank] Cryos International, he’s going to Copenhagen once a month for four days for four years. That’s roughly 200 donations, and you can get about 15 straws of sperm per ejaculation. If every straw makes a baby, that could be 3,000 potential children,” she explains in the doc. “That is just one sperm bank. And we know that he was in at least 11 sperm banks.”

However, the implications of Meijer’s actions reach much farther than just the children he may have fathered directly.

“Obviously, the children are affected, and the children’s children are affected,” says executive producer Natalie Hill. “But every cousin is affected. Everyone who becomes a partner of those children is then affected. Jonathan’s brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, everyone that is connected or becomes connected by making a new family will be affected by his actions.”

Read more about the doc series here, or watch The Man with 1000 Kids on Netflix now.