The Man with 1000 Kids brings renewed attention to Jan Karbaat's controversy

The Man with 1000 Kids dropped on Netflix on July 3. It is a shocking three-episode docuseries about an extreme case of fertility fraud. The nightmarish documentary centers on the controversial case of Jonathan Jacob Meijer, a Dutch sperm donor who was banned from making any more sperm donations after admitting to having fathered over 500 children.

On the surface, just by reading the title, the scenario is difficult to believe. Just by looking at the figure, it already tops the twisted tale of Dr. Jan Karbaat featured in the Seeds of Deceit documentary (2018). Karbaat used his own sperm to impregnate patients in his fertility clinic and fathered around 200 children.

But in this case, 500 or even 1000 seems to be a conservative guess, because as the latest docuseries progresses, many pieces of information arise that are very worrying.

The official logline of the limited series, per Netflix, reveals the harrowing fertility fraud, which reads:

"A group of families learn the charismatic man they had trusted is sperm donor to hundreds—or perhaps thousands—of other children across the world."

Disclaimer: This article is based on author's opinion. Reader's discretion is advised.

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Netflix's The Man with 1000 Kids almost overshadows Jan Karbaat's Seeds of Deceit controversy

Miriam Guttman's 22-minute short film Seeds of Deceit was initially shown on TV in the Netherlands in 2018. However, it gained a wider audience, and critics for its main subject when the extended three-episode series was screened at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.

Its main character was a Dutch fertility specialist, Jan Karbaat, who died in 2017. But before his death, he had left dozens and dozens of children behind. The gist of it was that the doctor had secretly impregnated the female patients who wanted to do an IVF in the fertility clinic he owned using his own sperm.

DNA tests in 2019 proved that he fathered at least 49 kids but that number had only increased over the years and it is now thought to be around the 200 mark.

If Jan Karbaat's controversy wasn't shocking enough, Netflix's latest docuseries The Man with 1000 Kids presents an even larger number of half-siblings. The bottom line of the story sounds like an impossible tale: A Dutchman, Jonathan Meijer, agreed to donate his sperm to several families, both through traditional sperm donations and outside of the conventional donation channels.

He also traveled around the world and ended up providing sperm donations in multiple countries, which made it difficult to keep a full count of kids with his DNA.

The donations Meijer made can be traced back to 2013. It was only in 2023 when his right to donate sperm was removed, giving him about ten uninterrupted years of donating in sperm barks and through private donations. While the docuseries chose not to reveal an official figure, the final episode of Netflix's The Man with 1000 Kids placed his potential children somewhere between 600 and 3000.

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Where is the man behind The Man with 1000 Kids now?

While the man behind the controversial Netflix docuseries refused to be interviewed for the project, he remains active on social media via his YouTube channel. However, ahead of The Man with 1000 Kids' release, Jonathan Meijer was most recently in Zanzibar in Tanzania and had refuted the documentary's claim that he had sired 1000 children in a May 22 YouTube video.

He admitted to doing multiple sperm donations across different channels, but it's not a thousand as the documentary claims, only 550, he said. In a June 25 YouTube video, Meijer also addressed why he didn't participate in the Netflix docuseries, saying:

"I was right in not participating for myself, personally, because they first wanted to call it The Fertility Fraudster. That's not a title I can work with."

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Watch The Man with 1000 Kids now streaming on Netflix.