Original subtitles

We met in Sydney. So we're both originally from Sydney.

We always knew that we wanted to have a family together.

We knew we'd have to source a sperm donor, so we started searching online.

And that's when we found Cryos.

The site looked so professional. It was really reassuring.

Cryos is the largest international sperm bank in the world.

They're based in Denmark.

There were hundreds of donors, like, hundreds of donors that came up.

Each donor used childhood photos in their profiles

and obviously aliases that aren't their real names.

She wanted someone that looked like me. I'm saying, "Okay, let's shortlist that."

So we want someone who's blond.

We had a selection of three donors, and then we narrowed it down to one,

and that was donor Ruud from the Netherlands.

He just... he had the most kindest eyes,

and he just really seemed like he was a really beautiful little boy.

Cryos stated that it was fine to import donor Ruud's sperm into Australia.

It said there was a maximum number of children per donor

and that he hadn't exceeded his limit.

So we were totally sold on Ruud.

When we found out we were pregnant, it was just amazing.

She goes, "We're having a little boy!"

And I swear to God, I fell to my freaking knees.

When we first saw our son, I saw Ruud straight away.

And even though he wasn't in the room,

he was there because he had given us this absolutely...

- Yeah, it was amazing. - ...amazing gift.

- And in that moment, it was... - Yeah.

Yeah, it was beautiful.

But that wonderment that we had experienced having our son

was totally ripped from us.

When we looked at donor Ruud's profile,

there was a handwritten note to the potential donor child.

It was very moving.

"Dear family,

I am glad to tell you something about why I became a donor."

He stated that he was very interested in a meeting

with any donor child.

But we wouldn't know who he was, his identity, before our child was 18.

That's the law. You have to wait.

But we knew, through Cryos, they had, uh, donor sibling Facebook pages

where you could look for siblings and families to connect.

You could say, "Hey, we've used this donor."

"Is there any siblings out there?"

"Is there anyone who has actually used this donor before?"

We can fly to them. We can meet them.

We might be able to have family barbecues,

and we can actually get those kids together.

And then we got a private message.

It just said, "Hey, how are you going?"

"I just wanna let you know,

I recognize the donor that you're looking for."

"I don't have very good news, unfortunately,

to tell you about your donor."

She said, "Your donor is quite famous in the Netherlands."

"This guy is a serial donor."

"He has no intentions of stopping,

and there is a Facebook group that has donor families that have used him."

"Would you like to know about it?"

So we got into that group straight away,

and they're uploading photos of all these kids and what they look like.

It's like seeing the same version of your own child.

- Just slightly different. - Yeah.

You could just lay out a plate of dough and just bring a cookie cutter,

and just do that hundreds and hundreds of times.

"I'm sorry. Your child is a number, and your donor is a liar."

It's like someone swung a sock with a brick in it.

It was... bam!

We joined the Facebook group,

and it opened a whole new world for us, a whole new reality.

Because we saw the pictures.

There are a lot of pictures from other children,

and there are so many similarities.

- We were thinking, "Oh my God." - "This is bigger than we thought."

There weren't four families or five families or ten families.

- There are much more. - There are already hundreds.

That's when... when we were, I guess, fearful for the children.

A couple of months later, we organized a siblings' day,

and then it became very real.

My daughter knows a lot of brothers,

and she really liked one of them.

Because they have the same interests. They have the same humor.

They have the same little silly things.

So they really connect.

And my daughter was saying, "Hey, I like... I really like him."

I was like, "Well, that's not an option. He's your half-brother."

"But I really, really like him. Maybe I'm in love with him."

So that's a big problem. And she was only ten or eleven.

These connections with the children are instant.

It's so weird to see.

They call it the Luke and Leia complex because of the movie Star Wars.

Children who haven't been brought up together

are more likely to get attracted to each other

because they see some familiarities

in the face of the, uh... of the sibling.

But just imagine we're ten years further.

They're going to university.

They're meeting someone that they feel this connection with.

- And... - They think it's love.

Then they can think it's love, and then you can have incestuous children.

I have to teach her to always ask, to everybody who... who she meets,

"Are you from a donor?"

The more kids there are, the more chance you have on, uh, incest.

So I talked to Jonathan several times

and asked him how many children there are.

And he avoids the questions. He avoids answers.

You wanna ask him nicely, and you don't want to make him angry.

I wanted my child to have a... a bond with the donor.

And when he's angry, he could cut you off and contact with your child.

There is his power.

When I asked how many children he had,

he told me there are probably 150-ish.

"But I do keep count."

I'm like, "Huh?"

You do keep count, but "150-ish"?

I asked him several times, over and over again, how many kids he had.

With everybody, he's calling another number.

Twenty-five. One hundred. One hundred and seventy-five.

Fifty. Two hundred.

Many moms confronted him, asking him to stop,

and he was just not listening.

I asked him to stop as well.

And then he always said, "Well, I'm... I'm... I stopped."

"I only help moms who want a second or a third."

But, of course, it wasn't true.

We decided to get onto the Cryos website.

We could see that he was donating...

- Frequently. - ...frequently.

There were times when he was coming every month to Cryos, Denmark.

Because you could see that his straws had sold out.

And then a month later, those stocks would replenish again.

And sometimes they would replenish up to 120 vials at a time.

And they were going very quick, so we knew that he was very popular.

I was trying to get information.

We asked him how many kids he had from Cryos.

But he lied and lied over and over again.

Well, he has his own YouTube channel,

and then we realized that he has multiple videos in Denmark.

Then you assume he's there donating.

Hi. Thank you for watching my new video blog.

Today I'm in Denmark, in Copenhagen.

Today I'm in Copenhagen.

Today I'm in Copenhagen.

Today I'm in Denmark, in Copenhagen.

A note labeled "Staff impression" from Cryos said...

"Ruud is a very devoted donor."

"He lives in Holland,

but he comes to Denmark approximately one week every month."

"Ruud always enters the room with a big smile,

revealing his gleaming white teeth."

"His sweet face is framed by the most lovely long, thick, curly hair."

We thought, "There is a donor limit."

There's a national limit in every single country.

And then we did a little bit of a look

to see what countries had received his sperm

and what countries had reached their quota.

And what we started to see is that he had reached his quota

in most European countries.

That's what it looked like.

I asked him to stop, to stop, to stop.

Stop donating. You're making too many children.

We need to find these children.

And Jonathan's been, um, quite transparent with his travels.

Every country that he was traveling to, we were able to investigate

the crevices of every single donor-conceived network group

and every sperm-donation group,

and put a call out on social media.

- We had a lot of bites, responses. - We did. We had a... Yeah.

We found mothers in Austria, uh, Italy,

France, Serbia, Ukraine,

uh, Germany, Poland, Hungaria, UK, Switzerland.

Mexico.

South Africa.

Russia.

Romania, Denmark, Sweden.

The US, Canada, Kenya,

and Argentina.

We were starting to do the math on that,

and we had realized that there probably are thousands of children.

What happens, psychologically, to these children

that have seven, eight hundred, nine hundred brothers and sisters?

How are they psychologically going to be able to deal with this information?

Start living your own life and your own dreams,

and follow your own will to power, your own strength.

Discover your own strength.

And it can be in... in any way.

You can excel in whatever you want to do.

You don't need anyone telling you what to do.

I talked with a lot of moms, new moms.

And the most important question they have is,

"How many kids does he have?"

I always have to say, "I don't know. That's the only thing I don't know."

In that conversation,

they realize that he... the whole thing, his whole story, is one big lie,

and then I have them... I have the feeling I'm the messenger of the bad news

every time, all over... all over again,

um,

ruining their world.

It's, um... it's not easy.

It's making me sleep bad. I mean... Yeah.

I didn't wanna do this.

It's terrible to...

to ruin their lives every time.

Because I... I know they don't sleep. And I don't sleep.

And sometimes I have, like, ten moms on the phone in a week.

And it's breaking my heart.

I think once we had all those facts,

yeah, we just sat in the lounge together, and we just...

we drew all our blinds, um, because it was just...

The day was just, um...

- Too much. Yeah, it was too much. - It was actually too much.

- I don't think we left the house for days. - No, we didn't.

We just had, um, an eight-month-old to look after.

Uh, we canceled everything. We didn't speak to our family.

We didn't work. We didn't do anything.

Absolutely cried our eyes out.

And you hear the worries of all those moms

for the future, for their... for their kids.

They trusted this man.

This person is half our son.

And what else was there about Jonathan that we didn't know?

Okay. Yeah.

I know Jonathan personally.

We are, uh, daily... in daily contact.

He confides in me, and he trusts me.

I tried to have a baby with Jonathan for six months.

I got to know him on the... on the Internet. He introduced himself.

And I think, two weeks later when I ovulated, he was there.

When he came, I was thinking, "Wow!"

Perfect skin, good body, blond hair, blue eyes.

And I'm ready to have beautiful babies.

And I said, "Okay, come to the bedroom. Let's do it in the natural way."

And he didn't hesitate.

And every time when he came, I gave him chocolate milk with cookies

because he was still so young.

I found it adorable.

Is there an age gap between the two of you?

Yes.

Which was fine by me.

He spent many hours at my house,

so then I got to know him better.

I really liked him.

I had time to discuss with him

why he was donating and where it all started.

You see photos of him as a child,

and he looks so innocent and smiley,

but I wonder how happy he really was.

Jonathan, uh, has, uh, many sisters, six,

and one... one brother.

I've seen videos of him when he's younger,

and he is surrounded by a lot of people and family.

He seemed happy and content around them.

I think he was rejected in some ways

because if you have a very big family

and you have to divide your attention to all of the children,

it might be difficult to give them the attention that they need.

I saw a lot of his pictures as he was growing up.

I think he was trying to find himself.

He was experimenting with different looks and different hairstyles.

On his channel, he talked about times that he struggled in the past.

I was so aware of how temporary everything was.

You can say I was sort of depressed.

You can see videos of him trying to find his purpose

through the years.

He moved from trying to be a musician...

to becoming a teacher.

Then he became a cryptocurrency trader.

The top five cryptos that I bought in March...

I think he was lost.

And then he found his true calling.

Something that gave him a real sense of purpose in life.

That's when he let his hair grow

because he found it... uh, that women are responding on that.

And he liked it very much.

In a group, when you've got quite a few hundred children,

everyone says what year the child is born,

and what we did find is that around ten years ago,

there was an explosion of children.

And he was really, really deciding that "This is what I'm going to do."

"This is who I'm going to become."

And, um, we could see that there was no stopping from that point.

To be honest, there's really no money to be had as a professional donor,

from what we do know about what Cryos pays.

- So it's not a lucrative profession. - It isn't.

- It's become an addiction for him. - Mm-hmm.

He actually can't stop himself anymore.

It's now an obsession where he needs to get that attention every time.

He needs to have that adoration

that he clearly missed out on when he was younger.

He has so many skills now to get into the brain of the women.

But also, he can really play with you.

He's meeting parents at their most...

Vulnerable.

...vulnerable and desperate stage of life.

And the more children that he creates in his image,

the more powerful his legacy will become.

To him,

he's creating mini versions of himself and spreading his genetics,

and that's also become an obsession.

It's almost like it's turned into a god-like complex, I think.

He feels that he is the one to make the decision

whether he can give life or not give life,

and that is a very powerful...

- Position, yeah. - ...position to be in.

And I cannot get through to him to say, "Why don't you stop?"

"What is going on with your brain

that you think you're still helping people?"

"Because you're not. You're hurting people."

I think, for me, I needed to really actually start

processing what was going on.

We just couldn't accept being powerless with it anymore.

- We all felt a responsibility. - Something needed to be done.

That something needed to be done.

That's when we came across Eve Wiley, a fertility-fraud activist.

The push to protect victims of fertility fraud

makes its way to Capitol Hill.

So my mother's fertility doctor

decided to use his own sperm

instead of the sperm donor that my parents selected.

My name is Eve Wiley,

I'm from a really small town in East Texas,

and I found out when I was 30 years old that I was the product of fertility fraud.

Eve has dedicated her life to advocating for laws

to protect victims of fertility fraud.

When the Australians first reached out to me,

I was blown away and beyond shocked about what they were telling me.

So with Jonathan and Cryos International,

he's going to Copenhagen once a month for four days

for four years.

And so that's roughly 200 donations,

and you can get about 15 straws of sperm per ejaculation.

And if every straw makes a baby, that could be 3,000 potential children.

There's no international limit

for the amount of offspring that one donor can have.

And so what ultimately ends up happening

is that a really popular donor will meet that national limit,

and then a place like Cryos

will go and sell it to a different country.

And then it will get maxed out there,

and then he'll get sold to country after country after country.

And that is just one sperm bank,

and we know that he was in at least 11 sperm banks.

These donors can go in,

and they can bounce around from clinic to clinic to clinic.

Even though they sign something that says they're not donating elsewhere,

there's nothing to enforce it

because it's just a guideline and a recommendation.

And that's the problem.

When you're breeding puppies or livestock and cattle,

that is more regulated

than the fertility industry and sperm donation.

We had been totally failed.

We had been failed by the donor, and we had been failed by the sperm bank.

So it was like everyone was in cahoots.

No one had cared about the legislation. What legislation?

And the sperm banks just wanted our money.

We know that this is morally wrong,

but just because it's morally wrong doesn't make it illegal.

So the first thing that I recommended for the mothers to do

was to create a database of all of the half-siblings

so that they can give that to their children when they get older.

And that way, it would really alleviate a lot of the problems

like accidental incest.

He admitted to us that he has a list.

He has a document with all the children he fathered,

and he's choosing not to share that.

He keeps his backpack really close.

It's almost like it's attached to him.

We do think he keeps a database in his laptop.

It's like a trophy. "I know exactly how many kids I have,

and I know where they live, and I know the names."

If you ask for the list, he's not giving it.

I asked him to tell those moms, to be honest to those moms,

because it's important that they know and their children know,

and he doesn't do it.

He doesn't care.

Jonathan was never going to share that information

because families talk,

and who he was and what he was really doing

would have been exposed.

- So he obviously kept everyone separate... - He kept everyone separate.

...and kept everyone apart so that information was never found out.

We realized that Jonathan was still donating

because we could see that he was still advertising himself, essentially,

um, in sperm-donor groups.

We could see that he was continuing to promote himself.

He was using different photos on many different websites.

He was showing off his long hair at the time.

He was dressing like a professional in a beautiful suit and tie.

He was really selling himself, especially as a Viking.

And it was so infuriating to see, because we were absolutely powerless.

How do you stop these guys? How can Jonathan be stopped?

Media is one way of informing the public

that "Hey, here's this guy. He's a danger. This is why it's a danger."

What we found frustrating is that his name wasn't out in the open,

because Dutch law doesn't allow his name or picture in the media.

He was out there lying to other prospective parents,

and we had no way of alerting people who he was

because every single article that was done on him in the past

simply said, "A Dutch man."

And no one had any idea who he was. He could have been anybody.

And so he was continuing to go under the radar,

visiting the homes of all these women,

and no one had that educated decision because no one knew who he was.

Jonathan had previously not been named in the media,

so one of the things that I did do is connect them to the New York Times.

She was saying, "Listen, I'm an American,

and this is how we roll in the US."

"If somebody has done something wrong and we need to expose them,

then we need to get his name..."

- In the media. - "...in the media."

This would give a global platform for the moms to notify Americans,

to notify women in the Netherlands and across the world

that he was a serial sperm donor.

A lot of these women don't know that they have been victimized.

The media was interested in our story.

So we organized, uh, a meeting with him

and, I think, about 10, 15 moms to ask him to stop.

And we had to reschedule that meeting, I think, about three times

because he was in another country or away or occupied.

Hello, my friends.

Thank you very much for watching my video blog.

Then we said, "Okay, this is the last date we're gonna plan with you,

and, um, if you don't show up, I know some moms will go to the media."

And then, I think, a few days before the meeting,

he said, "I'm not coming."

He said he went to Mexico.

We could see in videos that he had been there before.

You never know why, but I think he was going there to donate.

Today I'm in Mexico, in Mexico City,

and I wanna talk about the purpose of life.

I was angry, and I know other moms got angry.

It was the same story always,

popping up in different countries, proudly filming himself,

showing off his language skills.

It felt like he was playing with us.

Good morning, and thank you very much for watching my video blog.

So that was his last chance.

I took my laptop and went to the site of the New York Times,

and I started writing and writing and writing an email

and hit send.

I'm gonna take you down.

If it's not only me,

it's with a bunch of other moms

who will stand behind me,

and we will do it together.

We were so freaking excited.

We made the front page of the New York Times.

I couldn't believe it.

We just felt... we felt we were heard.

All of a sudden, his name was all over the place on the Internet.

It got picked up internationally,

and it did get the awareness that we wanted.

The day it got out, it was...

...nothing as I expected, but what can you expect?

You have no clue what you're up to.

There are a lot of weird people saying,

"You've got what you deserve,"

and "You should have respected God's ways," and...

"You shouldn't have had kids."

He was contacted for comment

after the article was published for the New York Times,

and I think he laughed it off.

When you disagree with him,

you're just angry moms, or you're all ugly,

or you all are not able to get children in any other way.

He literally told me that if I went on with media,

that it was my fault that my kids

wouldn't be able to have contact with their biological father.

He told other mothers too.

That's when the whole blocking thing started.

I made him angry, and he cut off all contact,

and he doesn't want to see me or my child. So that's a sacrifice I made.

And I hate that because I want my daughter to have that connection.

So he uses, like, your maternal instinct to blackmail you.

'Cause that's the only word I have for it, blackmail.

Trying to target mothers instead of directing...

The blame on himself.

...the blame on himself showed that he would never stop donating.

He refused to acknowledge any of it

and made a total mockery out of it.

He had said to a few mothers,

"This is going to give me so much exposure."

He said that he was gonna get so many more mothers

broaching him for sperm donation,

and that it was going to backfire

because now he was gonna be able to freely create so many more children,

which means that we were gonna have egg on our faces for daring to speak up.

We didn't think that this could get any more twisted.

But it did.

In our research, we stumbled upon

some really, really shocking allegations

by an ex-donor who turned whistleblower.

I've been a sperm donor since 2010,

and I know all about the donors in Holland.

I want to protect my identity and my reputation

because what I'm about to tell you is shocking and disturbing.

In 2010, there was only one website in Holland

that was a marketplace for sperm donors,

the website Longing for a Child.

I used the website Longing for a Child.

Longing for a Child.

Longing for a Child.

Since I was new, I wasn't certain what to expect

after I put my ad up on that website.

In the first month, I received 50 responses

from women who needed help with their child wish.

But after I met a few of these mothers...

then I found out that Jonathan wasn't acting alone.

He worked together with another Dutch donor...

to deceive hundreds of women in Holland and all across the world,

to father as many children as possible.

I got to know these guys through the website,

and they spoke openly to me about it.

The website was run by Leon.

Leon from Dordrecht.

He was a big bald guy of six foot three tall.

The first donor that I spent time with,

he introduced himself as Leon.

He had, um, a scar from his left ear to his right ear on the back of his head.

They operated like a cartel,

and a cartel works the way that you divide up territory.

In their case, dividing up the women.

I tried to have a baby with Jonathan for six months,

um,

before I was swapped to Leon.

Our friendship grew, and later, when I got to know Leon much better,

he told me about Jonathan and some other donors,

about, uh, what they did.

And I found out that Leon has around 415 children.

These two guys had multiple profiles on that website.

The profiles were completely fake.

Many of these different profiles would ultimately end up to two donors,

Leon and Jonathan.

So women thought they had a choice, but actually they didn't have.

The only reason why you would do that is to maximize your offspring.

It's a competition...

where they said, "Yeah, I have four more and, uh, two on the way."

And they're very excited about that,

proud of it.

It's just a game for them. And that's how it got dangerous.

It's the first time that I'm opening up to other people about this.

And I regret that,

but I just wanted to have a baby so much, so I wasn't thinking rationally.

Leon told me they met each other at a parking place...

that they put their sperm together, mix it,

and give it to the women who wanted to get pregnant.

Let's do a sperm roulette and see who wins.

There will be mothers thinking that they got sperm from one donor,

but it is from the other one.

I want to tell them it's very possible that this happened.

It's very possible that this happened.

At that moment we were feeling, "If this is true, I'm going to kill you."

Because that is really fucking around with our lives.

It's disgusting.

It's not a game. It's about kids.

Maybe there was someone else in his house. I don't know.

If you collected the sperm from the car

or he brought it to your door,

I can imagine that you might want to do a DNA test.

We really want to take legal action to force him to stop.

This was, for us, the final straw.

He really fucked with the wrong women.