The Dutch sperm donor who became the subject of the hit Netflix documentary The Man With 1000 Kids says he will take legal action to have the film taken off air.

Jonathan Meijer said he was going to court to protect the donor children and their families from “the media’s lust to make this a kind of spectacle”.

Meijer denied that he had fathered 3,000 children around the world, as the documentary claims, insisting the real number was 550. “Everything above that is speculation,” he told interviewer Eva Jinek on NPO1.

Last year a Dutch court ordered Meijer, 43, to stop donating or face financial penalties, in a case brought by child protection charity Stichting Donorkind, because of the high risk of incest.

Under Dutch rules fertility clinics have a limit of 25 children per donor, but Meijer was able to circumvent the guidelines by approaching at least 11 different clinics in the Netherlands separately. He also donated to the Danish sperm bank Cryos, which sends sperm to private clients and has no maximum limit.

The court also found he had lied to people he approached through his YouTube channel and other media about the total number of children he had fathered.

“Enormous network”

“All these parents have now been confronted with the fact that the children in their families are part of an enormous network of relatives with hundreds of half-brothers and half-sisters,” the judges said.

Meijer claimed he had stopped donating in 2019, but made an exception for families who had already had children using his sperm.

“I gave these parents what they couldn’t get from a clinic,” he said. “The government didn’t help them either because there has never been a campaign to put sperm donors in a positive light.”

Lawyers Gerard Spong and Peter Plasman said Meijer’s case had “absolutely no chance of succeeding”. They said the documentary was in the public interest because it informed other people who wanted children about Meijer’s activities.