The pornographic website Motherless, which has come under intense international scrutiny for hosting content related to gender-based violence and drug-induced sexual assault, was shut down by Dutch authorities after mounting pressure following a CNN investigation.
A spokesperson for the Dutch public prosecutor’s office told CNN that the site had been removed by Dutch authorities and that Zeeland-Western Braband’s public prosecutor’s office had opened a preliminary investigation.
The website appears to have gone offline Thursday night. Motherless’ servers are located in the Netherlands and hosted by NFForce Internet Services, a company based in Steenbergen in the south of the Netherlands.
Public attention focused on Motherless after CNN published its findings to the broader online ecosystem. The findings highlighted the role the site and associated Telegram groups play in non-consensual image sharing and hosting videos of drug-induced sexual assaults. Previous investigations by journalists in Germany and Canada have also uncovered thousands of videos that appear to show unconscious women being raped and sexually abused.
The website has been hosted on servers in the Netherlands since at least 2024, according to Dutch broadcaster NOS, and reports of Dutch connections to the platform following a CNN investigation amplified calls for Dutch authorities to take action.
NOS and current affairs program Nieuwsuur report that an analysis of 20,000 videos posted on the Motherless homepage last week found that videos tagged by users as “incest” were among the most viewed categories on the site, while “rape,” “sisters” and “schoolgirls” were also tagged among the most viewed videos on the platform in the past week.
CNN reports that Motherless has more than 20,000 user-uploaded videos of so-called “sleep” content, categorized using descriptive tags such as #passedout and #eyecheck as of its publication in late March 2026. Those tags appear to have been removed since CNN’s report, but content that appeared to indicate drug-facilitated sexual abuse was still present as of this week.
NFForce said in a statement Thursday that it has begun an emergency compliance and abuse review and has given Motherless 12 hours to respond. NFForce told CNN it “does not operate, manage, manage or control our customers’ platforms or their content.”
“Our role is limited to infrastructure services. Our response to abuse is based on reports received through our established legal and operational procedures,” it said, adding that specific URLs must be reported to “appropriate abuse handling channels” in order to investigate and address allegations of illegal content.
The removal of Motherless marks a major breakthrough in efforts to combat the online spread of non-consensual images.
Robert Hoving of Offlimits, an independent online safety organization based in the Netherlands, told CNN it was a “very important signal” from authorities that “websites that normalize sexual violence against women and turn it into a business model will be taken down.” But he added that regulators “need to be proactive, not just remove content and wait for things to happen.”
Zoe Watts, a British survivor of drug-induced sexual assault by an intimate partner who recently launched the #EndEyeCheck campaign with fellow survivor Amanda Stanhope, told CNN: “It’s absolutely disgusting to think that this site existed in the first place and that women were being systematically abused. But to see what our coming together and the power of good journalism has achieved is truly incredible.”
She didn’t know that her husband was sexually abusing her
Zoe Watts’ world shattered when she discovered that her husband of 16 years had put her son’s sleeping pills in his tea and raped her while she passed out. A months-long investigation has uncovered a hidden network of men who share tips on how to drug and rape women. CNN’s Saskia Vandoorne speaks to women who have survived this type of abuse. This article is part of CNN’s series “As Equals” on gender inequality. For more information on the investigation, visit cnn.com/drugged-raped-and-online.
But the takedowns also highlight the difficulties survivors face when trying to remove exploitative material that has been uploaded and redistributed online.
Advocacy and technology groups have warned that the platform could easily be revived by moving servers or domain locations. This is a move that was also seen on the website “Coco”. The platform where Dominic Perico recruited more than 70 men to rape his ex-wife Gisele came under scrutiny, had its domain moved, and was eventually shut down. Last month, a site very similar to Coco called Cocoland.cc resurfaced online, with its domain registered in Australia’s remote Coco Islands. French authorities have now begun a new investigation into the scene. A representative for Cocoland.cc told CNN that it has no relationship with Coco or its owners.
Motherless recorded nearly 82 million visitors in March, with its primary audience in the United States, and describes itself as a “moral free file host that hosts everything legal forever.”
The site’s domain name is registered in the Czech Republic and its parent company is registered in Costa Rica. This reflects a common pattern among platforms accused of hosting abusive content. This means using multiple jurisdictions to complicate the regulation of extremist content.
“If this site reappears, it will be very problematic,” Hoving said of Motherless, adding, “Those responsible should be held accountable and not just delete the site.”
