The porn website Motherless, which has faced international scrutiny over hosting content linked to gender-based violence and drug-facilitated sexual assault, has been taken offline by Dutch authorities following mounting pressure in the wake of a CNN investigation.
A spokesperson for the Dutch Public Prosecution Service told CNN that the site had been taken down by Dutch authorities and that prosecutors in Zeeland-West-Braband had opened a preliminary investigation.
The website appears to have been taken offline on Thursday evening. Motherless’ servers are located in the Netherlands and are hosted by NFOrce Internet Services, a company based in Steenbergen, in the south of the country.
Public attention focused on Motherless after CNN journalists Saskya Vandoorne and Niamh Kennedy published findings into a wider online ecosystem that highlighted the role that the site, and associated Telegram groups, play in hosting videos of non-consensual image sharing and drug-facilitated sexual assault.
CNN reported that Motherless was home to more than 20,000 videos of so-called “sleep” content uploaded by users, categorized using descriptive tags such as #passedout and #eyecheck at the time of publishing in late March 2026.
Previous investigations carried out by journalists in Germany and Canada also found thousands of videos in which unconscious women appeared to be raped and sexually abused.
The website has been hosted on Dutch servers since at least 2024, according to Dutch broadcaster NOS, whose reporting on the Netherlands’ connection to the platform in the wake of CNN’s investigation amplified calls for Dutch authorities to act.
The takedown of Motherless marks a major development in efforts to combat the spread of non-consensual imagery online.
