Dutch authorities have raided a hosting company at three locations — Steenbergen, a town in the southern Netherlands, Rotterdam, and Amsterdam — seizing servers belonging to or used by the pornography website Motherless. The Dutch Public Prosecution Service (Openbaar Ministerie) confirmed the operation, which forms part of an international investigation conducted in cooperation with Europol and other European law enforcement agencies. No arrests have been made so far.
The investigation centres on material allegedly hosted on Motherless that depicts serious sexual crimes, including child sexual abuse imagery and videos in which women appear to have been drugged and assaulted. Both the individuals who uploaded the content and the role of the platform itself are under scrutiny. Investigators are examining footage linked to multiple countries, including the Netherlands, and the analysis of seized servers is expected to be carried out with the support of European partners.
The site first drew widespread attention in the wake of the Pelicot case, one of France's most prominent recent criminal trials. Gisèle Pelicot was drugged by her husband Dominique over a period of nearly a decade and repeatedly assaulted by other men he invited to their home. Dominique Pelicot was convicted in late 2024 and sentenced to the maximum twenty years in prison; fifty co-defendants were also found largely guilty. Videos linked to the abuse were reported to have appeared on Motherless, which also featured, according to CNN, some 20,000 videos showing men assaulting their partners while they slept — content that CNN described as part of a wider so-called "rape academy": a network of websites and group chats in which men encouraged and instructed one another in sexual violence.
Motherless had previously been taken offline in May following an investigation by Dutch public broadcaster NOS, which revealed that the site's servers were located in the Netherlands. The site returned within a month, with representatives claiming measures had been taken to remove illegal content. Subsequent NOS reporting found that staff members of the site itself had been involved in uploading illegal material, including images of minors. The site had previously described itself as a "moral free file host" — a label it quietly removed amid the controversy.
Offlimits, a Dutch expertise centre specialising in analysing illegal online imagery, welcomed the raids. The organisation had previously called for an investigation into the servers, warning that platforms like Motherless risk normalising violence against women and fostering a culture of online lawlessness. Offlimits noted that reactively removing content after it is reported is insufficient and that seizing the infrastructure itself is a necessary step.