NCS reporter explains what’s Motherless.com
The porn website Motherless, which has confronted worldwide scrutiny over internet hosting content material linked to gender-based violence and drug-facilitated sexual assault, has been taken offline by Dutch authorities following mounting stress within the wake of a NCS investigation.
A spokesperson for the Dutch Public Prosecution Service instructed NCS that the positioning had been taken down by Dutch authorities and that prosecutors in Zeeland-West-Braband had opened a preliminary investigation.
The website seems to have been taken offline on Thursday night. Motherless’ servers are positioned within the Netherlands and are hosted by NFOrce Internet Services, an organization primarily based in Steenbergen, within the south of the nation.
Public consideration targeted on Motherless after NCS revealed its findings into a wider on-line ecosystem that highlighted the position that the positioning – and related Telegram teams – play in internet hosting movies of non-consensual picture sharing and drug-facilitated sexual assault. Previous investigations carried out by journalists in Germany and Canada additionally discovered 1000’s of movies through which unconscious ladies gave the impression to be raped and sexually abused.
The website has been hosted on Dutch servers since at least 2024, in line with Dutch broadcaster NOS, whose reporting on the Netherlands’ connection to the platform within the wake of NCS’s investigation amplified requires Dutch authorities to behave.
NOS and present affairs program Nieuwsuur reported that an evaluation of 20,000 movies that appeared on the Motherless homepage final week discovered these tagged “incest” by customers have been among the many website’s most-viewed classes, whereas one of the platform’s most-watched movies previously week had additionally been tagged with “rape,” “sister” and “school girl.”
NCS reported that Motherless was dwelling to greater than 20,000 movies of so-called “sleep” content material uploaded by customers, categorized utilizing descriptive tags resembling #passedout and #eyecheck at the time of publishing in late March 2026. While these tags appeared to have been eliminated since NCS’s report, content material showing to point out drug-facilitated sexual abuse was nonetheless current as of this week.
In a Thursday assertion, NFOrce stated that it had launched an pressing compliance and abuse-handling evaluate, giving Motherless 12 hours to reply. NFOrce instructed NCS that it “does not operate, manage, moderate, or control customer platforms or their content.”
“Our role is limited to infrastructure services. Abuse handling is performed based on reports received through established legal and operational procedures,” it stated, including that particular URLS have to be reported to the “appropriate abuse handling channels” so as to evaluate and tackle allegations of unlawful content material.
The takedown of Motherless marks a significant growth in efforts to fight the unfold of non-consensual imagery on-line.
Robbert Hoving of Offlimits, an unbiased on-line security group primarily based within the Netherlands, instructed NCS it was “a very important signal” from authorities that “websites normalizing sexual violence against woman, and turning that into a business model, are taken down.” But he added that regulators must “proactively act. Not wait until it has happened by just taking content down.”
Zoe Watts, a British survivor of intimate associate drug-facilitated sexual assault who spoke with NCS for his or her investigation, and who, together with fellow survivor Amanda Stanhope lately launched the #EndEyeCheck marketing campaign, stated: “To even contemplate that the site was out there to begin with, women systematically being abused, is absolutely disgusting. But to see what the power of our standing united and good reporting has done is absolutely incredible.”
She did not know her husband was sexually abusing her
When Zoe Watts realized that her husband of 16 years had been crushing her son’s sleeping drugs into her tea and raping her whereas she was handed out, it shattered her world. A months-long investigation uncovers a hidden community of males sharing recommendations on learn how to drug and rape ladies. NCS’s Saskya Vandoorne speaks to ladies who survived this sort of abuse. This story is a component of As Equals, NCS’s sequence on gender inequality. Read extra in regards to the investigation at newscentral.site/drugged-raped-and-online.
But the takedown additionally highlights the difficulties survivors face in making an attempt to take away exploitative materials as soon as it’s uploaded and redistributed on-line.
Advocacy and tech teams warn that the platform might simply resurface by migrating servers or area areas. It’s a transfer that was seen with the website Coco – the platform Dominique Pelicot used to recruit greater than 70 males to rape his ex-wife Gisèle – whose area was moved after it got here below scrutiny, earlier than ultimately being shut down. Last month, a website showing similar to Coco, known as Cocoland.cc, resurfaced on-line, with its area registered within the Coco Islands, a distant Australian territory. French authorities have now opened a probe into the brand new website. A consultant of Cocoland.cc instructed NCS it had nothing to do with Coco or its proprietor.
Motherless, which recorded practically 82 million guests in March and whose core viewers is within the United States, describes itself as a “moral free file host where anything legal is hosted forever.”
The website’s area identify is registered within the Czech Republic, and its mother or father firm is registered in Costa Rica. This displays a standard sample amongst platforms accused of internet hosting abusive materials: Leveraging a number of jurisdictions to complicate the regulation of excessive content material.
“It would be very problematic if the site comes up again,” Hoving stated of Motherless, including: “The people responsible should be held accountable, and it shouldn’t stop with just taking it down.”