Porn website at center of CNN investigation into sexual abuse taken offline
Porn site Motherless, which has come under international scrutiny for hosting content linked to gender-based violence and drug-facilitated sexual assault, has been taken offline by Dutch authorities following mounting pressure. CNN investigation.
A spokesperson for the Dutch Public Prosecutor’s Office told CNN that the site was shut 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 hosted by NFOrce Internet Services, a company based in Steenbergen in the south of the country.
Public attention focused on Motherless after CNN published its findings to the broader online ecosystem highlighting the role the site and related Telegram groups played in non-consensual image sharing and hosting videos of drug-facilitated sexual assault. Previous research by journalists in Germany and Canada had revealed thousands of videos showing unconscious women being raped and sexually abused.
The website has been hosted on Dutch servers since at least 2024. Dutch broadcaster NOSCNN’s investigation and report into the Netherlands’ connection to the platform strengthened calls for Dutch authorities to take action.
NO and current affairs program Nieuwsuur reported that in an analysis of 20,000 videos posted on the Motherless homepage last week, videos tagged by users as “incest” were among the site’s most viewed categories, while one of the platform’s most viewed videos last week was also tagged with “rape,” “sister” and “school girl.”
CNN reported that Motherless hosted more than 20,000 pieces of so-called “sleep” content at the time of publication in late March 2026, uploaded by users and categorized using descriptive tags such as #passedout and #eyecheck. While these labels appear to have been removed since CNN’s report, content depicting drug-facilitated sexual abuse was still available as of this week.
In a statement on Thursday, NFOrce said it launched an immediate compliance and abuse handling review and gave Motherless 12 hours to respond.
On Friday, NForce released the response stating it had received it from Motherless. In the statement, Motherless stated that they “conducted a comprehensive review of all content associated with the allegations referenced in recent media reports, as well as categories of potentially unlawful, exploitative, non-consensual, intoxication-related or otherwise high-risk material.” All identified prohibited files have been removed from publicly available content, indexed search results, mirrored or duplicated content, and archived or backupable content where operationally possible. “Accounts associated with repeat offenders have been suspended or permanently banned.”
Motherless’ statement added that it “reviewed” a list of “high-risk keywords, search terms, and content moderation categories” and “preventive moderation measures, upload restrictions, filtering and escalation procedures were strengthened, and a retrospective review of archived uploads was conducted.”
NFOrce said in a statement to CNN that it “does not operate, manage, monitor or control customer platforms or content.”
“Our role is limited to infrastructure services. Abuse management is carried out based on reports received through established legal and operational procedures,” he said, adding that specific URLs must be reported to “appropriate abuse management channels” to investigate and address allegations of illegal content.
The takedown of Motherless marks a major development in efforts to combat the spread of non-consensual images online.
Robbert Hoving of Offlimits, an independent online safety group based in the Netherlands, told CNN it was a “very important signal” from authorities that “shut down websites that normalize sexual violence against women and turn it into a business model.” But he added that regulators “need to act proactively, not just take down content and wait for it to happen.”
British Zoe Watts, whose intimate partner survived a drug-facilitated sexual assault, spoke to CNN about the investigation and recently launched the campaign alongside fellow survivor Amanda Stanhope. #EndEyeControl campaigner said: “It’s absolutely disgusting to think that the site existed in the first place, that women were systematically exploited. But it’s absolutely incredible to see what our standing together and the power of good journalism has done.”
But the takedown also highlights the challenges survivors face trying to remove abusive material after it has been uploaded and redistributed online.
Advocacy and technology groups warn that the platform could easily reemerge by moving servers or domain locations. This is a move seen on the Coco website (platform). Dominique Pelicot was used moved to recruit more than 70 men to rape his ex-wife Gisèle; After Gisèle’s space came under scrutiny, it was moved and eventually closed. Last month, a site very similar to Coco called Cocoland.cc resurfaced online, with the domain registered in the Coco Islands, a remote part of Australia. French authorities have now launched an investigation into the new facility. A representative for Cocoland.cc told CNN that the incident had nothing to do with Coco or its owner.
Motherless, which recorded nearly 82 million visitors in March and has a core audience in the US, describes itself as “a morally free file server where everything legal is hosted 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 malicious material: leveraging multiple jurisdictions to complicate the regulation of extreme content.
“It would be very problematic if the site resurfaced,” Hoving said of Motherless, adding: “The people responsible should be held accountable and this should not be limited to just shutting down the site.”
On Saturday, Motherless posted a statement on its website, saying it was “voluntarily taking the site offline to identify content that did not comply with our guidelines and to fix vulnerabilities that allowed a small number of uploaders to exploit the system.”
“We are working to ensure that these vulnerabilities are closed and infringing content is removed when the site is back online,” he said.
This story has been updated with new developments.
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