Porn website at center of CNN investigation into sexual abuse taken offline
By Kara Fox, Saskya Vandoorne, Niamh Kennedy, CNN
(CNN) — 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 published its 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. 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.
NOS and current affairs program Nieuwsuur reported that an analysis of 20,000 videos that appeared on the Motherless homepage last week found those tagged “incest” by users were among the site’s most-viewed categories, while one of the platform’s most-watched videos in the past week had also been tagged with “rape,” “sister” and “school girl.”
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. While those tags appeared to have been removed since CNN’s report, content appearing to show drug-facilitated sexual abuse was still present as of this week.
In a Thursday statement, NFOrce said that it had launched an urgent compliance and abuse-handling review, giving Motherless 12 hours to respond. NFOrce told CNN 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 said, adding that specific URLS need to be reported to the “appropriate abuse handling channels” in order to review and address allegations of illegal content.
The takedown of Motherless marks a major development in efforts to combat the spread of non-consensual imagery 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 “websites normalizing sexual violence against woman, and turning that into a business model, are taken down.” But he added that regulators need to “proactively act. Not wait until it has happened by just taking content down.”
Zoe Watts, a British survivor of intimate partner drug-facilitated sexual assault who spoke with CNN for their investigation, and who, along with fellow survivor Amanda Stanhope recently launched the #EndEyeCheck campaign, said: “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.”
But the takedown also highlights the difficulties survivors face in trying to remove exploitative material once it is uploaded and redistributed online.
Advocacy and tech groups warn that the platform could easily resurface by migrating servers or domain locations. It’s a move that was seen with the website Coco – the platform Dominique Pelicot used to recruit more than 70 men to rape his ex-wife Gisèle – whose domain was moved after it came under scrutiny, before eventually being shut down. Last month, a site appearing very similar to Coco, called Cocoland.cc, resurfaced online, with its domain registered in the Coco Islands, a remote Australian territory. French authorities have now opened a probe into the new site. A representative of Cocoland.cc told CNN it had nothing to do with Coco or its owner.
Motherless, which recorded nearly 82 million visitors in March and whose core audience is in the United States, describes itself as a “moral free file host where anything 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 abusive material: Leveraging multiple jurisdictions to complicate the regulation of extreme content.
“It would be very problematic if the site comes up again,” Hoving said of Motherless, adding: “The people responsible should be held accountable, and it shouldn’t stop with just taking it down.”
The-CNN-Wire
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