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Warning: This article contains discussion of graphic violence which some readers may find distressing.
A harrowing new documentary uncovers how a man who was dubbed 'The Eunuch Maker' was able to run a website where he offered to castrate men and livestream the procedure.
Marius Gustavson ran a pay-per-view website where he sold castration services and carried out the procedures in London flats and hotel rooms on seemingly willing victims, with a judge describing some of what happened as 'little short of human butchery'.
Gustavson was last year sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum sentence of 22 years, with Judge Mark Lucraft KC saying that his motivation was 'a mix of sexual gratification as well as financial reward'. Six others were also sentenced.
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Now, a new documentary titled The Eunuch Maker has explored the world Gustavson created where men would come to him and have their genitals removed, with the procedure filmed and posted online for paying viewers.
Between 2017 and 2021, he is thought to have earned over £300,000 from his actions, with the Old Bailey hearing that subscribers paid to watch his videos and could fork over up to £100 for a 'VIP' viewing package. Officials also said there had been 'clear evidence of cannibalism' as well.
Documentary maker Marcel Theroux told LADbible about meeting Gustavson in prison and attempting to work out what he and those he castrated were getting out of it.
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"Obviously the question going through everyone's mind is, ‘Why on earth would anyone do this?'," Theroux said, explaining that when he first emailed Gustavson, he was told he should look up something called 'skoptic syndrome' where people are driven to mutilate their own genitals.
Once Marcel went to visit Gustavson in prison and spoke to him in person, he found that the man's 'explanations were really unsatisfying', saying that his reasoning for castrating people was 'really kind of simplistic and banal'.
However, the documentary maker added that he could see how the convicted 'Eunuch Maker' was able to have an effect on people.
Theroux said: “I think he had no shame, and I think that a lot of the people who ended up interacting with him were people who felt tremendous shame.
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"You meet this sort of strangely charismatic, tubby Norwegian guy, go, ‘oh, it's no problem’. I think that Marius had that effect on people. It's like, ‘we're gonna do it like this, we can do it on Tuesday, I'll book the Airbnb, I know a guy, you'll feel much better, and you get money for it too, and we can get money for it’.
"I think he had a superpower for kind of melting away people's shame. He made all their problems seem fixable. I think that's possibly evil, that's possibly an aspect of evil to do that, to trivialize things and make significant decisions seem insignificant."
As for what he got from it, Theroux said that there was 'a huge amount of status' in it for Gustavson, who ran a website where he livestreamed the castrations he performed on people, some of them as young as 16.
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Discussing why someone would sign up to this beyond Gustavson's aptitude at 'melting away people's shame', Theroux spoke about how the website created a community where people could earn status by getting castrated by Gustavson as well as being paid for it.
He said: "You get status on the website from going through the procedure, you don't hear anyone saying, ‘oh, wait a second. Is this a good idea?’
"It's the danger of ending up in this sort of self-reinforcing silo where people’s extreme belief kind of hardens and doesn't get challenged.
"Then outside that it's just the stupid normies who don't understand how cool this is."
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The documentary maker said there was a 'complexity' around the subject as there could be an aspect of body dysmorphia where 'these men hate aspects of their own body'.
Theroux added that for some there was also a 'large degree of kink' for some people, saying that in certain cases castration had been 'an extreme variant' of cock and ball torture (CBT).
"These people are vulnerable because they're in a subculture, they feel huge shame," Theroux explained.
"They're looking for a way of resolving their conflicts, they feel this unhappiness they feel, and it made them very vulnerable to Marius, who was offering himself as a solution."
During the production of The Eunuch Maker, Theroux spoke to a number of 'voluntary eunuchs' who had willingly gone for a procedure where they would be castrated.
The documentary maker said that 'you get a different' sense of why they did it with each person he spoke to.
He said: "You do get a sense these are people with a terrible dysphoria who experience parts of their body as not their own, and are willing to go through a very extreme procedure to get rid of it.
"Some of them are people who've suffered from childhood sexual trauma, can, I think transfer part of that trauma is a part of their anatomy.
“I think you get that from one of the interviewees, you get a sense that this is someone who's been through a terrible trauma, and he identifies it with his penis, and thinks that getting his penis cut off is gonna, I mean it doesn't, it's not logical, but I think you sort of understand it when he's saying it.
“What I wanted to do was try and talk to them. I was genuinely interested in them, and I like them. One of the things I noticed about the voluntary eunuchs, they were really, really thoughtful people.
"The people who either underwent the procedures or were thinking about undergoing them, or who had travelled and had the procedures elsewhere, they thought about it really hard and had kind of educated themselves about their predicament."
The Eunuch Maker airs on Crime+Investigation and Crime+Investigation Play tonight (13 January) at 9pm.
Topics: Crime, Documentaries, True Crime, UK News, Health, Mental Health
Joe Harker