A former queer activist from Norway has pleaded guilty in a London court after carrying out castrations and livestreaming the footage as pornography to a paying audience over a span of six years. Marius Gustavson, 46, uploaded recordings of the illicit surgeries to his ‘Eunuch Maker’ website, netting up to £200,000 from subscribers.
The practice of removing the testicles or amputating the penis is linked to a male body modification fetish subculture known as “nullification,” and participants identify themselves as “nullos” or “smoothies.” While advertising his Eunuch Maker site and services online, Gustavson called himself Theo and described himself as a “happy nullo.”
Gustavson ran several social media accounts, using the handles @nullotheo, @ampunullotheo, @chubtheo, and @theo-eunuchmaker. His accounts on X were followed by men who identified as transgender, as well as those involved in chastity fetishism, eunuchdom, and nullification. On one account, he displayed a stylized “non-binary” pride flag in his header.
On December 19, Gustavson appeared at the Old Bailey Criminal Court in London via video link from HMP Belmarsh, where he is currently detained, and admitted to three additional counts of causing grievous bodily harm with intent.
He had previously confessed to conspiracy to commit grievous bodily harm, two counts of causing grievous bodily harm with intent and one count of possessing criminal property, referring to the financial profits gained from the scheme.
Separately, Gustavson also pleaded guilty to making and distributing two indecent videos of a child between January 2017 and January 2020.
The endeavor was part of a larger network of men who aided Gustavson and performed fetishistic amputations and other procedures for sexual gratification. Former nurses Nathaniel Arnold, 46, Jacob Crimi-Appleby, 23, and Damien Brynes, 36, assisted Gustavson with removing some of his own body parts, and have since been convicted.
Crimi-Appleby used his access to medical supplies in order to freeze Gustavson’s leg causing it to require amputation. Brynes removed his penis and Arnold facilitated the partial removal of one of Gustavson’s nipples. Arnold also admitted stealing lidocaine while working as nurse at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital between January 2016 and January 2022, and possession of extreme pornographic images.
Brynes, Arnold, and Crimi-Appleby all admitted causing grievous bodily harm with intent and are set to be sentenced on January 12.
In addition to the nurses, 66-year-old surgeon Peter Wates, referred to as Gustavson’s “right-hand man,” was said to have played a role in nine out of the 29 known procedures. He also admitted to conspiracy to commit grievous bodily harm.
Ion Ciucur, 29, originally from Romania and previously working in a hotel in Gretna Green, Scotland, is said to also have been involved in two incidents. Other alleged conspirators are David Carruthers, 60, Janus Atkin, 38, and Ashley Williams, 31, all of whom are from Newport, South Wales.
Gustavson was initially arrested along with six other men in February 2022. Shortly after his arrest, he told The Independent in an interview that he had undergone an amateur orchiectomy himself and carried the operation out on 58 other men. He stated that he had his own genitals surgically removed because he wanted to “look like a Ken doll with nothing down there.”
At the time of his arrest Gustavson had told the press that he executed the procedures using a Burdizzo, an instrument for removing the testicles of livestock. He admitted that he kept the amputated appendages in his freezer and preserved them in alcohol in his basement apartment.
Neighbors in the residential area where Gustavson was performing the castrations said they had seen ambulances regularly arriving at the property — despite Gustavson, who is also an amputee, insisting he conducted surgeries in a “very professional way.”
A website owned by Gustavson, eunuchmaker.co.uk, sold graphic videos of castrations and amputations. Registered in 2016, it also offered the option of paid monthly memberships for streaming videos of penectomies. Premium subscriptions included the option of a “free castration performed by the EunuchMaker.”
A registration form on the site listed possible “gender identities” based on sadomasochistic criteria. Among them were eunuch, nullo (nullification), and cutter, a euphemism for a person who performs male genital modification surgeries.
Promotions on his primary platform direct visitors to another URL owned by Gustavson, Eunuchmaker.info. Archived versions of the page redirect to yet another online community, the-em.com, which is cited in criminal charges filed October 21, 2020, in the U.S. state of Oklahoma against two men who participated in fetishistic genital surgeries.
Bobby Lee Allen and his partner Thomas Evan Gates were charged with conspiracy to commit an unlicensed surgery, maiming, and failure to bury a dead human member, and assault and battery with a dangerous weapon.
The two men, self-described ‘cannibals’, removed the testicles of a 28-year-old Virginia resident as part of an illegally conducted gender reassignment surgery. Afterwards, according to court records, Allen laughed and told the victim he intended to consume his amputated members.
Allen had claimed to have had 15 years of experience and several other patients lined up for future procedures. The victim further alleged that Allen boasted of leaving a man “open” to die after an operation.
Allen and Gates had lured the man to their cabin by way of Gustavson’s Eunuch Maker’s website and forum.
In another grisly case involving Gustavson’s forum, an elderly Florida man was sentenced to three years in prison following a bloody botched home castration he performed and recorded on camera, apparently intending to broadcast the footage through the Eunuch Maker site. Gary Van Ryswyk, 76, performed the genital surgery in August 2019 on a male victim, then aged 53.
As previously revealed by Reduxx, Gustavson was in a leadership position at a Norwegian trans activist lobbying group prior to relocating to England to carry out his clandestine genital mutilation surgeries. From 2001 through 2007, Gustavson was Chairman of the Board for the Buskerud chapter of The Norwegian Organization for Sexual and Gender Diversity, now known as FRI (foreningen for kjønns- og seksualitetsmangfold). During this time, FRI, Norway’s oldest and largest LGBT organization, went by the name ‘The National Association for Lesbian and Gay Liberation,’ or LLH.
In 2018, The Norwegian Organization for Sexual and Gender Diversity (FRI) successfully lobbied the World Health Organization to officially depathologize fetishism, sadomasochism, and fetishistic transvestitism by removing them from the 11th revision of the International Classifications of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD-11).
This was the result of a successful lobby campaign that spanned two decades in its effort. The Norwegian LGBT organization, which frequently displays a BDSM pride flag, had been working to remove sadomasochism as a paraphilic diagnosis from the ICD since 1996.
The initiative by LLH / FRI was called “Revise F65,” in reference to the classification category designated by the WHO’s ICD guidelines. Listed under “F65” in version 10 of the manual were “disorders of sexual preference:” fetishism, transvestic fetishism, sadomasochism, voyeurism, and pedophilia.
At a 2004 LLH / FRI convention, the Revise F65 mandate was explicitly expressed in the organization’s political platform. It was during this time that Gustavson served in a leadership position for the activist group.
“In addition to national work,” the campaign’s website states, “Revise F65 also have an international mandate to motivate other countries to remove their national versions of the SM/fetish ICD diagnoses.”
