Marius Theodore Gustavson had just performed one of his signature procedures in his basement flat when a stranger turned up to buy a penis.
The man known as the “eunuch maker” retrieved a jar from a small fridge behind his living room sofa before handing it to the buyer, who paid in cash before leaving.
It was yet another deal for Gustavson, the mastermind behind a lucrative website where subscribers could watch videos of extreme body modifications such as castrations and penectomies.
Gustavson’s former friend Andrew recalled: “My partner and I were there when a sale went down. We’d never asked about the fridge before but when [Gustavson] walked off with what looked [like something] a bit dodgy, we asked and he said: ‘Oh yes, this is someone’s penis, [it belongs to] this nice little twentysomething from Belgium.’
“But he didn’t come back in with lots of cash. He used the money to buy pizza. It wasn’t a lot.”
Gustavson, 46, originally from Norway, was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 22 years at the Old Bailey on Thursday after pleading guilty to charges including conspiracy to cause grievous bodily harm by performing extreme body modifications, including the removal of penises and testicles.
The court heard that life-threatening procedures were performed on vulnerable victims in non-sterile environments and broadcast on his website for the sexual pleasure of viewers.
Gustavson, who has had his penis, testicles, right nipple and left leg removed, was accused of being the principal offender, organiser and ringleader in the lucrative and wide-ranging conspiracy involving up to 29 offences on 13 victims and the trade of body parts.
Andrew, an IT worker in his 30s whose name has been changed, witnessed the trade in the summer of 2021. “In that fridge there were testicles and chopped-off penises pickled in a jar and kept cold, and people would turn up to buy them,” he said.
As a one-time administrator on the website, Andrew had a unique insight into Gustavson’s affairs and the procedures he carried out at his two-bedroom rental flat in a Victorian conversion in Harringay, north London.
“It was a nice flat,” Andrew said. “It wasn’t seedy, although he did subsequently build this little dungeon thing under the stairs. Aside from that, it was just like a normal flat. His bedroom was normal, clean, the wall was smothered with porn.”
There was also a picture frame above the bed in which Gustavson, known to his friends as Theo, displayed his removed testicles, and a sign on the door saying: “Theo’s playroom, open 24 hours, seven days.” Rigged with cameras, it was where Gustavson carried out extreme body modifications, such as a “sub-incision” procedure on Andrew’s penis in July 2020. Andrew allowed the act to be filmed and streamed on the website as payment.
“We took efforts to sterilise … and the aftercare was good as well. I got sent home with antibiotics and sterile materials,” Andrew said. “He very much gave the impression that he’d done this before. He exuded confidence.”
Despite Gustavson’s self-assurance, Andrew ended up going to hospital with complications, as did other consenting customers.
“Complications were a frequent occurrence at Theo’s,” said Andrew. “Blood loss mainly, so people going in for something and then he couldn’t stop the bleeding. I’m aware there was always a plan to drop people off at A&E in those kinds of cases. Some people … especially for [those] having their penis removed, you can’t kind of stop that in a home setting. So the plan was to do it and then go straight to hospital.”
The Old Bailey heard the procedures were linked to a subculture where men become “nullos” – short for genital nullification – by having their penis and testicles removed. Gustavson’s barrister told the court that the breakup of his client’s marriage in 2016 awoke his previously “dormant” condition of body integrity dysphoria (BID) and drove him to commit the mutilations.
Andrew said he was aware of at least 15 procedures that Gustavson had been involved in, including, he claimed, the removal of a woman’s breasts.
“I also know he used to go abroad on holidays to do these things,” said Andrew. “It was an annual trip. They’d go to Germany and someone would rent out a room somewhere, and it was a group of cutters that would have arranged for people to come to that place and it was almost like a party. I only know because one year [Gustavson] couldn’t go because he lost his passport and he was really angry.”
The court heard that between 2017 and 2021 Gustavson made almost £300,000 through his website, which amassed a “staggering” 22,841 subscribers. Andrew said he believed the “eunuch maker” enterprise was Gustavson’s only source of income and his mother had to help him pay rent. “Theo wasn’t living the high life,” he claimed. He said Gustavson often offered discounted annual memberships for £35 as part of new year and Thanksgiving promotions to lure customers in.
The website itself was popular owing to the abundance of free content, Andrew said. “I first got involved because Theo was having trouble scaling the site due to the sheer number of visitors to it. The servers were literally struggling to cope,” he said. “We’re talking a site that has 300,000 visitors a week, 10,000 to 20,000 active daily users. When we look at the Google Analytics for it, the only country that has never visited it was North Korea. This is a global thing.”
Andrew was arrested in November 2022 as part of the police investigation, codenamed Operation Vicktor, because he and his partner had had procedures done by Gustavson, but he was not charged. “It was horrible. It was traumatising. It was absolutely horrific,” he said of the months-long investigation.
Brendan McCarthy, a body modification artist who was jailed for 40 months in 2019 after he partially removed one customer’s ear, another’s nipple and split the tongue of a third, said the Gustavson case was nothing like his. “People may have thought what I did was extreme, but what they were doing I think should be stopped. That is something that is life-threatening,” he said.
The court mentioned McCarthy’s case when considering the extent to which consent is a mitigating factor. But the judge told Gustavson consent was not a defence to procedures that he described as “little short of human butchery”.
Andrew said he believed the group’s conviction would only serve to drive the body modification practice further underground. “Theo never saw that there was anything wrong with what he was doing. In his view, people were consenting, and that kind of overrode other concerns,” he said. “Theo genuinely believed he was helping them.”
