Marius Gustavson, originally from Norway, ran the Eunuch Maker website where subscribers would pay to watch videos of body mutilation. He made up to £200,000, Daily Mail reports.
Gustavson himself had his leg amputated after he stuck it in dry ice for 2 hours and afterward received £18,500 in disability.
10 men total have been charged in relation to the live mutilation scheme which involved 29 extreme body modifications, body part removals, and trade of body parts with 8 other men.
Thursday in court, former surgical assistant David Carruthers, 61, and Janus Atkin, 37, admitted conspiracy to commit bodily harm.
A bulk of Gustavson's followers on his multiple social media accounts were made up of trans-identified males. Many allegedly had strong interests in chastity fetishism, eunuchdom, and a fetish body modification subculture dubbed "nullification," which describes the desire to practice or watch the removal of male genitalia.
From 2001-2007 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). The organization, according to Reduxx, "had been working to remove sadomasochism as a paraphilic diagnosis from the ICD since 1996" and in 2018 "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)."
