How I forced Pornhub to take down child abuse videos | The Times and The Sunday Times Magazine, August 24, 20204

Laila Mickelwait on her four-year mission to stop one of the world’s biggest porn sites sexually exploiting children for profit

here could not have been a worse moment for the intense battle against Pornhub to begin. On February 1, 2020, I was at a low point in my life: feeling battered and drained looking after my three-month-old son, Jed, who had suffered a birth complication called shoulder dystocia. The shoulders of his large 10lb 11oz body had become stuck while he was being delivered, and he had to be prised out with force. Because of the ongoing pain, he was screaming at all hours of the day and night. I also felt disillusioned after spending more than a decade of my advocacy career fighting sex trafficking but seeing very little real progress.

Yet in the dark hours before dawn, after being awakened by Jed’s cries for the fourth time that night, a story I had read a few days after his birth came to mind again. A 15-year-old girl from Broward County, Florida, had been missing for a year but was finally found when a user of Pornhub tipped off her mother that he had recognised her daughter on the site. The mother found 58 videos of her child being raped, uploaded by an account named “Daddy’s Slut”. The filmed assaults were being monetised with advertisements placed next to, before and after the videos, and offered as pay-to-download content to the 130 million daily visitors to the site.

At that time, Pornhub was the tenth most visited website on the internet, with 47 billion site visits per year, more than Amazon, Netflix and Yahoo. It was also named the third most influential tech company, just behind Google and Facebook. With 6.8 million user-uploaded sex videos per year along with millions of images, Pornhub became the world’s YouTube of porn. Its parent company, MindGeek, had a virtual monopoly on the global porn industry and was raking in hundreds of millions of dollars per year by selling 4.6 billion advertising views on Pornhub every single day.

As I sat there rocking Jed in the darkness of my bedroom, exhausted yet unable to sleep, a question came to mind: how in the world did these videos of criminal abuse end up on the world’s largest and most popular porn site?

Suddenly, I had an idea. I would test the upload system for myself to see how the videos were being screened. In uploading a video of the rug in my dark room and the computer keyboard, I discovered all that was needed to upload content to Pornhub was an email address. No consent form was required to prove the video didn’t contain rape, no driver’s licence or ID was required to ensure the video didn’t contain a child. In moments I had a message from Pornhub: “Congratulations! Your video is now live!” I quickly realised that because of this non-verification process, Pornhub’s servers were potentially the largest collection of sexual crime in North America, if not the world. Legal porn (with which I had no issue) was side by side with videos of real rape, child sexual abuse, trafficking and non-consensually uploaded sex videos. All hiding in plain sight.

After tweeting the finding to my few thousand followers, there was outrage. But Pornhub is an enormous target. I knew this news had to get to those in positions of power so I started tagging senators, celebrities, the FBI, even the prime minister of Canada, where Pornhub is based, and the president, reminding them that sex trafficking is legally defined as any commercial sex act involving a minor or induced by force, fraud or coercion, and that every sex act on Pornhub is highly commercialised. In a burst of inspiration, I shared the hashtag #Traffickinghub and it started to catch on across social media. A new follower designed the hashtag into the form of the world-famous Pornhub logo, and another new follower demanded that I start a petition to shut down Pornhub, which I quickly did. It immediately went viral. By the end of day four, it had 100,000 signatures; within weeks, it had half a million signatures from people from across the globe and showed no signs of slowing down.

I saw support from those who were pro-porn, anti-porn, conservative, liberal, old, young, atheist and religious. Hundreds of porn producers and performers were signing and sharing the petition, which soon reached one million signatures. Many porn performers were also offering to help expose and shut down Pornhub, and sent me illegal videos they found as they were scouring the site for their own stolen and pirated professional porn content. There aren’t many issues on which people are universally united, but everyone agrees that no one should be raped for profit on the world’s largest porn site.

This fight with Pornhub is often painted as a David and Goliath battle, but it was not just one woman against Pornhub. Hundreds of survivors and organisations became involved, along with millions of individuals. Heavy-hitting lawyers joined the fight, alongside prize-winning journalists, security experts, lawmakers, therapists, company whistleblowers, porn performers and producers. Even a billionaire hedge fund manager became an important ally, and the former owner of Pornhub dubbed “the Zuckerberg of porn” messaged me to say he wanted to help.

This organic grassroots effort that I was leading to shut down Pornhub for child abuse, rape and trafficking became known as the Traffickinghub movement. Most important and central to all of this were the Pornhub victims who began to share their stories courageously. As an advocate, I can shout from the rooftops all day long, but it’s survivors that make the biggest impact. I felt a special connection to some, such as 19-year-old Lilly, who approached me for help one night to get Pornhub to take down videos of her rape as a minor. When I typed her name as I wrote back, I was reminded of my own daughter, Lily Rose, then aged three, and it was haunting.

Serena was also 19 when she contacted me, and her story resonates with many parents because she could be anybody’s daughter. At 14 she was an innocent, straight-A student who had never kissed a boy before. She had a crush on a boy one year older, who convinced her to send him nude images and videos of herself. Hers was the experience of countless children today in a digital world. She did it because she wanted to impress him, but he shared them with classmates against her will and they ended up being uploaded to Pornhub, getting millions of views. When she would beg for them to be removed, she recounted how Pornhub would hassle her for proof that she was under age and a victim. And even when she finally managed to get one video taken down, another would just pop up and the cycle would repeat. All of this sent her into a spiral of depression and despair to the point where she dropped out of school because of the shame, became addicted to drugs to numb the pain, ended up homeless living in her car and tried to kill herself multiple times.

Stories like these were now coming at me at all hours and in all ways. At times, the constant barrage of illegal Pornhub links being sent to me from around the world became unbearable. Often, I found myself weeping at what I was seeing and heartbroken that I was unable to stop it. As difficult as it was to see these many sexual crime scenes that included violent rapes of clearly under-age children, homeless teens, completely unconscious drugged women and the sadistic torture of victims who were begging and screaming for it to stop, I knew it was more important to help victims pursue justice than look away.

I also understood that I had the power to press pause, but these victims could not stop the violent assaults that I was merely witnessing. They not only went through the pain of the attacks but then had to live with the tormenting reality that the worst moments of their lives had been immortalised online for both profit and pleasure. Pornhub had a download button on every video, ensuring the crime scenes could be uploaded again and again in perpetuity.

I felt I had a responsibility to the victims to open each link, report them to authorities and not miss anything. The stakes were so very high: this was literally a life and death issue because the rate of suicidal ideation for victims of non-consensual image-based sexual abuse is upwards of 50 per cent. Many attempt suicide because of the distress and trauma. But I also felt enormous hope as all this was unfolding. I could see progress happening in real time and that kept me going.

That’s not to say I sometimes didn’t feel a working mother’s guilt about my own children. I was living in two different worlds: trying to be present and play with my kids, letting them experience an innocent childhood, while at the same time wading in this dark world for hours after they had gone to bed. Like many mothers who have a vocation, I struggled to balance things. I have vivid flashes of memory: sitting on the floor of our playroom with Lily Rose in the early days of Covid; me sporting a green pointy felt hat dressed up as Peter Pan, her as Wendy. I’m trying my best to put my heart into it, but my work is suddenly demanding my attention. I feel Lily’s tiny hand under my chin trying to tear my eyes off the phone and pleading with me to pay attention to our game, but I am too engrossed in what I’m reading. Another time, looking down at my phone, I feel a stab of guilt when I realise since the fight began, my photo library contains more screenshots of information and conversations about Pornhub than photos of my children.

I found consolation in knowing that I was doing this work not only for the victims I was encountering but also to prevent future victims. This fight was about my children too, and all children. If we didn’t do something about this now, Serena could be my own daughter or son in a few years.

The battle was a risk for our whole family. Early on I had prostitution escort ads made in my name, my face superimposed onto pornographic images being circulated online; there were death threats, rape threats and smears. My mother’s home address was posted online, suggesting it was a brothel that could be rented by the hour; my sister’s bank accounts were hacked and drained of money. There was an aggressive online defamation campaign to try to discredit me and the growing Traffickinghub movement.

We moved house multiple times. One letter in blue-ink handwriting with no return address delivered to our post office box listed our home address and my children’s middle names, which I had never disclosed publicly before. The writer said they were close by, watching my family. It made a point to say, “You are going to get someone killed.” I became aware of my surroundings in a way I hadn’t before. If my children were playing in the backyard and I was doing the dishes, I wouldn’t turn the other way. It felt like I had to have my eyes on them always. But I didn’t let fear take hold to a point where it became debilitating.

I owe much to my husband, Joel, who was, and is, a huge source of strength, wisdom, sound advice and encouragement. At the start of the campaign, he was in the midst of a major life change, moving out of dentistry and into construction. I am so lucky he was able to provide for us so I could continue the fight. He never once asked me to stop because of the effect it was having on family life. Not even when I forgot his 40th birthday, only realising weeks later. In fact, he was the person, more than anyone else, who would say, “Keep on pushing through. Don’t be scared or intimidated — this work is important and I’m here to support you.” There were moments when it all became too much and I considered shutting down the petition. At the same time as I considered it, I knew it wasn’t an option. I would never be able to live with myself if I did not see this through to the end.

From the very earliest stages I had been advised to “follow the money”. One thing I have learnt is that the biggest concern of companies like Pornhub is how much money they can make, and they are highly motivated to maintain relationships with the credit card companies, who in this case were facilitating the monetisation of child abuse and trafficking. I had meeting after meeting with senior executives of the card companies who asked for evidence and promised action. Time and again I provided it — practically a book’s worth since May 2020, when I began engaging with them. Yet they were resistant and unwilling to take the necessary action.

Finally, in December 2020, the dam broke. After months of investigation, Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times released a groundbreaking expose headlined “The children of Pornhub”. The piece featured Serena’s harrowing story alongside other child victims. Within days Pornhub was pressured to take down 80 per cent of the entire website, consisting of 10.6 million videos and more than 30 million images in what the Financial Times called “probably the biggest takedown of content in internet history”. After more than a decade of being a cultural icon, Pornhub was now a pariah, being shamed in thousands of media articles worldwide.

Mastercard finally announced it was terminating its relationship with Pornhub and MindGeek, swiftly followed by Visa, Discover card and others. MindGeek’s Montreal headquarters were in absolute chaos: 400 employees quit, and mainstream advertisers were rapidly cancelling their accounts. What had once been the tenth largest website in the world had been cut down to a stump.

After getting the kids to sleep, I walked quietly down to the guest bedroom, closed the door and dropped down onto the carpet. Overwhelmed with relief at the thought that this might be the end of the fight or close to it, I exhaled a huge breath, covered my face with my hands, and fell forward onto the ground with tears of gratitude running down my cheeks, thanking God for what I felt was a true miracle.

As it turned out, although we had made tremendous progress, we were nowhere close to done. There was another two years of battling the credit card companies, which a few weeks later quietly rekindled their relationship with Pornhub’s advertising arm, which was allowing the company to process the profits from the almost five billion ad impressions sold daily.

Fast forward to 2024 and I am still working full-time on this fight for justice through my nonprofit organisation, the Justice Defense Fund. The CEO and the COO of Pornhub were forced to resign, and Pornhub’s parent company does not exist any more as MindGeek (it was sold and renamed Aylo). But the battle is not over.

There are nearly 300 victims who have sued Pornhub in 25 lawsuits across the globe, some of which are class actions on behalf of tens of thousands of child victims. These are still in process. We are also waiting for justice in the criminal courts in several countries where Pornhub has offices, including the US, UK and Canada. The US federal government criminally charged Pornhub for profiting from sex trafficking and forced the company to pay a $1.8 million penalty. But that isn’t nearly enough. The level of knowing complicity from Pornhub’s owners demands criminal accountability commensurate with the extent and severity of the harm done, and we haven’t seen that yet. We need to see it.

We also need to ensure that another Pornhub doesn’t pop up in its place. That is why we need to enact laws that demand reliable third-party age and consent verification for every individual and every user-generated porn video on every website that distributes pornographic content per terms of service. Credit card companies and financial institutions must also make it a policy to refuse to do business with websites that don’t enact these critical preventative measures.

The petition now stands at 2.3 million signatures from every country in the world, and new people are still signing each day. In a time of great divisiveness and polarisation, I hope this story helps to inspire people from different backgrounds to put down their differences and fight together for important causes.

Four years ago, I unexpectedly began this fight against Pornhub at a time when I was disillusioned and discouraged. Today, I am full of hope and more confident than ever about what can be accomplished when people come together to confront injustice. Let’s keep fighting together until justice prevails.
Takedown: Inside the Fight to Shut Down Pornhub for Child Abuse, Rape and Sex Trafficking by Laila Mickelwait (Penguin, £26.99)