Pornhub Is Still a Crime Scene, Even After Its Rebrand | Newsweek, July 22, 2024

Pornhub is a crime scene. You read that right. The site was purchased by a hastily concocted private equity firm, ironically called Ethical Capital Partners, last year. But its owners are continuing the monetization and global distribution of scores of homemade, user-generated sex videos that were never reliably verified to ensure the individuals in them are not children, rape victims, trafficking victims, or revenge porn victims. Even under new management, the site is still infested with illegal content.

Over the past few years, Pornhub has had a dramatic downfall after being exposed and held accountable for profiting from mass sexual crime. The fallout included the site taking down 80 percent of its videos, totaling 10 million unverified videos and over 30 million images; being completely cut off by Visa, Mastercard, Discover and PayPal; and losing all mainstream advertisers. The CEO and COO of its parent company resigned in disgrace, and the distressed company was sold.

However, it appears the new owners aren’t much better than the old ones.

The new owners of Pornhub renamed the site’s parent company from “MindGeek” to “Aylo” in an attempt to distance it from its toxic reputation as a peddler of sexual crime. But behind the scenes at its Montreal headquarters, men who have been with the company well before it was exposed—men who enabled the global distribution and monetization of victims’ trauma—still occupy executive offices.

Perhaps even more concerning is that the public face of Pornhub’s new ownership, a Canadian criminal defense attorney named Solomon Friedman, advertises his firm’s experience defending men accused of possessing and distributing filmed child sexual abuse and has spoken on his work defending possessors of child sexual abuse material. He even twice congratulated another attorney who got a man off on a technicality who had been in possession of 7,730 images of child sexual abuse, including images of infants being raped by grown men. Does he intend to try and get Pornhub off the hook in the same way? I can assure you the victims of Pornhub won’t allow it.

The consequences for victims of this abuse are severe. Victims of Pornhub often describe the widespread dissemination of their rape and abuse as the “immortalization” of their trauma. Once the abuse is uploaded, these survivors are perpetually tormented by the fact that they could be fighting to remove their abuse from the internet for the rest of their lives.

Even when they can get crime scene videos down, they face a continual game of whack-a-mole as the abuse is uploaded again and again online. It’s not surprising that many survivors become suicidal. Academic studies have cited that victims of the nonconsensual distribution of sexual images have a very high suicide risk, with almost half of the victims contemplating suicide. Some tragically end up dying by suicide.

Since 2020, nearly 300 victims have sued Pornhub in 25 lawsuits for its knowing distribution and monetization of rape and trafficking. These lawsuits include multiple class actions representing tens of thousands of child victims, and the U.S. federal government has criminally charged Pornhub for knowingly profiting from sex trafficking. Just last month, 13 child victims sued Pornhub as well as its owners and financial enablers.

The legal discovery process continues to uncover explosive evidence. It found emails from Pornhub’s CEO debating whether to remove or leave up a specific child sexual abuse video, admitting that the site didn’t verify age or consent and tried to hide it from the credit card companies. It found executives admitting they only employed one person to review flagged videos five days per week and had a backlog of 706,000 flagged videos and much more. Depositions confirmed that Pornhub purposefully hid child sexual abuse videos from authorities for over 13 years and didn’t report a single instance of abuse even where the law required mandatory reporting.

No amount of whitewashing, renaming, and rebranding can hide the truth. As one attorney defending over 100 victims who were trafficked on the site said about the attempted rebrand, “If you swim in a sea of s**t, it’s hard to lose the smell.”

The Canadian government conducted a multi-year investigation of Pornhub, culminating in a damning report that found it had violated Canadian privacy law. Pornhub’s new owners sued the government in an attempt to hide the report from the public, but lost the fight, and the report was released earlier this year.

After all of this, the site recently began to claim it would start verifying the age and consent of those featured in new videos uploaded to the site. However, it refused to remove all of the unverified content uploaded before the new policy change.

A quick search on Pornhub today turns up highly monetized, unverified, shaky, low-quality, homemade videos that show vulnerable, drug-addicted, homeless women being coerced with a place to sleep, some food, a few dollars, or drugs to engage in sex acts in jurisdictions where it is illegal even to purchase sex. The definition of sex trafficking in the U.S. and internationally makes it clear that coercing a commercial sex act from a vulnerable individual constitutes trafficking. In minutes, I was able to find unverified homemade videos that have been on the site for years of women yelling at their abusers to stop, crying out “it hurts!” and “turn the camera off.” There is no doubt that Pornhub is still a trafficking hub. It’s time to force it, at a minimum, to delete every unverified video on the site.

But that isn’t nearly enough. Victims deserve the full weight of justice to be brought to bear on this predatory company. They need to see criminal convictions, and they deserve significant restitution for how their lives have been shattered. Preventative policies also urgently need to be adopted. Specifically, we need laws mandating reliable, third-party age and consent verification for every individual in every video that exists on every website distributing user-generated porn.

It’s time to finally hold Pornhub and its owners accountable to the full extent of the law and to enact policies to prevent this kind of abuse in the future. We can do it. We must do it, because serious harm demands serious consequences in order to bring true justice to victims and deter future abusers.

Laila Mickelwait is the Founder and CEO of the Justice Defense Fund, Founder of the Traffickinghub movement, and the author of Takedown: Inside the Fight to Shut Down Pornhub for Child Abuse, Rape and Sex Trafficking (Penguin Random House/Thesis, July 23, 2024).