The billion-dollar scandal: Pornhub’s role in child exploitation and trafficking
MindGeek operated a large portfolio of adult entertainment sites, including Pornhub.
What you need to know:
- Pornhub’s empire crumbled after investigative efforts exposed child exploitation, leading to lawsuits, financial losses, and mass content removal.
- Laila Mickelwait’s campaign against Pornhub exposed sex trafficking, mobilised global outrage, and forced financial institutions to cut ties.
Motivated by YouTube's advent in 2005, German venture capitalist Fabian Thylmann hatched a plan to purchase user-generated porn sites. His search for capital acquisitions landed him in Montreal, Canada, the headquarters of troubled porn company Mansef owned by Syrian-born Montreal University engineering graduate Feras Antoon and Concordia University student David Tassillo.
Fabian took a $362 million high-interest loan from Colbeck Capital and 125 different investors, including Cornell University and JP Morgan Chase, and merged Mansef with his sites. He consolidated the porn industry and cultivated a profitable ecosystem of sexual contact.
However, at 7am on December 4, 2012, 100 Belgian police officers arrested Fabian on his luxurious estate in Tervuren, an opulent suburb in Brussels, for tax evasion. Feras and David subsequently partnered with a low-profile tycoon called Bernard Bergemar, bought Mansef from Fabian and renamed it MindGeek. It became the new parent company to the infamous domain name, Pornhub.com.
Pornhub was the world’s site for free user-generated porn, with more site traffic than Amazon, Yahoo and Netflix. It was a vast library of lewd content amassed on their servers since its inception in 2007. Its plethora of daily visits surpassed the entire populations of Canada, Australia and France combined, and its influx of 4.6 billion daily advertising impressions generated hundreds of millions of dollars each year for MindGeek.
In 2020, researchers named Pornhub the third most influential ‘tech’ company in global society just behind Google and Facebook, with an accumulation of 6.8 million video uploads yearly. Pornhub was a cultural icon and a proliferated proponent profiting from millions of videos of sexual abuse, defilement, prepubescent nudity, sex trafficking and torture.
In 2014, Laila Mickelwait, an Arabic descendant of Jordanian and Sicilian heritage, lost her surgeon father Wisam to a heart attack, after he discovered that Laila's sister was being sexually abused. The grief Laila endured sparked a relentless desire to seek justice for victims of child sexual abuse.
Laila completed her Master's in Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California and interned in Washington DC, with the United Nations’ University Millennium Project. She included human trafficking in the UN's annual 'State of the Future' report and devoted the rest of her life to studying and combating human trafficking within the porn industry with care and devotion.
She began tagging senators, celebrities, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Members of Congress and Prime Minister of Canada Justin Trudeau on Pornhub's criminality and lack of verification of age and sexual consent of uploaded videos. Her campaign triggered a chain of public outrage and she branded her new mantra #Traffickinghub with a logo that resembled Pornhub’s. On February 9, 2020, the Washington Examiner published Laila's essay ‘Time to shut Pornhub down,’ which detailed disturbing revelations and explicit findings. Thousands of girls and women around the globe, whose sex abuse videos were uploaded on Pornhub, flooded Laila with messages, seeking justice and litigation assistance
The cover of Laila Mickelwait's memoir, Takedown: Inside the Fight to Shut Down Pornhub for Child Abuse, Rape and Sex Trafficking.
A day later, her credence was bolstered when BBC.com published an article in 41 languages titled, ‘I was raped at 14 and the video ended up on Pornhub.’ The story described the abduction at knifepoint of a 14-year-old Ohio girl named Rose, who was sexually assaulted for 12 hours. In her memoir, Takedown: Inside the Fight to Shut Down Pornhub for Child Abuse, Rape and Sex Trafficking, Laila articulates how she created a Change.org account titled ‘Shut Down Pornhub and hold its Executives Accountable for Aiding Trafficking.’ She posted her Examiner op-ed into the body of the petition and shared it on social media, provoking a viral reaction.
By the fourth day, the petition’s signatures grew to 100,000, setting Laila's unassailable ambition into motion. Over 80 per cent of videos on Pornhub were free and didn't earn money for users, the user incentive was the social currency of views, likes, clicks and comments. The profiteers were preemptive owners and executives of Pornhub, who were monetising free porn by selling 4.6 billion advert impressions on the site's content every day.
Laila linked all the numerous Pornhub victims, who had reached out to her, to Mike Bowie, a cultured Wall Street attorney who represented each of them pro bono. Mike commenced the process of filing separate lawsuits against MindGeek executives Feras Antoon, David Tassillo, Bernard Bergemar, and the credit card companies that were enabling the trafficking of children.
Trafficking is a transactional crime, hence credit card companies Visa, MasterCard and Discovery were the procedural formalities of payment that delivered money from advertisers and porn consumers to Pornhub’s executives. They kept Pornhub profitable and obtained a portion from each child sex transaction.
On December 4, 2020, New York Times Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Nick Kristof published a brazen piece, titled ‘Children of Pornhub,’ based on evidence supplied to him by Laila. The outrage from the article was enormous and prompted MasterCard CEO Ajay Banga to terminate the use of his credit cards on Pornhub. Visa and Discovery emulated Ajay's actions and ended the use of their cards from Pornhub, starkly plummeting its revenue, and leaving users with only cryptocurrency and bank wires as payment options.
In a futile effort to escape prosecution, Feras orchestrated the grandest content takedown in history by deleting 10.6 million videos and 30 million images from Pornhub. His company, MindGeek, was simultaneously facing two class-action suits in Canada on behalf of victims for $600 million apiece and another two class-action suits in the US on behalf of trafficked children.
The writer is a novelist, Big Brother Africa 2 Kenyan representative and founder of Jeff's Fitness Centre (@jeffbigbrother).