Getty Images; Jenny Chang-Rodriguez
It took just a few minutes for anti-trafficking activist Laila Mickelwait to log on to Pornhub, type the search term "homeless," and find a disturbing amateur video, the kind she complains about in her new book, "Takedown."
"You can hear the woman yelling to stop because it hurts," she said recently of the video, which includes a tag showing it's been on the site five years. "She's angrily telling the man to shut the camera off and stop filming."
Mickelwait used the same search term to quickly find another video that shows a woman described in its title as a "crack whore." The woman is heard complaining bitterly as she submits to sex in return for what the title mockingly claims is five dollars.
"We have no indication she even knows this is being filmed," Mickelwait said of this video, which has been on the site for two years. "You cannot see the woman's face, so it would be impossible to verify."
Pornhub, launched in 2007 and based in Montreal, lets users upload amateur and professional porn videos in much the same way users upload to YouTube.
It's been four years since a wave of news accounts revealed that the site was infested with non-consensual videos of rape, sexual assault, child porn, and footage from hidden cameras.
Advertisers, streaming platforms, and credit card companies cut ties en masse, and the site took down 80% of its content.
Since then, Pornhub has enacted a detailed system of safeguards to keep illegal and abusive content off the site. Users who upload videos must submit government-issued photo IDs. In January, the site began requiring these IDs for "performers" in all new videos.
"No platform on the internet has taken the significant steps we have to protect the safety and security of our community," said Sarah Bain, a spokeswoman for Ethical Capital Partners, a Canadian private equity firm that owns the Pornhub network of adult-content sites.
"We have taken unprecedented steps to mitigate the ability of bad actors to upload illegal material on our platforms," including using AI technologies and human monitoring to police content, she said.
But legal repercussions from those pre-purge days — including federal monitoring and an ever-growing number of lawsuits — are still rippling through Pornhub and its network of user-generated porn sites.
"Performers" remain unverified in many thousands of pre-2024 videos, including those that pop up from search terms involving teens and violence, Mickelwait told Business Insider.
It's these kinds of videos — uploaded without any verification of the age or consent of those depicted — that now drive Mickelwait's fight to knock Pornhub out of business.
Without verification, there's no way to know if the "performers" consented to the performance — or to its posting on Pornhub. "You actually don't know if they're 18, or if it's revenge porn, or if it's rape," Mickelwait said.
An ever-growing number of lawsuits by some 300 plaintiffs allege the site knowingly profited from videos of their abuse. More lawsuits are being readied, plaintiff lawyers told BI. Lawyers for Pornhub did not return requests for comment on these suits.
In yet another ripple, Pornhub's parent company, Aylo — formerly MindGeek — was ordered last year to submit to three years of federal monitoring of its content and screening. Aylo is the parent company for a network of porn sites, including Pornhub, PornhubPremium, Brazzers, YouPorn, Reality Kings, Men.com, TransAngels and Nataku.
Details of that monitoring — part of a deferred prosecution agreement from the Pornhub network's years of hosting hundreds of videos from the GirlsDoPorn sex-trafficking ring — have not been made public. A law enforcement source told BI last week that an announcement will be made soon.
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Pornhub remains a thriving user-generated adult entertainment site, boasting 100 million visits a day.
But as detailed in her new book — to be released by Random House on Tuesday and written like a detective thriller — Mickelwait has landed some round-house punches.
Mickelwait is the founder of the nonprofit Justice Defense Fund. Her Traffickinghub petition, which calls for an end to Pornhub, has 2.3 million signatures.
The mother of two began her fight against the online porn empire in early 2020, as horror stories began to mount.
Nearly two dozen videos uploaded to Pornhub showed a 12-year-old Alabama boy being repeatedly drugged and raped. The rapist, Rocky Shay Franklin, is now serving a 40-year prison term for sexual exploitation.
A 15-year-old Florida girl who went missing for a year was found when a Pornhub user reached out to the girl's mother. "The mother found fifty-eight videos of her child being raped on Pornhub," Mickelwait writes.
An investigation in the Sunday Times of London revealed illegal videos on the site involving children as young as three.
Mickelwait's book — its full title is "Takedown: Inside the Fight to Shut Down Pornhub for Child Abuse, Rape, and Sex Trafficking" — details her public and behind-the-scenes efforts to expose the site's outrages and publicly shame its business partners.
A spectrum of influential voices, including former progressive New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and conservative hedge-fund titan Bill Ackman, has amplified Mickelwait's activism.
In response to the outcry, advertisers Heinz, Unilever, and even KY Jelly pulled their ads off Pornhub, and credit card companies severed their ties. MindGeek, the name of the parent company for Pornhub at the time — which then had more traffic than Amazon or Netflix — purged 10 million unverified videos almost overnight.
"In less than 24 hours, 80% of the entire site is gone," Mickelwait writes. "The 10th-largest website in the world has just been cut down to a stump."
Laila Mickelwait/Business Insider
"Laila is a one-woman wrecking crew, with two babies in her arms and a keyboard," said Mike Bowe, a Manhattan-based attorney who represents 34 women accusing Pornhub of sex trafficking and child pornography in an ongoing federal racketeering lawsuit out of California filed in 2021.
"I've never seen someone with so few resources make such a big impact on such an important issue," Bowe told Business Insider.
Hedge-funder Ackman's public outcry after Kristof's devastating Times investigation — titled "The Children of Pornhub" — is credited in the book with pressuring Mastercard and Visa to abandon the site.
"Laila Mickelwait is a superstar advocate and activist who has single-handedly led the charge against Pornhub and its facilitation and monetization of child sex trafficking," he tweeted last week.
These days, Mickelwait hopes spiraling legal troubles — and potential damages in the tens of millions of dollars — will be Pornhub's knock-out blow.
Business Insider has found lawsuits on behalf of nearly 300 plaintiffs who allege that back before the 2020 purge, videos of their abuse were uploaded to Pornhub without their consent and remained on the site for weeks or months after they were flagged.
Pornhub's owners, advertisers, credit card partners, and hedge-fund financiers raked in millions, these lawsuits allege.
More than a dozen of these lawsuits were filed in the past month alone, and many more may be on the way. "We are in the process of filing cases on behalf of approximately 250 victims, with more reaching out weekly," Bowe told BI.
In a nod to the scope of this litigation tsunami, a federal judge in California used the phrase "tens of thousands of children" in a November order granting class certification to one of at least two class-action trafficking suits against Pornhub and MindGeek, which rebranded last year as Aylo.
"There is evidence from the defendants' own records demonstrating the presence of thousands of pieces of CSAM on their sites," in previous years, US District Judge Cormac J. Carney wrote in the order, using the acronym for child sexual abuse material.
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The allegations in the lawsuits are heartbreaking.
In 2020, 40 women — victims of the "Girls Do Porn" sex-trafficking operation — sued Pornhub in federal court in California, alleging the company knowingly profited from illegal videos of their abuse. In October, the list of plaintiffs in that case grew to 121 women.
A 2022 lawsuit says Pornhub profited from the videos of the 12-year-old Alabama boy who was drugged and repeatedly raped — and for five months ignored demands by police that the videos be taken down.
"I ended up trying to kill myself many times. I ended up in mental hospitals," Serena Fleites, the lead plaintiff in Bowe's 34-plaintiff trafficking suit, said 2021, while testifying at a hearing before the Canadian Parliament, according to Mickelwait's book.
Fleites was a 14-year-old 8th grader in Bakersfield, California when a boy a year older than her, who she had a crush on, asked her to film naked videos of herself. The boy shared the videos with friends, and someone uploaded them to Pornhub.
"There were instances where the video would have literally 2.7 million views," she told lawmakers investigating the parent company. "And it would still be on Pornhub despite hundreds of comments saying: 'Oh this is definitely child pornography. That girl can't be any more than fourteen, thirteen.'
"And yet Pornhub still wouldn't take it down, even when I messaged them multiple times," she testified.
Pornhub, Aylo, and Ethical Capital Partners are aggressively fighting these lawsuits, some of which are nearly four years old. The companies deny knowingly profiting from illegal and abusive content and insist that reforms now keep such content off the site.
"Out of respect for the integrity of court proceedings, our policy is not to comment on ongoing litigation," said Ethical Capital Partner's spokeswoman, Bain.
"We look forward to the facts being fully and fairly aired in that forum. We believe in fair and just outcomes, we are committed to working with law enforcement and regulators to respond to ever-changing threats and challenges, and we will continue to expand our practices to be at the forefront of the industry and protect the safety and security of our users," she said.
Pornhub and Aylo are also fighting hard against recent legislation in 19 states that requires users to verify they are 18, typically by requiring anyone registering to use the site to upload government-issued proof of age.
In protest of these restrictions, Pornhub has blocked access from IP addresses for at least nine states with such laws, according to pcmag.com. Users who try to log on to Pornhub from IP addresses in those states instead get a message from adult film actor Cherie DeVille, telling them to complain to their local representatives.
Pornhub's lawyers have sued the attorneys general in these states, challenging the constitutionality of their user age-verification laws.
Their challenge to Texas's age-verification law is set to be heard by the US Supreme Court during its fall term. It's a case that would decide the legality of these laws coast to coast.
"Most consumers in general do not feel comfortable uploading their IDs" when online, noted Mike Stabile, director of public policy for the Free Speech Coalition, an adult entertainment trade association that has joined in fighting the lawsuits.
"That's doubly more sensitive when you're dealing with adult content," he said.
Stabile added that if Mickelwait finds something of concern, she should report it."Historically, what Laila has done is air it through the press," he said.
Mickelwait said that she has reported many hundreds of videos to law enforcement and anti-trafficking watchdogs.
Most recently, she said, she reported to state authorities the Pornhub video showing a woman shouting in pain and asking not to be filmed.
"It's critical to bring justice to these victims, but also to be a deterrent to future abusers," she told BI. "Pornhub, to this day, is still a crime scene that needs to be shut down and its owners held accountable."
