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Pornhub promoted real sex crimes against children. She revealed the truth

TheoJuly 30, 2024

What I love most about my job is the inspiring people I meet.

One of those people is Laila Mickelwait, founder and CEO of the Justice Defense Fund.

Mickelwait had been fighting sex trafficking for years when, in early 2020, she faced her biggest enemy yet: Pornhub. And it all started one night on her laptop.

At the time, Pornhub was one of the most popular websites in the world, attracting billions of visitors each month. Since then, the company has faced a reckoning.

While Mickelwait says she has no problem with legal pornography, she has zero tolerance for those who illegally profit from sex trafficking and child rape – and that’s exactly what she found on Pornhub.

Mickelwait’s new book, “Takedown: Inside the Fight to Shut Down Pornhub for Child Abuse, Rape, and Sex Trafficking,” was released on Tuesday.

I spoke with her last week about her book. Our conversation has been condensed for length and clarity.

I was hoping you could start by talking about your experiences so far and how they relate to your work on behalf of Pornhub victims.

I have been involved in the fight against sex trafficking for 18 years. The fight to hold Pornhub accountable is part of a long history of fighting sex trafficking and child sexual abuse. And as I looked at the trends in this global crime, I noticed that it wasn’t just happening offline. It was being recorded and distributed and monetized online.

So when I started my research, I tried to dig deeper and understand the intersection between the porn industry and sex trafficking and these crimes and other evils.

I listened carefully when I heard news articles about pornography or the porn industry, and in late 2019, there were certain articles that caught my attention. And I talk about it in the book, and I can describe one of those cases that was particularly concerning to me at the time. It was about a 15-year-old girl who was missing for a whole year and was finally found after a Pornhub user tipped off her mother that she was on the site, and her mother found her in 58 videos of her being raped for profit on Pornhub. Around the same time, the London Sunday Times had conducted an investigation and within minutes found dozens of illegal videos on the site, even of children as young as 3.

These stories kept running through my head. I kept coming back to them and finally one night the question popped into my mind: How does this happen?

And this all started in 2020?

February 1, 2020, in the dark hours before dawn.

You very quickly started a movement to force Pornhub to remove videos depicting child abuse and rape. You created the hashtag Traffickinghub and started a petition that received several million signatures. What made your efforts so successful?

I think that goes back to the word “activism,” right? And I think the important job of an activist is to activate people. And I think that’s what happened when I just shared the truth about what I discovered that night: All you needed to upload user-generated sex videos to the biggest porn site in the world was an email address. That was it.

It was shocking to me when you explained how easy it is to create an account on Pornhub to post something.

Yes, and we realized that this was a crime scene rife with real sex crimes, and we raised the alarm. We welcomed people from all walks of life and tried to activate them. And it became a real team effort, with whistleblowers, survivors, advocates, journalists, lawmakers coming forward, and everyone taking their place and doing their part. And I think that’s what has made this effort particularly effective over the last few years.

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What made the whole thing explode was the realization that alongside the fake videos of child rape, there were also real videos of child rape and it was often impossible to tell the difference because the children’s age and consent were not verified.

What was it like for you personally to hear all these heartbreaking stories from victims?

It was hard. It was heartbreaking every time. I felt like I never got used to hearing that and every situation was unique. But just hearing the worst moments of their lives being filmed. It’s one thing to be raped. It’s a whole other thing when that rape is filmed and then distributed all over the world for profit and pleasure on Pornhub where 5 million users per hour have the opportunity to actually download it because they had a download button on every video. They (the victims) called it the immortality of their trauma where they understood that even after they died, people will still get profit and pleasure from the worst moments of their lives.

Without justice, there is no healing and no closure. They need justice, not only against the perpetrators who abused them, but also against the leaders who profited from it and spread and perpetuated their trauma around the world.

This is what human trafficking looks like:A sex trafficking survivor almost died trying to escape. How she turned her life around.

What about Pornhub now? I know you wrote about how they deleted 80% of their site overnight because these videos and photos were not verified.

A lot has happened in the last four years. Pornhub has had a reckoning. This is described in detail in the book, as well as how we have experienced successes and challenges.

Today, we are still waiting for justice to be served. We are still waiting for prosecution, not only against the company, but also against its individual owners. There are currently 26 lawsuits pending on behalf of victims in the US, Canada and the UK, several class action lawsuits pending on behalf of tens of thousands of child victims, and we are trying to fight for justice and accountability.

And I also think it’s really important to put policies in place to make sure this doesn’t happen again, because we need to hold Pornhub accountable. But we need to make sure that a copycat site doesn’t pop up in its place.

Can you tell us more about the Justice Defense Fund, which you founded and lead, and your work to help these victims?

I founded the Justice Defense Fund to help victims in their quest for healing and justice. We work on two types of major initiatives. One is public pressure initiatives where we try to bring injustices to light, particularly companies like Pornhub that are involved in the distribution of illegal and criminal content.

And then we support victims and guide them through their journey to civil justice. If we can help victims hit them (companies like Pornhub) where it hurts, it can not only bring them the much-needed justice and healing and reparations they deserve, but it can also help change the system and the way these things work.