A David and Goliath battle involving a billion-dollar pornography website
Laila Mickelwait’s Takedown describes in fascinating and often distressing detail both why Pornhub, the Canadian-owned internet pornography video-sharing website, needs to be destroyed and how this might be achieved. It’s not the story of a movement against the porn industry, like the one I have been involved with for decades, but more a woman’s lone, Erin Brockovich-like crusade to shut down a major distributor.
The book relates how, through investigative journalism, Mickelwait discovered that one of the world’s biggest websites was knowingly profiting from sex trafficking, and reveals her subsequent fight to hold Pornhub accountable for its distribution and monetisation of child sexual abuse and rape. She is the founder and CEO of the Justice Defense Fund and the founder of the Traffickinghub movement – but she is no ideologue. Indeed, she is keen to specify that what she seeks to abolish is illegal trafficking, not the legal pornography industry. Her view is that as long as it is ‘lawful and not harming another person’, what happens between consenting adults is their business. She points out that she herself has ‘hardly lived the life of a prude or an enemy of the entertainment business’, and has been known to spend New Year’s Eve at a Playboy mansion party.
Pornhub was storing all videos of child sexual abuse ever to have been on their site. That is a felony
But she is a Christian, and looked to prayer for inspiration in tackling the monster of the porn trade; and she eventually succeeded in getting Pornhub to publicly confess to a federal felony, with Katie, a senior staff member, disclosing that the company had access to every single video in their huge collection – dating to pre-2009. In so doing, Katie admitted that Pornhub was storing all videos of child sexual abuse ever to have been on the site. That is a criminal offence.
After spending countless hours combing through comments on Reddit, Mickelwait realised that what she was looking at was ‘a gold mine of incriminating comments from Pornhub’s own mouth’. On one thread, a user seeking advice stated: ‘There is child porn all over Pornhub.’ Katie offered reassurance: there was no need to inform a law enforcement agency – just send the evidence to them. In other words, a senior manager at Pornhub was telling someone not to report to the authorities the child sexual abuse videos they had found on the site.
Mickelwait chronicles the investigations conducted by herself and colleagues, who have spoken with rape survivors, moderators and former employees of Mind-Geek – which owned Pornhub until June last year. The revelations, written in potboiler form, drop ‘live’ on to the page. When she describes chasing criminals in an attempt to hold them to account in US courts the style is hyperbolic – but, then, there is much that is dramatic about the online porn industry.
I have known the author for some years, occasionally bumping into her at conferences where global experts gather – including tech men capable of policing the internet for illegal content. Feminists have long argued that pornography in itself represents abuse of women, which in turn helps build misogynistic attitudes and behaviour among boys and men. Mickelwait’s focus is on the rape and child abuse imagery that manages to end up online without triggering any penalties: not for the rapists, not for those who filmed the crimes, not for the host sites (such as Pornhub) and not for the consumers of illegal content.
A Canadian X account, @EyeDeco, targeted Serena, who, having discovered videos of herself being abused as an underage teenager on Pornhub, came forward to Mickelwait. This account posted old Instagram images of Serena in an attempt to shame her. It was unmasked as Grace Sinclair from Montreal, operating on behalf of MindGeek.
This is not just about the odd video depicting a criminal act that sneaks in among the many millions of videos hosted on such sites. Pornhub is the tenth most visited website in the world and operates in plain sight. Its free content – which makes up the vast majority of the videos available – is a smokescreen for its pay-to-download content. It hosted countless images of child abuse, rape and sadistic sexual violence – the largest collection in the world. The author’s portrayal of those responsible for such crimes – the rapists, traffickers and sadists – is all the more terrifying when you realise that these are just regular, everyday men.
And Pornhub is clearly culpable. Out of more than 1,200 employees, just one person was tasked with reviewing the hundreds of thousands of films flagged for depicting real crimes of child sexual abuse, rape and trafficking. At one stage, there was a backlog of 700,000 films. INHOPE, the international association of internet hotlines which purports to lead the fight against child sexual abuse material online, has taken money from Pornhub – ignoring the conflict of interest and helping Pornhub present a clean image.
Having interviewed women whose rapes and sexual assaults were filmed and uploaded to Pornhub, I understand something of the extent of their trauma, of knowing that the men viewing these videos were taking sexual pleasure from their suffering. Some women who have worked in the porn industry have sued Pornhub for ‘conduct amounting to rape’ on set. The number of lawsuits against the company rises constantly. Mickelwait documents the cases, and her mission is clearly personal. But her depiction of herself as a lone crusader is disingenuous. There is in fact a proud history of such work, including the outstanding contribution made by Gail Dines, the author of Pornland. Yet Mickelwait neither acknowledges the wider movement nor provides any of the historical context.
There have been complaints from adults who say that images of themselves being sexually abused as children have been uploaded, and there is irrefutable evidence that Pornhub has hosted rape, trafficking and child abuse content. It claims that there were no videos of extremely young children being raped – ‘Every video and photo is reviewed manually before upload by a large and extensive team of human moderators’ – yet the site was heaving with illegal content.
Takedown is a testament to the tenacity of Mickelwait and others who refuse to ignore grave injustices. Documented in an accessible and highly entertaining style, her campaign did more than just clip Pornhub’s wings: it also served, through her collaboration with high-profile journalists, to educate the general public about the reality of the porn industry.
Today, porn drives technology. It also generates more profit than Hollywood and the music industry combined. Fighting this is a classic David and Goliath battle. But what Takedown tells us is that the struggle to hold the industry to account must be a concerted, multi-pronged effort. One woman can make a difference, but she can’t do it alone.
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