Since the New York Timespublished their bombshell report by Nicholas Kristof on the orgy of rape and sexual abuse featured daily on Pornhub, the bad news continues to pour in for Mindgeek. U.S. senators are putting forward bipartisan legislation; a Canadian parliamentary committee is calling on top executives to testify; and Pornhub deleted over 10 million videos—up to 60% of the site’s content—in a panicked scramble to avoid accountability. The strategy does not appear to be working.
Today, Pornhub got hit again when the news broke that forty survivors of abuse and sex trafficking are filing lawsuits against the site for facilitating their online exploitation. In January, survivors of a porn production company called Girls Do Porn won $12.7 million from the company, with the men who ran Girls Do Porn are still facing federal sex trafficking charges. The civil suit detailed the threats, manipulation, grooming, and deceit utilized by the pornographers to accumulate the material. The victims were at times even “trapped in hotel rooms.”
Like many other traffickers and perpetrators of sexual exploitation, Girls Do Porn uploaded videos of the victims to Pornhub, which has consistently (and deceitfully) claimed to have a stringent verification process for videos. Pornhub promptly monetized the videos and raked in profits from the victims—and refused to take the videos down, even after the victims were awarded millions in a civil lawsuit against Girls Do Porn. Forty victims have filed suit on December 15 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California, represented by the Holm Law Group PC and The O’Brien Law Firm, APLC.
