For four years, the world’s most popular porn site – Pornhub – has been dealing with a non-stop public relations crisis largely due to a campaign started by one woman.
Activist Laila Mickelwait of the Justice Defense Fund founded the #Traffickinghub movement in 2020 with an army of supporters. With 33.5 billion visits in 2018, Pornhub features sexual violence and the degradation of women. Some of those assaults are criminal, a fact horrifyingly highlighted when a mother of a 15-year-old girl from south Florida who had been missing for almost a year discovered that her daughter was still alive when pornographic photos and videos of the missing teen surfaced. Held against her will, the minor was forcibly featured in 58 porn videos that were uploaded online, including to Pornhub.
#Traffickinghub exposed these horrors. It rapidly became a movement, with over 600 organizations participating and over 2.2 million people in 192 countries signing the #Traffickinghub petition. Her activism led two-time Pulitzer Prize recipient Nicholas Kristoff of the New York Times to do his own investigation.
Kristoff’s report, “The Children of Pornhub,” detailed evidence of child abuse, included interviews with victims, and noted that the site “is infested with rape videos … (i)t monetizes child rapes, revenge pornography, spy cams of women showering, racist and misogynist content, and footage of women being asphyxiated in plastic bags … Most aren’t of children being assaulted, but too many are.” His conclusion? “Pornhub is Jeffrey Epstein times 1,000.”
“When I became aware of the horrific crimes being perpetrated against victims on Pornhub, I had a responsibility to sound the alarm on what I had discovered and how Pornhub was going to great lengths to cover it up,” Mickelwait told me. She continued:
It has been a tough fight, but we have collectively seen some incredible victories. Thousands of media articles have been written exposing Pornhub, which has severely damaged their brand. After a long battle, Visa, Mastercard, and Discover have finally cut all ties with Pornhub, leaving them with only cryptocurrency as a payment option. Most of their major advertisers and business partners have cut ties with Pornhub, including Comcast, Xfinity, Roku, Grant Thornton, Heinz, Unilever, and countless others.
It is a stunning fall for one of the most powerful porn monopolies on the planet – and Mickelwait’s movement isn’t finished. She takes to social media daily to detail the sexual violence rampant on the platform.
“Meta recently shut down Pornhub’s 13 million follower Instagram account,” she said. “One hundred and ninety-four victims have now sued Pornhub and its parent company MindGeek in individual and class action lawsuits across the U.S. and Canada. The Canadian government also engaged in a parliamentary investigation into Pornhub’s exploitation of victims. We aren’t done yet, but it is encouraging to see the progress made since the movement was launched in early 2020. I am seeing left and right, conservative and liberal, religious and non-religious people all raising their voices and taking action.”
In response, Mindgeek – which owned Pornhub and many other porn sites – was sold to the investor group Ethical Capital Partners in March 2023 and rebranded as Avlo. The company owns Pornhub and three other “streaming sites,” porn production companies, and paid porn sites.
Solomon Friedman, an ordained rabbi and criminal defense lawyer from Ottawa, is one of the founding members of Ethical Capital Partners, and he has been on a PR tour to rebrand Pornhub as one of the most ethical porn sites in the world. He recently sat down for a wide-ranging interview with Patrick Bet David of Valuetainment, and his strategy is clear: convince people that Pornhub has changed.
The latest missive in this PR war is a coup for Ethical Capital Partners. Friedman landed an interview in the National Post with a suspiciously agreeable Tyler Dawson titled, “Porn, part of the human experience and possibly Canada’s greatest export.” The feature begins by boasting that Pornhub is “one of the most-visited websites in the world,” with 140 million people logging on each day.
Dawson summarizes the interview by citing facts that he clearly believes reflect well on Pornhub, such as the fact that a third of Pornhub’s visitors are women. Dawson is so credulous that he believes statements like this from Friedman are profound: “Pornography is not a depiction that society then models itself after. Pornography … is more like a mirror. Whatever is reflected into it is reflected back.”
A discerning mind would note that Friedman simply said the same thing twice. Dawson clearly does not possess such a mind. Pornography is a feedback loop. Users watch it; it transforms their minds and wires their libidos to an increasingly perverse diet of content; and then it becomes a mirror. The research on this is overwhelming, comprehensive, and increasingly, public consensus. When Dawson does ask about the ubiquity of choking in porn, Friedman insists that porn is actually getting “softer” rather than “harder,” which defies research coming out of nearly every Western country and his own porn company’s ugly track record.
Dawson’s interview is not so much a probing interrogation as a lap dance. He allows Friedman to babble on about his commitment to safety. He doesn’t ask, for example, why mainstream content on Pornhub – which includes many forms of sexual violence – falls under that term. “Consent” really does turn sexual violence into something else, in Friedman’s view.
Dawson allows Friedman to cast himself as a sort of hero, rescuing the porn industry for the good of everyone. Friedman is, in fact, just another vile pornographer pumping a non-stop digital diet of brain-transforming sexual toxins into the minds of millions. Friedman says, for example, that “we saw a real investing opportunity if the stigma around the industry could be dispelled, and the only way that stigma could be dispelled was with open and proud ownership.”
It does not appear to occur to Dawson that perhaps the “stigma around the industry” should be further buttressed rather than eliminated. Instead, he notes – again, rather revealingly: “As long as humans have been daubing paintings on cave walls, we were thinking about erotic art. Where do you think pornography fits in the human experience?” In short: We all think about porn, all the time. Tell us how you think about porn. Friedman is happy to oblige, and his answer admits that pornography is “sex work” – that’s progressive speak for prostitution – and then goes on to defend it. He insists that sex work is like any other work, like practicing law. I will refrain from making dark jokes about this comparison.
Friedman even offers high-minded drivel like this: “There’s a reason why in Canada and the United States, and in basically every Western liberal democracy, pornography is constitutionally protected as free expression. Sexual expression is part of free expression, whether they’re the ones creating the content or the ones viewing the content. I think there’s something very profoundly human about it all.” Whatever that means.
Friedman does not mention the growing number of experts, researchers, and even politicians from the U.K. to France advocating that porn be restricted. In fact, the constitutional framework exists in most countries, including Canada and the United States, to ban pornography entirely. Asked about porn addiction, Friedman says this:
This is not an accepted mental health diagnosis in the present diagnostic standards manual. It goes like this: let’s say you love fly fishing. So, you go fly fishing on the weekends, you spend a little bit of money on your fly-fishing equipment, and that’s a healthy hobby.
But if you go fly fishing all day, every day, and spend all of your income on it, stop going to work, stop talking to your wife and kids, you’ve got a real problem and you need help, right? That’s not a fly-fishing addiction. That’s something in your life that’s interfering with your function. The same is true when it comes to porn.
The vast, vast majority of individuals are consuming it in a way that has absolutely no negative impact on their life. In fact, many report a positive impact on their sex life and their functioning. But if an individual is obsessed and spends all their money and their time, and it interferes with their real-life human relationships, that’s a big problem and they should seek assistance for that.
To put it bluntly, this is both a dodge and a deliberate deceit. Millions of young men and women have been addicted to the content Friedman and his partners push, and their cries for help fill Reddit threads and other internet forums. The evidence is easily available to anyone who looks – much of it has been compiled at “This is Your Brain on Porn.” Anyone who has ever felt pornography’s power – that is, anyone who has tried to quit – knows that to compare it to fly fishing is ludicrous. That is, unless Friedman fly fishes in a very different way than most sportsmen.
Friedman then goes on to detail all of the security measures that Pornhub is now taking. It is worth noting that Mickelwait has been carefully documenting their failures on her X page. After detailing these measures, Friedman goes on to claim that he is frequently the recipient of “vile antisemitic correspondence.” I don’t doubt it. Friedman insists that he is not a “corrupter of society,” but he most certainly is – not because he is Jewish, but because he is a pornographer. He is a corrupter of society in the same way that Hugh Hefner, Larry Flynt, and Alfred Kinsey were. Anyone facilitating the mass promulgation of pornography is assisting the corruption of society by definition, regardless of their ethnicity. That Friedman does it as a religiously trained person should be to his very deep shame.
Friedman’s intent is simple: to claim that Pornhub is not the industry’s problem but the industry’s future. This misses the point, since it is the industry itself that is the problem. Mickelwait has been detailing Pornhub’s record and ongoing sins in a counter-tour to rebut Friedman, and she appeared earlier this month on Theo Von’s wildly popular podcast. Perhaps the National Post will deign to interview her next.
