How Pornhub Became The Internet’s Biggest Crime Scene - Laila Mickelwait - #956

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Pornhub is not a porn site, it's a crime scene. What's that mean?

**Laila Mickelwait** (0:05)
It means exactly what you just said. So what I discovered about five years ago was what millions of people already knew and that all it took to upload to the world's YouTube of porn. So this is user generated porn, the biggest porn site in the world at the time. Actually, it was the fifth most trafficked website in the world at the time. I made this discovery that all it took to upload to Pornhub was an email address that anybody in under 10 minutes could upload to the site and they were not verifying ID to make sure that these were not children and they were not verifying consent to make sure that these are not rape or trafficking victims. Because of that, the site had actually become infested with videos of real sexual crime. So we're talking about child abuse, child sexual abuse material, we call it. This is child rape. It's also self-generated child sexual abuse material where children would be filming themselves and sharing it. And then that would get uploaded to Pornhub, which is completely illegal to be viewing and distributing that content. To adult rape, unconscious women, completely drunk, non-consenting, all the way to what we used to call revenge porn. So this would be image-based sexual abuse. So all kinds of non-consensual content.
And even copyright violations, where this is illegal content because it was stolen material that was being uploaded to the site. So that was the state of Pornhub. And they had, at the time, they had 6.9 million videos that were uploaded in 2019 And this was my fight to hold them accountable for these crimes started in 2020 And at that time, they had 56 million pieces of content uploaded to the site. And they had, actually, 170 million visitors per day, 62 billion visitors per year. And enough content being uploaded that it would take 169 years to watch if you put those videos back to back. So that's how much content was being uploaded. And mind you, this is now anybody with an iPhone. So anybody, anywhere in the world that had a camera could film a sex act and with no checks whatsoever, using a VPN even, to be even more anonymous. They could upload this content to Pornhub and it was infested with videos of crime.

**Chris Williamson** (2:29)
Why was this your job to find? This seems like 62 billion visits per year. One of those 62 billion visits could have sprung somebody else into action. Why was this you?

**Laila Mickelwait** (2:45)
I mean, this is one of the things that really kind of amazes me even now is that this was something that was hiding in plain sight. So, this was under everybody's noses. Like, really anybody could have sounded the alarm on this. And it's amazing that it took from 2007 to 2020 for it to get any attention, that this was actually going on. And, you know, I am actually honored to have the opportunity to shine a light on this and to, you know, be helping the many, many, many countless victims now who've had their trauma immortalized on this site. And so, I don't know why it took this long for it to come to light, but there's this saying that I love, and it's an idea whose time had come. And I think that that's actually true. It was an idea, Trafficking Hub, which is the movement that I started to hold Pornhub accountable. It started with a hashtag on social media and grew and went viral. But I think Trafficking Hub was an idea whose time had finally come. And enough was enough, and it was time to expose what was going on.

**Chris Williamson** (3:54)
What's the story of Pornhub across the years? Huge company owned by an even bigger parent company. What's the arc of how they ended up where they are?

**Laila Mickelwait** (4:04)
Sure, yeah, it's so interesting because you think about Pornhub as a solo site often, but really what people don't know is that Pornhub is owned by a parent company. You know, most people in the world have probably heard the name Pornhub. You know, they had spent millions and millions of dollars to become a household brand name for porn. They had done things like massive PR campaigns to save the bees and save the whales and clean the oceans and even donate to breast cancer awareness. And they had this whole arm of Pornhub called Pornhub Cares, which was like this philanthropic arm. They are walking New York Fashion Week. They have faux commercials on Saturday Night Live. So everybody pretty much understood the name Pornhub. Now, if you talk about the company that owned Pornhub, well, that's a different story. So most people had never heard of the parent company of Pornhub, which was called MindGeek. Now, MindGeek had essentially rolled up the global porn industry under one huge international multi-billion-dollar corporation because with a $362 million loan, they had actually bought up most of the world's most popular porn sites and brands. So there was a hedge fund called Colbet Capital that had 125 secret investors that included JP Morgan Chase, that included Cornell University, and they had loaned these hundreds of millions of dollars to, which was Manwin at the time, so I'll tell you the history of that, but to the company to buy up the world's most popular porn sites and brands. So they actually owned everything from Playboy Digital to Pornhub and all of its sister tube sites, so Pornhub and its sister site, so that would include RedTube, U-Porn, GayTube, Xtube, Xtube, PornMD. I mean, I could go on and on, massive amounts of tube sites that operated all the same way. But my geek used to be a company called Manwin, and before Manwin, it was a company called Mansef. And there was these men in Montreal that started Mansef in 2007 They had purchased the website pornhub.com for about $2,500 at a Playboy Mansion party, and they launched Pornhub. But it was a man named Fabian Tillman, so he's a German entrepreneur, that actually put Pornhub on the map. So he was a very shrewd businessman and he had this idea that he wanted the world to be able to access free porn. And so he kind of took Pornhub from somewhat popular site to the brand name that it is today, and then he actually got in trouble for tax evasion. So the company was sold because originally, the owners at Mansef were in trouble for money laundering, so they had to suddenly sell the site and they sold it to Fabian. And then Fabian got in trouble for tax evasion, and then he suddenly had to sell the site, and so he sold it to VPs at his company, and now they're in trouble again. So criminally charged by the US government, and now they're trying to sell the site again to a hastily concocted private equity firm. And so that's kind of the story of Pornhub, where you have this history, where they get in trouble with the law, they rebrand each time they name the company something else and sell it and sell it again, and this time they were criminally charged for intentionally profiting from the sex trafficking of over 100 women in California. So now they sold MindGeek and now they call it ALO. So it's a new, it's the same company, it's the same website, and many of the same owners and executives have been involved from the very beginning that are still there in Montreal today running the site.