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.
Brave 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. He is now on a desperate PR effort to try to rebrand his twisted company as "ethical". He's being helped in this by many liberal media outlets, but, for all their efforts, the tide of public opinion is clearly flowing against such filth.