In a moving testimony to Canadian lawmakers earlier this month, a teenage victim of child pornography shared her harrowing story of the compounded trauma she endured when Pornhub allegedly failed repeatedly to remove the illegal footage of her from its website.
Serena Fleites — who first gained attention in December, when she shared her story in a New York Times piece about child pornography on Pornhub — told politicians during a Feb. 1 hearing that she spent the early part of her childhood in a mountain town with no WiFi and spotty electricity. When she was a little older, the now-19-year-old Fleites moved to a new place in California and a new school, where she was bullied.
She eventually met a boy, and they started dating, although they were only in seventh grade. The relationship turned ugly, though, when he repeatedly pressured her to send him a video of herself undressing.
“If we’re really in a relationship — if you truly love me — then you’d send me something like that,” she recalled her then-boyfriend telling her.
Reluctantly, Fleites sent him a video. Then her nightmare started coming true: The boyfriend shared the explicit video of his then-13-year-old girlfriend with his friends and, soon thereafter, it made its way to Pornhub, the largest pornographic website in the world.
“A lot of people in the grades above me — mostly guys — they would try to harass me and blackmail me, saying if I didn’t do stuff with them or I didn’t send them more videos to them, then they would send it to my family: my grandma, my mom, my sisters, my brother,” Fleites explained.
She went on to say that, when she contacted Pornhub, the site’s staffers continually hassled her for more information, forcing her to send them photos and identification information in an effort to prove she was who she said she was, before they would consider removing the clip, which was titled, “13-year-old brunette shows off for the camera.”
“It caused this huge buildup of anxiety and depression in me, which caused me to turn to drugs to try to forget about it, to turn to suicide to try to end it,” Fleites said, telling the lawmakers that, prior to this entire ordeal, she was a straight-“A” student with a “bubbly” personality.
After weeks of going back and forth with the pornography site, Fleites said she was able to convince Pornhub to take the video down. But then, she explained, it would end up back on the site — over and over and over again.
Fleites, who pretended to be her mother when she first contacted Pornhub, said it was “very obvious” the video of her was child pornography, because she “hit puberty really late due to a hormone disorder where I age very slowly, so when I was 13 or 14, I still looked like I was nine or 10 years old.”
That video, the young woman said, had “already been downloaded by people all across the world,” so, regardless of how many times Pornhub removed it, “it’d be right up again.”
“They’re really selfish,” said Fleites after accusing the site of having no interest in taking down child pornography because it brought so much traffic to the site. “They need to really look at themselves in the mirror, because they’re prioritizing money and content over actual human beings’ lives.”
Holding back tears, Alberta MP Shannon Stubbs praised Fleites for her willingness to share her story so publicly.
“It’s rare in life to be in the presence of someone who has rare and incomparable strength and resilience like you have clearly demonstrated here,” Stubbs told Fleites. “I hope that, through this process, you are able to empower yourself and you own your power that you have. And no one gives it to you; it’s inherent in you, and that’s clear. It’s powerful within you.”
Canadian lawmakers spoke Friday with David Marmorstein Tassillo and Feras Antoon, two executives with Pornhub’s parent company MindGeek.
Tassillo claimed Pornhub had never heard of or had contact with Fleites, telling MP Nate Erskine-Smith that a first and last name isn’t enough information to determine if they’d ever communicated with the teenage girl.
“So how many 13-year-old reached out to you five or six years ago?” Erksine-Smith asked.
In December, Pornhub removed millions of videos from its platform, claiming it scrubbed the site of any content uploaded by non-verified users. The move came after Mastercard and Visa cut ties with the pornography website after internal investigations found illicit material on Pornhub.
Erksine-Smith asked Antoon if the horrific incidences with Fleites as well as Girls Do Porn could have been avoided if Pornhub had moved sooner to put in place the measures it implemented in December. He also wondered why MindGeek decided to wait until 2020 to make such changes.
Both executives denied any wrongdoing on the part of Fleites, and Tassillo claimed Pornhub is “the safest adult platform in the world right now.”