More than 700 victims’ advocates and survivors of sexual exploitation have sent a letter to Congress, urging lawmakers to launch a criminal investigation into Pornhub and its elusive parent company MindGeek.
This comes as Pornhub — the largest pornography distributor in the world — has been credibly accused of hosting not only videos of sexual assualt and abuse but also many videos containing child sexual abuse material (CSAM), or child pornography.
The group argued in their letter to Congress that Pornhub has been allowed to get away with illegal activity without facing repercussions.
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“MindGeek, which owns Pornhub and at least 160 other hardcore pornography websites, serves as a case study of corporate indifference regarding harm caused to women and children on its platform,” the letter states. “It has received widespread international condemnation for facilitating and profiting from criminal acts, including sex trafficking, filmed sexual abuse of children, and non-consensually recorded and distributed pornography.”
“Additionally,” it continues, “because MindGeek intentionally placed a download button on every video distributed on Pornhub until December 2020, after being exposed by The New York Times, the company has violated federal age verification and record-keeping laws. … This is because the download button caused the direct transfer of pornography from MindGeek servers to individuals’ devices around the globe.”
Pornhub has endured intense public scrutiny in recent years. The backlash came to a head at the end of 2020, when The Times published an editorial exposing the pornography platform for hosting CSAM.
At the center of the article was a young woman named Serena Fleites, who in February testified before lawmakers in Canada, where MindGeek is headquartered, about the trauma she endured when Pornhub repeatedly failed to remove illegal videos of her from its website.
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In the fall of 2019, police found 60 explicit videos of a missing, underage teenage girl on Pornhub. The site had also been profiting for nearly a decade off videos of young women lured and coerced into filming sexually explicit acts. The man behind those crimes, Girls Do Porn founder Michael Pratt, is a wanted fugitive.
It wasn’t until Mastercard and Visa disallowed their customers from using their cards on Pornhub in mid-December that the company removed millions of videos from its platform, which Times writer Nicholas Kristof said was “infested” with illicit material.
News of the letter to lawmakers comes at the same time Tortoise editors Alexi Mostrous, Xavier Greenwood, and Patricia Clarke have tracked down Bernd Bergmair, whom they describe as “the secretive majority owner of MindGeek, the huge Canadian conglomerate that owns sites like Pornhub, the tenth most popular website in the world.”
The team at Tortoise only found Bergmair — who lives in London — after combing through New York, China, Hong Kong, and Austria.
The full investigation will be available in podcast form next Thursday.
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