Holding Pornhub Accountable for Monetizing Child Rapes

A federal judge issues a landmark ruling in a case brought by a brave girl I wrote about.

A federal judge in California has issued a landmark decision to allow a lawsuit to proceed against Pornhub and against Visa for together monetizing videos of child rapes.

The plaintiff is Serena Fleites, who was the central figure of a long article I wrote about Pornhub in December 2020. Here’s how I introduced her then:

At 14, Serena K. Fleites was an A student in Bakersfield, Calif., who had never made out with a boy. But in the eighth grade she developed a crush on a boy a year older, and he asked her to take a naked video of herself. She sent it to him, and this changed her life.

He asked for another, then another; she was nervous but flattered. “That’s when I started getting strange looks in school,” she remembered. He had shared the videos with other boys, and someone posted them on Pornhub.

Fleites’s world imploded. It’s tough enough to be 14 without having your classmates entertain themselves by looking at you naked, and then mocking you as a slut. “People were texting me, if I didn’t send them a video, they were going to send them to my mom,” she said.

The upshot was that Serena quit school, attempted suicide, self-medicated with heroin and became homeless. When I interviewed her, she was living in a car with her dogs — and it all started with that Pornhub video.

After my article, readers helped Serena get housing, education and legal help, and she also sued MindGeek, the company that owns Pornhub and other porn websites, along with Visa, which MindGeek depends on to make money. And let’s just pause to acknowledge Serena’s courage in talking to me, in allowing herself to be photographed, and in proceeding with this lawsuit. I’m full of admiration for her.

MindGeek and Visa moved to dismiss the case, but Judge Cormac Carney was scathing in his decision to reject that motion and allow discovery to proceed:

MindGeek sells ad space through “TrafficJunky,” its advertising platform. Ad revenue earned through TrafficJunky accounts for over 50% of MindGeek’s revenue. To reach their intended audience, advertisers can build campaigns around keywords like “13yearoldteen” and “not18”; indeed, they can even target ads to people searching the term “child rape” in Japanese….

MindGeek also spread content around, taking Pornhub videos and uploading them to its various other porn websites. Ensuring a hopeless whack-a-mole situation for victims, like Plaintiff, MindGeek also allowed users to download and then reupload videos. Most disturbing of all, Plaintiff alleges that MindGeek itself would reupload illegal videos that it had been forced to disable using made-up accounts that masked the true identity of the uploader.

The judge also took note that MindGeek allegedly hounded Serena and other critics online. I got more death threats after my Pornhub article than after any other article I can remember, and I’ve always wondered if some might have been instigated by the company. Discovery in this case will be interesting.

Judge Carney also seemed contemptuous of Visa’s arguments that it was an innocent party and should not be implicated:

Plaintiff’s case focuses on the monetization of child porn after it was made and posted to MindGeek’s sites, which, if what Plaintiff alleges is true, Visa knowingly took part in. Plaintiff is suing MindGeek for—again in the words of section 1591—“benefit[ting] financially” from the child porn featuring Plaintiff, knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that Plaintiff was a minor when such videos were produced, in violation of section 1591(a)(2). That is where Visa enters the picture in full view….

Why would MindGeek allow Plaintiff’s first video to be posted despite its title clearly indicating Plaintiff was well below 18 years old? Why would MindGeek stall before removing the video, which Plaintiff alleges had advertisements running alongside it? Why would MindGeek take the video and upload it to its other porn websites? Why, after being alerted by Plaintiff that the video was child porn, would it allow the video to be reuploaded, whereafter advertisements were again featured alongside the reuploaded videos? And why did Plaintiff have to fight for years to have her videos removed from MindGeek’s sites? Plaintiff claims that MindGeek did these things for money, and Visa knowingly offered up its payment network so that MindGeek could satisfy that goal.

There’s much more to the opinion, and I encourage you to read it. I suspect that this will lead to many more lawsuits, for there are countless boys and girls who had rape videos monetized by Pornhub or other websites. When I was reporting this subject, it was surprisingly easy to find 14-year-old kids who had had these videos posted and suffered enormous trauma as a result. Repeatedly, teenagers attempted suicide; one did kill herself.

Just one final comment. There’s sometimes a tendency to see the criticism of these sites as deriving from prudishness. Not so. The problem isn’t porn or nudity or sex; it’s rape. In the same way that one can support #MeToo rape prosecutions without being prudish, one can be sex positive and Pornhub negative. I’ll leave you with a paragraph about Pornhub from my initial story.

Its site is infested with rape videos. It monetizes child rapes, revenge pornography, spy cam videos of women showering, racist and misogynist content, and footage of women being asphyxiated in plastic bags. A search for “girls under18” (no space) or “14yo” leads in each case to more than 100,000 videos. Most aren’t of children being assaulted, but too many are.

After a 15-year-old girl went missing in Florida, her mother found her on Pornhub — in 58 sex videos. Sexual assaults on a 14-year-old California girl were posted on Pornhub and were reported to the authorities not by the company but by a classmate who saw the videos. In each case, offenders were arrested for the assaults, but Pornhub escaped responsibility for sharing the videos and profiting from them.

We should hold major international companies accountable when they try to profit from child rape. And that’s why this judge’s decision may be a landmark in ending that impunity.