There are more than 365,000 missing children in the United States each year. 30% of those missing, approximately 109,000 children, are being trafficked.
According to a report from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, in which data from 155 countries was gathered, the most common form of human trafficking (79%) is sexual exploitation. Surprisingly, in 30% of the countries that provided data, women made up the largest proportion of traffickers. Worldwide, almost 20% of all trafficking victims are children. The majority of the rest are women and girls.
It’s not just the usual suspects you would imagine being involved in the trafficking either. Some governments are part of the problem. U.S. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken has released a 2024 report that determined at least 13 countries exhibited a policy or pattern of trafficking. This included Afghanistan, Burma, the People’s Republic of China, Cuba, Eritrea, Iran, the Democratic Republic of Korea, Russia, South Sudan, Syria and Turkmenistan.
Author Laila Mickelwait discovered a criminal online porn empire that was infested with child sexual abuse and rape videos that were free and easily accessible by anyone with internet access. Her national bestseller, “Takedown: Inside The Fight to Shut Down Pornhub for Child Abuse, Rape, and Sex Trafficking,” exposes the behavior of “MindGeek” (now “Aylo”), a Canadian multinational pornographic conglomerate currently owned by Canadian private equity firm Ethical Capital Partners, that owns Pornhub.
I talked with Laila about her book and the shocking discoveries she made about the tenth most visited site on the internet, Pornhub. She details her battle against the billionaire executives and the credit card companies who helped them monetize the abuse of countless victims as young as three years old.
Daily Planet (DP): Your book, “Takedown,” exposes the abuse of minors, women, and trafficking that’s going on at one of the largest porn sites on the internet, Pornhub. Can you tell us how this fight began for you?
Laila Mickelwait (LM): I began to notice over 10 years ago, with the emergence of our digital world, that the problem was not just an offline issue but an online issue as well, where these crimes were being enacted, filmed, and uploaded online. I began to pay attention and investigated and researched this intersection between the pornography industry and sex trafficking, so my antennas were up at the end of 2019 when this story began. The story in “Takedown” really starts on [the night of] Feb.1, 2020, when I made an important discovery that set the trajectory of this whole book.
At the end of 2019, I started to read some news stories that arrested my attention about Pornhub and child sex trafficking that was happening on the site. In particular, I was especially disturbed by a news story about a 15-year-old girl from Florida who had been missing for an entire year, and she was finally found when a Pornhub user tipped off her mother that he recognized her daughter on the site. She was found in 58 videos being raped for profit on Pornhub. Around the same time, there was a study from a London Times investigation where dozens of illegal child videos were found, including some of children as young as 3 years old.
So, in the context of my history of fighting sex trafficking, I was thinking about these stories again and again. One night I had an idea to test the [Pornhub] upload system myself and see what it took to upload content to the site because the big question looming in my mind was, “How in the world did this happen? How did these crimes end up being globally distributed and monetized on Pornhub to 130 million site visitors per day and 47 billion site visitors per year?” That’s when I discovered what millions of people already knew and that all it took to upload a video was an email address.
At that point, I realized they weren’t verifying ages to make sure these weren’t children. These were user-made home videos because Pornhub has become a place where anyone with an iPhone can become a pornographer by filming a sex act anywhere in the world and uploading it online. They were not verifying IDs in the videos to make sure they weren’t children; they were not verifying consent to make sure these weren’t rape or trafficking victims. I quickly realized this was a site infested with real crimes and that Pornhub was not a porn site, but it was an actual crime scene. I felt compelled to sound the alarm, and that’s when all of this began in early 2020.
DP: How surprised were you to discover the lack of age verification and lack of verification that all people in the video were consenting?
LM: It was shocking because, as I describe in my book, Pornhub had done a very intentional job of spending millions of dollars on public relations across the world to present itself to the global public as a mainstream brand and as a brand that would only feature consenting adults; something they lied about over and over again. They even went so far as to have an arm of their company called “Pornhub Cares,” which is a philanthropic arm of Pornhub where they had highly publicized PR campaigns to do things like save the bees, save the oceans, and donate to breast cancer research to present this image to the world of it being a company that cared about health and safety when none of that was true.
Just below the surface, the site was crawling with monetized videos of child rape, sex trafficking, unconscious rape and all kinds of nonconsensual content that they knew was there and that they were distributing and monetizing anyway. They distributed this with a download button on every video so that five million users per hour had the opportunity to download and possess real crimes, including child rape, and then reload them not only to Pornhub but to other places on the internet for the rest of that victim’s life, forcing them to experience what is called the “immortalization of their trauma.”
DP: How did you discover that through Pornhub’s marketing arm, “Traffic Junkie,” the credit card companies through them were monetizing the abuse of countless victims?
LM: Many whistle-blowers and company insiders came to me over the last four years and gave me such important evidence and documentation, insight and information about the way the company was operating, and that included the way that they were monetizing free porn. Free porn isn’t free. It makes hundreds of millions of dollars for Pornhub’s parent company, which at the time, was called “Mind Geek.” They have since rebranded and now call themselves “Aylo.” What I learned was not only were there videos on this site being offered to the public for free, but also being monetized with premium subscriptions.
They also had pay-to-download content that was also being monetized by the credit card companies. The primary way they were making money off porn was by selling 4.6 billion ad impressions on that content every single day and that is how they were earning most of the company’s profits. Credit card companies were not only monetizing premium subscriptions but also monetizing by enabling advertisers to purchase ads for all of this content, including blatantly criminal content. I discovered that business model early on in all of this.
What happened was at the end of 2020, after The New York Times produced this groundbreaking expose, called “The Children of Pornhub, the credit card companies announced they were cutting ties with Pornhub, but we discovered a few weeks after all that happened, the credit card companies snuck back to the advertising arm of Pornhub, which was kind of the behind the scenes part of how they were monetizing content that was not clearly in public view and that was another whole multiyear battle with the credit card companies to get them to finally cut off Pornhub once and for all, including the advertising side of the business.
DP: Just to clarify, credit card companies restarted business relations with Pornhub after they had been made aware of the illegal activities involving trafficking, rape, and child porn videos on Pornhub?
LM: Yes, this was all after the credit card companies had already been sued by victims due to their relationship with Pornhub. The credit card companies [after the lawsuits] had continued to do business with and engage in monetizing Pornhub’s” videos via the advertising that’s not only around the videos, but it’s before the videos, and if you press pause, it’s in the middle of the videos as well as after. Again, 400 billion ad impressions are being sold on Pornhub every single day on unverified content, with much of that content being illegal.
DP: When you investigated and contacted the credit card companies about all of this, what were the initial responses you received from them?
LM: At first, they expressed their concerns over the situation and how much they care about this issue [of sex trafficking]; however, I quickly realized that getting them to not only speak about their concern but to take action and resolve the issue by stopping the monetization of sex crimes, including child rape and trafficking, was going to be harder than I could I have ever imagined. It took so many conversations, which are detailed in the book, with the executives of Visa and Mastercard over several years, and it wasn’t until enough public pressure mounted and enough eyes were on them that included not only public pressure but the pressure of litigation, where victims were suing the credit card companies, for monetizing their trauma, that they finally ended up cutting off Pornhub.
I do want to emphasize that this was a group effort by hundreds of organizations, hundreds of survivors, incredible journalists, lawyers, lawmakers and law enforcement. All of these people came together from different backgrounds to hold this true villain accountable. I think that’s one really beautiful part of this true story.
DP: In the book, you detail how you interviewed an employee of Pornhub who was one of the ones responsible for previewing the videos that are uploaded and making determinations on if they are legal and that all parties involved are consenting adults. Can you share the shocking discoveries you made in that interview with him?
LM: Some of the more experienced moderators [Pornhub employees tasked with verifying videos] would watch up to 2000 videos in an eight-hour shift. It wasn’t just one moderator; I’ve spoken to multiple moderators and employees and had dozens of hours of conversations. I’ve spoken to them not only online and over the telephone but in person, obtaining the documents that prove they were telling me the truth.
There was no verification process. It was a guessing game. A complete and utter guessing game. They were guessing who was 14 [in the videos] and who was 18. Who was engaged in consensual rough sex, and who was being raped. Which videos were uploaded with consent, and which were what we call revenge porn [uploaded without the knowledge or consent of a party involved]. These moderators said their job was not to keep illegal content off the site [Pornhub] but to allow as much content to go through as possible because the business model relies on an unlimited amount of content. Massive amounts of content drive huge amounts of views to the site. They didn’t want to limit it.
The moderators said they were reprimanded if they watched less than 700 hours of videos per eight-hour shift. There were 10 moderators per shift and only 30 moderators in total. Compare that to like 15,000 Facebook moderators. Again, they weren’t verifying ID, age, or consent. So many times they guessed wrong and in some cases didn’t see the videos because they were doing such high numbers [of videos], that they just clicked right through them.
Even more egregious than that, we learned Pornhub had a staff of 1,800 employees they were making hundreds of millions of dollars a year on the content, and they employed only one person who worked 5 days per week checking flagged videos [videos marked by viewers as possibly illegal]. These videos included illegal videos like child rape and trafficking.
Their policy was that a video would only be reviewed if it had been flagged more than 15 times. That means a victim could flag their rape video 15 times, and it wouldn’t even be reviewed. We learned they had over 706,000 videos put into a backlog that had not been reviewed. That’s the level of complicity of this company permitting and distributing this kind of illegal content.
DP: In the book, you explain how one of the moderators you interviewed said he was informed that if the girls in the video weren’t excessively crying, it was probably not rape. How shocking was that to you to learn that’s how they gauged potential rape in a video?
LM: That’s the way that [Pornhub] they operated. I do want to point out that even to this day, “Pornhub” is still awash with unverified content where the individuals in the videos aren’t verified for age or consent. So, even today, this problem persists. I hope the book opens people’s eyes and causes them to react to their shock and outrage with action.
DP: Some of these victims have filed lawsuits, and you have helped some get in touch with legal representation. Can you update us on where this currently stands?
LM: Since 2020, nearly 300 victims have sued “Pornhub” in 25 lawsuits, including multiple class action lawsuits representing tens of thousands, have been of child victims. The company has also been criminally charged by the U.S. government.
DP: The book describes how you were targeted for your fight against all of this. Can you tell us about that?
LM: I’m very open and vulnerable in the book, and I want the reader to be able to go on this journey with me and experience what I experienced. A lot of it was very difficult. There were attacks against me and others who were also speaking out, including victims, and I detail that in the book. It was mostly attempts to intimidate, discredit, silence, and scare. To get us to stop. At times, it was so difficult that I wondered if this was what I should do [continuing the fight]. At the end of the day, though, I feel a deep sense of responsibility, and I need to continue this fight until justice is fully served.
My biggest hope for this book is that it will reach people who may have had no clue that this was an issue. Those who had no idea that this has ever happened and that it will activate them to care about this and also to take action to help make it stop. To not only hold Pornhub accountable but to prevent this from happening again in the future.
Laila Mickelwait is the Co-Founder and CEO of Traffickinghub, the Founder of the movement supported by millions around the world, and the national bestselling author of “Takedown: Inside the Fight to Shut Down Pornhub for Child Abuse, Rape, and Sex Trafficking.” She has been researching and combating the injustice of sex trafficking since 2006 and is a leading expert in the field.
The Traffickinghub movement that Laila continues to lead is a decentralized global effort to hold Pornhub accountable for enabling and profiting from mass sexual crime. The petition to shut down Pornhub has been signed by over 2.3 million people from every country in the world and over 600 organizations have participated in the effort.
