At the end of 2019, Laila Mickelwait couldn’t shake the disturbing headlines about cases of child sexual abuse on Pornhub, the largest pornography site and the tenth most visited site in the world at the time. So one night in February of 2020, she decided to test the site herself. What Mickelwait discovered launched a new chapter in her fight to end online sex trafficking. She tells the story of taking on the fight against Pornhub in “Takedown: Inside the Fight to Shut Down Pornhub for Child Abuse, Rape, and Sex Trafficking,” released on July 23.
Before writing the book, Mickelwait spent over a decade working to combat online human trafficking and sexual exploitation. She worked for Exodus Cry, an organization dedicated to abolishing human trafficking, and in 2020, started her own non-profit the Justice Defense Fund. She went on to mobilize a movement and social media campaign Traffikinghub to shut down Pornhub, whose parent company MindGeek, now called Aylo, owned more than 100 “tube” sites, including Redtube, Youporn, XTube, and others. Nicholas Kristof called MindGeek “a porn titan” in his 2020 New York Times article “Children of Pornhub.”
Mickelwait says she is focused on “preventative” governmental and corporate policies that would require third-party age and consent verification for every individual in every uploaded video or image for any similar site. Today, the petition she started has 2.3 million signatures from all over the world.
Mickelwait’s efforts have contributed to significant steps in limiting Pornhub’s activities. In 2020, the site took down 10.6 million of unverified videos and 30 million images. Credit companies cut ties with Pornhub. The company is facing lawsuits on behalf of nearly 300 victims in 26 lawsuits across the U.S., Canada and the UK, as well as multiple class-action lawsuits on behalf of tens of thousands of child victims. “We have yet to see a proper criminal prosecution against the company and its owners,” Mickelwait told me in a recent interview.
In her book, Mickelwait takes the reader along as she unveils the behind-the-scenes of the platform profiting from illegal sexual content, investigates the executives behind Pornhub’s parent company, faces threats, and works with lawyers, whistleblowers, journalists and victims.
Mickelwait spoke to Deseret News about her book. The interview was edited for clarity and length.
Deseret News: What ignited your fight against online sex trafficking and eventually against Pornhub?
Laila Mickelwait: Long before this battle against Pornhub took shape, I had been on this path of wanting to help bring an end to this injustice of sex trafficking, child sexual abuse and criminal sexual exploitation. About 18 years ago, when I first became awakened to this issue, it wasn’t very common knowledge that this was happening — that there was such a thing as modern-day slavery and human trafficking.
My dad influenced me from a very young age. Growing up in Amman, Jordan in the midst of civil war, he was very passionate and concerned about various human rights and justice issues. My sisters and I bonded with him over discussing the issues of human rights and war. About 10 years ago, I began to zoom in on this intersection between sex trafficking and pornography industry, because I began to notice that these crimes weren’t just happening offline, but they were being filmed, uploaded online, distributed and monetized.
Later, at the end of 2019, I read stories about a series of cases of child sexual abuse on Pornhub, the world’s most popular porn site. They were shocking stories to hear and they produced haunting questions that I couldn’t shake at the time. One in particular was the story about a 15-year-old girl in Florida, who went missing for a year and was finally found when her mother was tipped off by a Pornhub user, who recognized her daughter on the site. Another investigation done by the London Sunday Times found illegal videos of children on Pornhub as young as three years old.
I was up one night on February 1, 2020. I was discouraged with my work after fighting this injustice for years and not seeing any real tangible progress. I was also with a very sad baby, who had a birth complication and who was up at all hours of the night. I was rocking him and thinking about that 15-year-old girl and the light bulb went off unexpectedly.
I decided to test the upload system on Pornhub for myself. It was in the early hours before dawn, I discovered what millions of people already knew (because they had been uploading these videos to the sites. There were 6.8 million uploads to that site that year.)
I discovered that all it took was an email address to upload to the world’s largest and most popular porn site. Anonymously, anybody in the world could upload without any kind of verification: are they a victim, are they a child, did they agree to this? I discovered that the site had become completely infested with videos of real sexual crime.
My dad always said this phrase: “Assumption is the mother of all screw ups.” And this thought came to mind that night when I realized we’re all assuming that this content is being vetted for age and consent. I tested it out and I wasn’t.
DN: In your book you describe the powerful machine behind MindGeek, which was the name of Pornhub’s parent company at the time. What did you learn about the inner workings of this company and how it was able to conceal its actions?
LM: This was crime hiding in plain sight – this is not the dark web, it’s the mainstream web. MindGeek and Pornhub spent a lot of effort and money not on keeping illegal content off their site, but on promoting an image to the world that they are a legitimate, mainstream and safe brand. One of the ways of doing that was that they had an arm Pornhub Cares, which was this philanthropic arm that was really intended for getting headlines for things like saving the bees, saving the oceans, and donating to breast cancer. I talk about it as a form of consumer fraud: they are projecting this facade of caring about safety and being a mainstream that’s operating within the bounds of the law, but just underneath the surface, they are a site that is crawling with real sexual crime, not only just distributing it, but heavily monetizing it, commercializing it, profiting from it.
Another level of this facade was that they wouldn’t share who was behind the company. The majority shareholder of Pornhub was unknown to the public—he had intentionally hidden himself from the public for many years. The mask had to be ripped off not only from the company and the way it operated but its owners as well.
DN: It’s an emotionally intense project especially while caring for two little kids. How did you deal with the weight of both the activism and witnessing the heartbreaking stories of victims, and writing a book about it?
LM: The way that I felt about it the way I want the reader to feel. I wrote the book in the present tense. As I’m discovering these things, and as this information is coming and as I’m interacting with victims, and as whistleblowers are coming forward to reveal information — you’re learning about it with me in real time. I wanted the reader to be able to feel the way I felt when I learned, for instance, about no consent for data being harvested and sold.
I wanted to connect with the reader on a human level – I’m a regular person, I’m a mom, I’m just like any other woman that might be reading this book. I spent many, many late hours, tears dripping onto the computer keyboard as I was remembering and writing whatever was happening in real time.
DN: This was a grassroots movement that you started from your home. Tell me about how it evolved and what role did then-Twitter, now X, played in all of it?
LM: It evolved very organically, very unexpectedly, in this very grassroots kind of way. It started on Twitter, just doing the only thing that I could do at the time with a baby that needed me at every single hour of the day and working remotely. I had my phone in one hand and held my baby in the other arm while I was posting on Twitter what I was discovering.
I realized very early on that this had to be much bigger than me. MindGeek had a monopoly on the global porn industry, where they own most of the world’s porn sites and brands. They had hundreds of millions of dollars at their disposal.
Someone came to me with the idea to start the petition, which became #Traffikinghub on Twitter. The petition is to shut down Pornhub and hold its executives accountable for aiding trafficking. This call to action resonated with so many people. And it wasn’t just anti-porn activists, but also people in the porn industry, as well as people who were Christian, Muslim and Jewish and atheists -- a huge coalition of people all around the world who came together to agree in unity that nobody should be raped or trafficked on the world’s largest porn site for profit.
The movement had to be decentralized, something that everybody could feel and take ownership of, and it needed people with all different skills. One of the most important jobs of an activist is to realize that you can’t do it alone and that you need to activate other people with other skills to join the fight. And so we were seeing everyone coming together: heavy-hitting lawyers, businessmen, journalists, lawmakers, organizations and, of course, most importantly, survivors.
Just giving Pornhub a slap on the wrist for immortalizing the trauma of countless victims, who have to live with the fact that the worst moments of their life will live on for profit and pleasure on the internet forever— it’s not going to deter future abusers from acting the same way, it’s not what justice looks like, because all of this is a cost benefit analysis for these corporations and their executives. Pornhub needs to be shut down. The risk has to be too high for them.
Victims need justice, because without justice, they can’t have healing and they can’t have closure for what has happened.
DN: You talk about the challenges of getting the credit card companies to cut their ties with Pornhub and the impact that Nick Kristof’s story in the New York Times had on moving a needle in this effort. What changed after his piece?
LM: It took a year of bringing this illegal content to the attention of the credit card companies over and over again and them being quote-on-quote very concerned, but not taking any action. I give Nicholas Kristof all the credit in the world for his groundbreaking piece. Right before that article, after a year of battling to have this exposed, after hundreds of articles had been written, after 2 million people had signed the petition, Pornhub had more web traffic than ever before —during COVID, they gave a free premium to everyone. They had more videos on the site than they had ever had before.
It was only after Kristof’s article that the card companies were under so much pressure that they announced they were cutting ties. But then they only cut off like Pornhub premium and the paid-to-download content, but they went back to the advertising arm of Pornhub a few weeks later, which is how Pornhub was making most of its money. So we had a round two and had to battle again to try to get them to finally cut off ties with Pornhub.
This story was told with my voice and through my eyes. But the real heroes in the story are the victims. We had accomplished together what Financial Times called “probably the biggest takedown of content in internet history,” when Pornhub deleted 10.6 million videos and more than 30 million images. Visa, MasterCard, Discover and Paypal did cut ties with them for good, but the fight continues. The battle rages on for justice. We’re not done yet.
DN: What’s your vision and hope for the future of this fight and eventually your end goal?
LM: My goal for this book is to get it out in the world, to activate and inspire many, many more people to join the fight, to make the internet a safer place for generations to come. And I have that very particular goal of how to get there and it’s to hold abusers like Pornhub accountable to the full extent of the law, to bring civil justice to victims and to implement that preventive policy to make sure that we don’t have copycat websites and that we can actually prevent this across the Internet. I’m especially focused on the age and consent verification piece of it.
Sometimes I think everybody has heard about this. But then I encounter people every day who say: “I had no idea that this was happening at all. I had no clue there was illegal content on Pornhub.” It’s not just about the bad actors, it’s not just about Pornhub. It’s about holding feet to the fire of enablers who are allowing these sites to destroy the lives of countless victims. This includes financial institutions and sites like Google for directing traffic to crime scenes.
DN: What advice would you give to the victims of online sex trafficking who may not know where to turn for help?
LM: We do have a team at the Justice Defense Fund who’s there to help. If there is a victim who reads this article and wants to reach out, you can fill out the “find help” form and you can talk to somebody about this who is a trauma-informed professional to discuss what the options are.
I think it’s important to understand what sex trafficking is. It could be what we have seen in the movies about somebody who is abducted by force. The international and national definition of trafficking is anyone under the age of 18, or anybody who is an adult, who is induced into a commercial sex act by force, fraud or coercion and the commercialization of that sex act is what makes it trafficking.
A lot of the victims that end up on this site, and go through this trauma, could be anybody’s child.