Takedown: Inside the Fight to Shut Down Pornhub for Child Abuse, Rape, and Sex Trafficking by Laila Mickelwait

Author:Laila Mickelwait [Mickelwait, Laila]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2024-07-23T00:00:00+00:00

30

DEMONIZING THE CRAZY AMERICAN WOMAN

From the start of this battle with Pornhub, I have mostly held back from connecting victims to journalists, even though I am being asked all the time. The reason is that I don’t trust those journalists with something so sensitive and potentially harmful to victims if it isn’t done right. But I trust Nick Kristof because he has consistently told victims’ stories with care and compassion, and I have been in touch with him quite a bit lately. I connect him with brave survivors who tell me they want to speak out and am encouraged by the positive feedback about him: “He didn’t push me for details I wasn’t ready to share.”

“He was easy to talk to.”

“He was respectful.”

Some even said, “He is amazing.”

It’s not only victims I’m putting Nick in touch with but also MindGeek employees who have reached out to me including Alex, the moderator from Cyprus, and Mateo from Montreal. Nick tells me he hasn’t had any luck getting Fabian to talk to him. I try to help from my end, but it appears Fabian doesn’t like speaking to journalists.

One evening Nick tells me that he has some questions for me, and we get on a call. He says he has had a few conversations with MindGeek’s spokesperson over the course of his investigation, and I remind him the spokesman is likely Pornhub’s VP Corey Urman using a fake name. Nick goes on to say that on the last call the spokesman mentioned Lilly to him.

“They called her ‘Lovely Lilly,’ ” Nick says, revealing they also told him not to believe anything Lilly told him.

“She is lying,” the spokesman from MindGeek said as he told Nick that she is uploading her own child abuse videos to the site.

The spokesman also said they found Lilly’s specific location using her IP address and he claimed her abuse videos were being uploaded from an IP address in the same place. The idea that MindGeek is admitting to knowing where to find Lilly is highly disturbing. They obviously don’t realize that they admitted once again that child abuse videos were on their site.

They told Nick the same thing about Sofia—that she was uploading her own videos to Pornhub. This was the same attack that MindGeek’s @EyeDeco used when going after Sofia on Twitter, until Sofia shared a screenshot of proof from her abuser that shut down the attack.

This line of attack has become MindGeek’s modus operandi. I was told by Alex that the middle managers at MindGeek’s Cyprus moderating office told the employees during meetings that they must never speak to me because I was the one uploading child abuse videos to Pornhub. Trying to make themselves out to be the heroes, they told the moderators that MindGeek upper management were the ones finding and taking down the child abuse videos I kept putting on the site and claiming they were uploaded by others.

“Did any of them actually believe that nonsense?” I asked, completely taken aback and disgusted.

“Well, some of them,” Alex said.

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