1143: Laila Mickelwait | Exposing Pornhub's Dark Trafficking Empire

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People are uncomfortable. They're afraid to talk about it. It's one of those things that it's affecting everybody in some way. We're all in contact with this free user generated porn industry, but nobody wants to talk about it. welcome to the show i'm jordan harbinger On the Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice.

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Layla Micklewaite helped expose, if you'll pardon the pun, the flagrant out-of-control sex trafficking on Pornhub. I didn't really ever think about this before, but... A lot of the people there are not up there consensually and they're not getting paid, unfortunately, a lot of the time. I mean, it's just it's it's.

It's worse than not getting paid. I don't even know how to summarize this. You'll get it here on the show. She also helped hold some of the owners and controlling managers of the site and the company to account. This story is wild. It is very satisfying at points. We really click.

I'm a big fan of her and her cause, and I think you'll really gain some insight from this episode, insight that might make some of us, myself included, quite uncomfortable. This is an important episode with a really great guest. Here we go with Layla Micklewaite.

By the way, I read the book. I enjoyed it. That's a weird thing to say, but I did enjoy it. It was well-written and good. The payoffs are satisfying. Thank you. Yeah. Let's start from the beginning. So you're on a mission to take down Pornhub. That's a heavy lift. What sparked this? Yeah, I mean, it wasn't something that 10 years ago I thought...

In 2025, this is what I'm going to be doing. But at the same time, I had been preparing for it my whole life. So in the context of over 15 years in the fight against sex trafficking. I was paying attention to the headlines and I was noticing that there was a trend that wasn't just happening offline. It was being filmed. It was being monetized online. And so there was this intersection between what I call the big porn industry, and we can talk about that, and child sexual abuse and trafficking.

And at the end of 2019, I started to notice some really concerning headlines. One story that I kind of credit to the launch of the Trafficking Hub movement was a story. About a 15-year-old girl from Broward County, Florida, and she had been missing for an entire year, and she was finally found when her distraught mother was tipped off by a Pornhub user that he recognized her daughter on the site. Oh, gosh. And she was found in 58 videos being raped.

And police actually were able to locate her and they recognized the guy's face from the assaults in the video and she was rescued from his apartment. She had been impregnated. It was like this horror story. So she got kidnapped and then put in videos. No, she had been missing. So I think she might have ran away. Nobody could find her for a year. And this is how she was found that her.

Mom was notified that her daughter was on Pornhub, and she was actually in videos that were being paid to download. So it was a profit-sharing relationship with Pornhub, and they were splitting the profit from the sale of her rape videos. So that was really concerning. I had read that story a few days after my second child was born. When you're a parent, it all hits so different, right? I was telling friends of mine about the book.

Some of the guys were like, oh yeah, that's gross. And I was like, no, man. But then I was like, I have a daughter and a son, so it's... There's just that layer of what if it were my kid? But guys, especially who don't have kids are like, yeah, that's really gross. And it's just like a horrible thing they've heard that week. Yeah, I cared about this for so many years. But then. When I have my own children, emotionally, it hits you in a different way to a deeper place.

Didn't exist when I was a dude thinking about the gym and my next pizza or whatever. You just can't. It's just this whole other level of emotional connection, empathy, and all of you can imagine yourself in the position of that mother. All of that. Yeah, that's true. Based on your research, what percentage of videos on mainstream platforms or on platforms like this might feature exploited? I would say, so on Pornhub, we have a percentage of them that we know.

20% of the content was from people who considered themselves in the kind of professional model category, although we know that there was criminals infested in there as well. And 80% of that site was user generated. not verifying agent consent. So I would say on these sites, the possibility that this could be illegal if there's a site that's not verifying agent consent is probably over 80%. Not to say that that is the percentage, the possibility.

Now, we actually have some concrete numbers to show that at one point, Pornhub was admitting, and the height of all of this happening, they said 1%. They did like an audit of themselves, and they said, we think that 1% of our content is... child sexual abuse material, and that would be confirmed, known, hashed. previously uploaded child sexual abuse material, that means that it was

One in a hundred videos, child sexual abuse. But that was when they investigated themselves. Themselves. Imagine how much worse it actually was. Right. Jeez. Think about that. People are browsing a lot of videos per session on those sites. Yeah. Jeez, that's really something. We know like the stats of like child sexual abuse material online, but specific to the adult site. We don't really have those numbers. NCMEC has had over 100 million reports of

Child sexual abuse in one year. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. And you think, oh, some of them are false. There's even more unreported, I would imagine, than there are false reports. That's how it always goes. So the London Sunday Times, which is a very credible investigative newspaper in London, they had done an investigation at that time and they had found dozens of illegal videos on Pornhub within minutes, even children as young as three.

It was shocking to read that. And they were calling out particular advertisers in this investigation. London Sunday Times, they called them out for that immediately. They were shamed. They apologized. They pulled the ad. But it was a big deal, at least in the anti-trafficking space. We were paying attention to what was happening. And there was a woman named Nicole Ademando from New York. She had been... abused by her partner. She had filmed the abuse.

And he was uploading the videos to Pornhub and she killed him. Oh, my God. She ended up getting sentenced to life in prison at the time. She had a legal team and they were able to reduce her sentence to seven years. I can relate a little. I mean, I get it. It was a very dramatic. case and the pictures of her. She had two young children.

Her being taken off to prison. It was just a horrific story. And then there was about 100 victims in California and San Diego that were part of this trafficking operation called Girls Do Porn. It was run by a guy named Michael Pratt. who ended up on the FBI's 10 most wanted list. I saw that. Where is that guy now, I wonder? So he was found two Christmas Eves ago in Spain. He had become a fugitive. Yeah. Because he was wanted. What a terrible life.

Nice place. Yeah. He was finally found and all his co-conspirators are in prison already. And now he's in the process of finally being held accountable. But he was running a partner channel on Pornhub that was one of their most popular partner channels on the site. Not while he was a fugitive though? No. Okay. So the victim sued him, the FBI, the criminal. accountability for girls do porn. But the way that they had distributed their content and made it very popular was through Pornhub.

So they had one of the most popular partner channels. I think it was over 600 million views and 800,000 subscribers. Five bucks among whatever. Well, so you subscribe to the channel and then they give you clips and they advertise and then they drive you to. pay for more content. Oh, I see. But even still multi-million dollar business. Yes. And they were splitting again. This is a profit sharing relationship with Pornhub and they were splitting the profit.

And Pornhub was aware because victims were reaching out and begging them to take these videos down because it was destroying their life. So they were tricked into doing the porn. Oh, they were trafficked. And so there's no question. And that's part of the definition, of course, of trafficking is forced. fraud, coercion, if you're under the age of 18 and you're using a commercial sex act. So if you're making money on that sex act that was induced by force or fraud or coercion, or if anybody's

under the age of 18. You don't even need to prove any of that. It's just automatically trafficking. So anyway, they were held accountable. But this was in the news at the time as well. And so all of this began to raise the question.

How in the world was this happening on Pornhub? Because at the time, Pornhub was a cultural icon. It was all over the place. You got the Christmas sweaters and stuff. And you're like, these are whimsical and fun. Exactly. And now I'm like, I'm not getting one of those. Walking New York Fashion Week. People are wearing their apparel.

jokes on Saturday Night Live, like faux commercials on Saturday Night Live. All of that. Mainstream brand. Not to mention that at the time, so by the end of 2020, they had capitalized on coronavirus. And they had actually become the fifth most visited website across the entire internet. All those people working at home were just like, let me take a quick break.

That I couldn't do. They made traffic soar. They had also done some crazy PR stunts. Like they offered Pornhub Premium for free to the entire world. So that instead of paying $9.99 for ad-free Pornhub. So, you know, you could watch. porn or you could watch real rape or child abuse ad-free on Pornhub. They were just giving it for free. So their traffic was better than ever. They were making more money than ever. They had more visits than Netflix and Amazon. They had 170 million visits a day.

62 billion visits a year that year. And by the end of 2020, they had 56 million pieces of content on the site. Every year they were having enough content uploaded. It would take 169 years to watch if you put those videos back to back. Oh, my God. The scale is crazy. In your opinion, how much responsibility do executives at companies like Pornhub bear for the child abuse happening on their platforms? Because I assume their argument is we didn't know about this. Oh, in the case of Pornhub.

We know they knew. We know. We have evidence. We have conversations. We have email exchanges. We have documents. We have policy. We have so much evidence. that this was something they knew about. They hid from authorities because of profit, because they wanted to maximize profit. They allowed to continue for years, since 2007. And so 100% responsibility because they have the ability to stop it. They had the ability in 2007.

to age verify, to make sure that somebody had to show an ID, to show their face, to consent verify before they could upload, and they chose not to. What are the common signs that video on a site like Pornhub might involve exploitation or trafficking? Is it just the tags? There are some where it's obvious, right, that this is nonconsensual, this could be prepubescent, and you could see that, right? Or there's violence or tags, titles indicating young or pain, things like that.

Sometimes these are videos that were consensually recorded and then non-consensually uploaded. So then in that case, you have no idea. whether they consented to having that video on Pornhub and victims of this kind of, they call it image-based sexual abuse. That's all the way from child abuse. to what we used to call revenge porn, and they face serious amounts of trauma as well. The suicide ideation rate for these victims is about 50%.

And so the harm is from the revenge porn side all the way to the child sexual. It's all serious. And when you're on a site that doesn't verify agent consent. Not only of the uploader, but every single video and every single person, every single video, you have to be suspect of everything that you're watching. Well, it's interesting because I first got this book and I was like, OK, she's going to be some like super religious person who's against porn.

And then we had our phone call and I was like, okay, that wasn't what I expected at all. like a normal person who has a vendetta rightfully so against this. horrific website. And then I read the book and I was like, wow, this is an organized crime operation. This is not a sort of sex workers put their stuff up here. You watch a dumb ad and you're done with your business. It's organized crime, period. An international crime ring.

that just happens to be something that everybody knows about and a lot of people use. Once you read the book, it's like there's no difference between this and... the Albanian mafia shipping cocaine or something across, at least there's fewer victims with people who are shipping drugs across the board. which is crazy to think about. And hiding in plain sight. Hiding in plain sight. That's the phrase I was looking for. Yes. Just under everybody's noses, millions of people a day.

A phrase my dad always used to say, he was just a very wise man, and he always used to say, assumption is the mother of all screw-ups. And thinking about that, the idea that we're all assuming. That this is legal, vetted, consensual material because that was their tagline. That was what they presented to the world. And they spent millions of dollars.

on their PR campaigns to save the oceans. And they had this whole arm of Pornhub called Pornhub Cares. So weird. Yeah. Save the bees and all this stuff. And so I said, well, let me just test the upload system. I put the baby down after he went back to sleep, got the camera out, took the video of the keyboard and the reg.

uploaded and found out what millions of the point of hidden in plain sight, millions of people already knew because they were uploading to Pornhub every day that there was no requirement for ID. or a consent form, anybody anonymously with a VPN in under 10 minutes using an email address, just a random email address, could upload a sex video to Pornhub. And there you go. That's how the site became infested with videos of real sexual crime.

I'm probably not alone. It makes you feel guilty for ever watching porn in your whole life because you're like, oh my gosh, have I contributed to the bottom line of this company? The answer is almost certainly yes, in some small way. Or have I consumed abuse material and just not known? Because the element of fraud and the crime of sex trafficking, that's...

That's important and interesting to me on a nerd level, just as an attorney, because what that means is essentially you could say to somebody, hey, I'm gonna pay you to appear in a video, and then they leave, and I just say, I'm not paying you, or I trick you in some way, saying, hey, I've got a job for you, you're gonna have to strip, and then it turns into a sex video, and that is illegal, that is sex traffic.

It's a little bit of a shade there. It's not like you don't have to grab somebody off the street and then force them. It's not taken with Liam Neeson. It's not some crazy thing like that. You can have somebody who thinks they're getting a job at a restaurant in another state or another country and dot, dot, dot. They're sex trafficked because.

they don't have any money, and they don't have a way to leave, and you're telling them you'll let them go if they do this, and you're telling them it's not gonna be uploaded anywhere, but then it is. That is trafficking. So you could even have somebody who you say you're going to have sex on camera for money. and they say, okay, fine, but you don't tell them it's going to be uploaded, that's still sex traffic.

That's the important point here, I think. They didn't even necessarily need to know that there was going to be money or not. They could have deceived, defrauded, coerced. And we're talking about adults because when they're under 18, it just doesn't matter what happened if they have a video on the site. Now, the monetization piece, I think, is really important when we're talking about the definition of trafficking because a lot of people don't realize.

that what constitutes trafficking is that commercialization. When something of value is exchanged, for the Coerced Sex Act or the underage sex. Now, with regard to the websites, we call it tech-facilitated trafficking because this might be free porn. 80% of the content on Pornhub was free, but it was heavily monetized. So the ones that were benefiting from it are the executives of Pornhub who are selling 4.6 billion ad impressions.

on Pornhub every single day. Wait, per day? I thought you were going to say per year or something. Oh my God. That's a lot of ads. Exactly. That was how they were making most of their money on free porn. So free porn is not free. Yes. It's heavily monetized. It has a high human cost, clearly. But 20% of that would be paid to download content where you could enter into this.

Profits sharing relationship with Pornhub where you could put the content behind a paywall. You have to pay to download that content. And in one horrific case, there was a 12-year-old boy from Alabama, and he was drugged, and he was overpowered, and he was raped. by a man named Rocky Shea Franklin, who had one of those profit-sharing pay-to-download relationships with Pornhub, and he filmed the assaults and he uploaded 23 of those videos to Pornhub.

with titles indicating that they were abused. And this is important when we talk about complicity because Pornhub, in its defense, made a huge mistake. We have content moderation. They had 10 people working per eight-hour shift, but they do say, we had... Somebody viewing, manually proving every single video before it went live on the site. That's not true. But if it was true.

That means that they were approving videos with a 12-year-old drug boy with titles such as Uncle Secret, Young Ass's Best. Things that would clearly say this is a child. And then once it was discovered, he was a verified uploader in this pay-to-download relationship. And then police found out they reached out multiple times to Pornhub demanding the videos come down. They were ignored multiple times. It stayed up for seven months.

getting hundreds of thousands of views. Which were all monetized, I assume. All monetized. So he was arrested and now he's sentenced to 40 years in prison and the boy is suing Pornhub. Good for him. Good for him. Is he 20 now? It's been so, I mean, they've never. He recently turned 18. Oh, but this poor kid. Well, originally he stood with his mom and then he became old enough to.

I was exaggerating to try and keep it light, but it really took six years and counting. This stuff was up for months and months when he was a child. This is terrible. When they say we viewed and approved, that means that complicity. was even deeper if they're trying to say that. Why would they say that? We know it wasn't true because moderators through the course of this came forward to me.

And to investigators and to the attorneys and all of that and produce documents and schedules showing that they had 10 or under moderators per shift working not only on Pornhub, because Pornhub was owned by a parent company. MindGeek. MindGeek, who had. Earned virtually a monopoly on the mainstream, most popular global porn sites and industry. They just buy everything? So with a $362 million loan from Colbeck Capital.

The previous owner of Pornhub rolled up the industry buying most of the most popular porn sites and brands. and pay sites and tube sites. Pornhub was the flagship site. So it had Pornhub in its sister site. So it'd be YouPorn, TubeAge, GayTube. extreme to on and on. And these moderators were not just moderating the millions of videos on Pornhub. They were in charge of all.

The porn tube site. So there's 10 people who have eight hours to go through 400,000 uploads a week or whatever it is. Exactly. Something like that. They were reprimanded if they were watching less than 700 per eight-hour shift. Videos? Videos. Just skipping through them. They were incentivized to be just, they put it this way. Our job was to allow as much content to go through as possible because the free user-generated business model of porn relies on massive amounts of content.

to be picked up in the Google search results, to drive massive amounts of traffic to the site to sell those 4.6 billion ad impressions. They were incentivized to just get as much through. Some of them were watching the more experienced ones, were watching even up to 2,000 videos per eight-hour shift, just clicking through. This is like psychological trauma. It was. It really was. And one of the moderators, and he gave me permission to share this.

It was especially hard for him because he was sexually abused as a child himself. And so it was especially traumatizing for him. And I think that was one of the reasons why, you know, when he heard the stories about was having a porn hub, wanted to come forward. and reveal what he knew. Oh my gosh. So the content moderation thing is just a joke.

It's one of those, like, we have to technically have this department because just say we have it. Yeah. Yeah. It was ridiculous because when I discovered all this, I started the hashtag trafficking hub. Just to reiterate what we just said about trafficking, the reason why I did that was because... Any underage victim and anyone forced fraud or coercion on the site is a victim of trafficking per our statutes because these are heavily monetized videos.

So they're using the trafficking statutes now to sue. They can be held criminally responsible for all of that. Some people might say, well, how is that trafficking? It's because it was monetized. Yeah. Look, I'm a guy who went to college with internet. So like I've seen my fair share of porn, especially in the early days, you see videos with drunk women who can barely move. And that's the point of the video.

And it's really gross, and that is, I would imagine also, no one can consent when they don't know where they are and they can't keep their eyes. This is everywhere. You don't have to look very hard, I would imagine, on a site like Pornhub to find something bad. My question is, Google's indexing all this. So if you're indexing something and it's 12-year-old boy gets raped,

Your search engine is indexing this, which means it found this, and you're just going to go, yeah, okay, well, we're just going to surface that as the first result because it matches the best. How is there not a flag in Google that goes, we found a lot of these rape videos that are on a website? Should we block that entire website or call the FBI or something? No, just put it on the list like the other search results. That's an unreasonable course of action. I agree with you a thousand percent.

And one of the senior employees said Google is where Pornhub lives or dies. Of course. If they didn't index all these titles, they wouldn't need to create all these different videos. Exactly. And Google has the power to suppress. So they are just not. innocent bystanders and all this because Nick Kristof when he did his article Yeah, he's the two-time Pulitzer Prize winning journalist from the New York Times that took this.

He heard about this. Just to give people a recap of what happened. So the Trafficking Hub campaign went viral. I started a petition. I wrote an op-ed about this, an essay. Got a lot of traction. The petition went viral. 2.3 million signatures today from every country in the world. Lots of media articles were written about this. And then Nick Kristof did this huge investigation. One of the things that he pointed out was Google's power over all of this.

And I look at this and I see there are enablers. There is the bad actors and then there are enablers who allow them to do this, who help them, who in fact benefit from. their business and doing so knowingly. So that would include the credit card companies, the financial institutions and Google. And so I think Google, they don't let you surface results for how do you kill yourself? Oh, they don't.

took that ability away from people to search that and find a result that would teach them that. This is what he wrote in his article. I haven't actually tried it for myself. Yeah, I've never thought to Google that. But he said, likewise, they could suppress. user-generated porn sites known to be infested in trafficking and not allow that traffic to go. And I have dozens of examples of Google search results.

That are confirmed. If that link was clicked on Google, it would go to a confirmed case of child abuse on Pornhub. And I've shown those to Google. That's a very interesting case, again, from a legal perspective, because. Google is also monetizing things via ads and sponsored links, and it's okay. How much do the search results that you're indexing result in monetization for your company?

Arguably, there's a nexus there. So you're also, in a way, of course they got that section 230 where they're like, hey, we're not responsible for the things people put on the internet. Okay, but you're creating another product by creating the index and the search results. That is exactly right. And right now, Pornhub and MindGeek, they're losing their motions to dismiss based on Section 230 because they help.

They created thumbnails. Yeah, the image search. It's all there. Google creates that on their own servers. The lawyers are making the argument that I would also make. There's a nexus there because of that. Yeah, and then knowingly benefiting. So in the U.S., not only is it illegal to engage directly in trafficking.

But knowingly benefiting from a trafficking venture where you knew or you should have known that this was happening, you can be held liable for that. So I think there should be a lawsuit against Google. Yeah, I would agree. And it's amazing how much power they have to. stop something like this. They just aren't doing it because there's not enough noise. Well, you're working on that. Let's work on that next.

The thing that I didn't understand necessarily was if the uploaders are making money from uploading the videos, you have to know who they are because you have to know who to pay. How are they getting paid? The uploaders? Yeah. So that was that 20%. So the 20% of content on Pornhub where it was the pay to download content, they would identify themselves. They have to. So Rocky Shea Franklin was one of those uploaders.

Now, the problem was they were identifying the uploader. They weren't identifying. the individuals in the videos. So we have numerous cases of victims who are currently suing Pornhub who were part of those pay to download. They called it the Model Hub program. where they were quote-unquote Pornhub models that had these verified accounts where they would show an ID, they would show where to get paid, but they wouldn't be verifying the individuals in the videos.

80% of the content on Pornhub or more. was just the free content. It was anonymous. I see. That maybe points to another website where somebody can go. I'm trying to figure out why somebody would upload free. Okay, they upload free stuff the same reason why they upload it to Facebook. Clout? clicks, its views, shares, comments. But you're going to prison for 40 years. They're not because they're not going to prison because they could use a VPN to upload and use an anonymous email address.

I see. So nobody could ever know. So the risk was nil, basically. There was no risk whatsoever. Imagine abusing somebody like you're not even also getting paid for. It's like the height of sociopathy, right? It's like. You're not even just a heartless bastard who will do anything for money. You're a heartless bastard who is just wasting your time on this.

just to get comments and you're ruining someone's life. I can't wrap my mind around it as a normal person who doesn't have massive psychological damage. I don't get it. The scary thing is that because of the scale of these sites and because they're not the dark web, right, these are the mainstream. sites. And these are people that we're interacting with every day because of the scale. It has to be. Pornhub had intentionally put a download button on every single video.

Meaning, and this is important when you think about liability, because if there's a child sexual abuse. Video, that is illegal to distribute and possess. But they were allowing people from their servers to actually possess those videos on their devices all over the world and re-upload them again and again. A rape that might be uploaded. So yes, that initial upload happened from that perpetrator, but then...

Millions of people a day would have the opportunity to then download it, and then they are the re-uploader. So they then redistribute it again and again. I wonder why they allowed downloading and re-uploading. They must have wanted people to re-upload it with different titles. I asked that question exactly right. They want it because to them, it didn't really matter.

what was in the video as long as it was inventory you have a thousand of the same video on porn hub with a different title and they don't care just as as long as it has different tags as long as it has a different title

And so it was incentivizing people. They wanted people to do compilations. They wanted people to download and re-upload. Go and edit stuff or whatever. Exactly. That is exactly why they had a download button. But at the same time, understanding... a site that was infested with videos of real sexual crime.

Somewhere, a bunch of guys made a decision that said, hey, if we do this, we're potentially liable for distributing child and illegal pornography, child sexual abuse material, rape videos, et cetera.

But if we do allow it, we get more inventory. And they were like, we're never going to get caught for the illegal thing. So just do the other thing that makes us. I think that they had an arrogance. Yeah. Or there's just no lawyers anywhere near this place, which I don't believe if you're making that. No, they had a I mean, they have a chief legal officer. Who was there from 10 years ago who's still there today? Wow, that's a dirty attorney right there. And I mean that in the figurative sense.

I'm not accusing this person of any crimes. I am accusing of being a disgusting scumbag. There was an arrogance to all that was going on. I think that they thought they were just too popular, maybe too big. That's a question that I sometimes wonder. What were you thinking? You would never get caught? I want to talk to the lawyer and go, what was your plan?

This was the plan. It was how can we make as much money as we can as fast as we can? This was the business model that they set up to the point where in the discovery process with the litigation now, we've even discovered more than what's in my book. So we recently found out things like the executives had emails and documents that they were sharing with each other that would be recommended. We need to suppress on our Red Words list words like childhood, minor.

Young. And they wouldn't. And that they were tracking to the dollar. how much money they were making every month. on categories and titles. That contained child sexual abuse material like the teen categories because those were some of the most popular categories on the site. Right. So if we block this tag, we can do it, but it's going to lose us $10 million a month. They knew. And they were like, let's not do that.

They knew to the dollar. They were tracking how much money they were getting on these various categories. Now, obviously, all of the videos in those categories would not be illegal, right? In a teen or a very young or young, old young, small tits, things like this. It's not all going to be illegal. A lot of it is 18-year-olds who look underage, but a lot of it was.

actual teens that were in these videos and tweens. How desensitized are you to stuff like this? Because you just said a bunch of stuff where I was not really necessarily expecting you to say it. There's a part of your brain that's just so deep in this, but then you're like a normal person with a child also. It's got to be kind of strange. Lawyers do this too, right? You're a defense attorney and you're looking at.

gory murder crime scene stuff and then you have to go get a latte and maybe not think about that for 10 minutes yeah i think that i have just been so immersed in all of this that it just doesn't really i don't want to say it's like

that I'm detached or that it's like a critical thing. It doesn't come across that way, but I just didn't expect you to say, well, there's the small tits category. I was like, geez. But see, this is the thing is that maybe at first it was uncomfortable for me to talk about it, but I forced myself because the thing is that I think people... have to hear it. I don't want to talk in vague terms too much. I was really trying to balance.

You may feel like this is so graphic and descriptive. No, you could tell the publisher was probably like, do we need this page? Oh, they were, yeah. Like, can we remove the chapter on the thing? Because that's really like, yeah, we want to sell this in other areas, other countries.

When this comes out in another country, you're going to find out what censorship is really like. You know, when the Russian edition comes out, we need all of the stuff that refers to sex removed from this book. Yeah, I just got a Ukrainian translation. So we'll see how that goes. But I thought that it was important not to be vague, to be specific, because I think that a lot of people want to.

You're just oversensitive about this is really consensual content. You just don't understand. You don't know consensual content. When you read the book, it is clearly not that. It's very clear. What would you say to somebody who believes that the trafficking or the exploitation on these platforms? Oh, it's rare. She's exaggerating. I'm sure you've heard this before. Yeah, I would just say that, you know.

One instance, like the 15-year-old girl from Florida who's missing for a year and found in 58 videos on the site. That would be too much. But we know that the site was actually infested with videos of real sexual crime. That would be the spectrum of abuse. And this is not exaggerated. Like most of the content on the site was legal and consensual. but too much of it was illegal.

and that they were profiting from all of it and it was knowing. And so I guess that's just what about-ism too, because a lot of people say, what about this site and what about that site? and say, okay, well, let's hold them accountable too. I'm focusing on this one predator. We don't do that with individuals. When we see Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein, we don't say, we're not going to hold Jeffrey Epstein accountable because Harvey Weinstein was doing it too. Or Bill Cosby was also raping.

No, somebody getting murdered in New Jersey doesn't go. Look, people get murdered in New York. It's like we hold them all accountable. You all go to prison. That's the way the law works. That's the way it is in this case.

It was interesting in the book that you mentioned that adult film stars, like the ones who work in legitimate, vetted, industrial, whatever, porn, they are the ones who often report the videos because they're looking for their pirated stolen content, but then they come across something where they go, oh my god, this is a child. So they find it all the time. And it's funny because you see somebody like.

Jenna Jameson being like this is a cesspool that needs to be taken down and you go what an unlikely ally because people will say and I'm sure that your critics say this you're just a prude that's against I get that all the time. Well, that was their kind of ammunition to try to quiet this, to try to de-platform or discredit. Of course. This is a religious moral crusade.

right wing to shut down all sex on the internet. And at the same time, you have porn performers who are some of my greatest allies in the fight. And sometimes they had to be quiet about it because of the Mind Geek monopoly. And they would get blacklisted if they would speak publicly because although they hated Pornhub because the free porn tube site.

To your point, what you just said was they destroyed the legal studio produced porn industry by allowing, obviously they allowed the rape and the child abuse and all that, but they were just allowing pirated. copyrighted content all the time so we had porn performers who were complaining just saying shut this down because i'm spending two hours a day

scouring my geeks porn tube sites trying to get my own stolen content off the site. So they hated it. Now feast your perverted ears on the pornographically good deals on the fine products and services that support this show. We'll be right back. you This episode is sponsored in part by Wayfair. There's nothing more satisfying than finally checking off those home projects you've been putting off. Jen's always updating things here and there. We always utilize Wayfair.

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Shop the best selection of home improvement online. Get renovating with Wayfair. Head to Wayfair.com right now. That's W-A-Y-F-A-I-R dot com. Wayfair. Every style, every home. This episode is sponsored in part by Airbnb. I got to give a shout out to Brian McDonald who listened to the show and absolutely hooked me up in Vietnam recently.

Brian runs A Taste of Hanoi, and I had this layover in Hanoi, and he's like, I got you, sets me up with one of his guides for a motorbike tour in Saigon. Now, if you've never been in the back of a motorbike in Vietnam, it's something, man.

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And I'm teaching you how to build the same thing for free over at 6minutenetworking.com. I know you're probably not booking for a podcast. It doesn't matter. You might not even use this for work. It might just be a great set of personal or work-related skills. Honestly, this course is about improving your relationship-building skills in every area.

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When I was in my early 20s, a friend invited us to a porn shoot in, of course, the Valley. And we thought, oh, this would be funny to go and see. And it was gross, right? The girls were... not in a good condition. They were like probably partially intoxicated. But what was interesting was the guys who were shooting it, they were like,

You got to leave. You're not in a condition to work. And I remember thinking like, oh, this is a professional operation. They sent home the girls that were intoxicated or high. I was not expecting that.

There's these different tiers, right? There's the horrific illegal gross stuff that we're talking about now. There's professional adult film shoots that happen where there's like catering and lighting people and stuff. And it's not necessarily my thing, but it's a thing that it's an industry. And then there's also like.

The Playboy Mansion, which is like adjacent to that. And it's not appropriate to mix all this into one snowball. There's just these different layers and they get really seedy and gross as you go down. It is true. And there is this distinct difference between. The porn valley, it almost feels historical now because everything has migrated to mostly the free user generated porn sites, but it still exists like the studio produced content where they have to abide by.

This is really important. USC 2257. This is a law that we've had since 1988 in the United States that requires age and consent verification. It came about when there was an underage. victim, Tracy Lords, who was underage and she was being used in these porn videos. She's super famous, correct? I feel like I've heard that. Yeah, like you would have heard her name. Any thinking person understands that if you don't verify for agent consent...

in porn you're going to have illegal content proliferating in the industry. And this has been something that they accept. professional porn industry, and they abide by that for the most part. And if you don't abide by that, it's a criminal offense. The DOJ has a right to inspect those records at any time. And if you don't have them, you can go to prison. Yeah. So they take it seriously. However, the problem is it just didn't translate.

into the internet age. Sure. And that is one of the things that we're fighting hard for. is to create those standards, those standards where you have an intro and an outro. In a lot of those videos where you say, hi, my name is da-da-da, I'm here, I consent to this. They do a post-shoot interview as well. They can have those standards. Now, you're not going to get as much traffic. You're not going to get as much content uploaded, but that's the price to pay to have a legal operating industry.

There was a point at which you're applying enough pressure where you can see them swapping out and deleting video. And so essentially proved they knew that the problem was there the whole time because they had no problem finding all these videos they needed to delete once you applied enough pressure. What's interesting to me was in the comments under the videos, you mentioned this in the book, they censor words like rape and underage.

So if that's flagged and censored automatically, theoretically, if you see that pop up 15 times in the comments of one video, you could block that video and then have a manual review of that. thinking, oh, maybe there's underage, rape, whatever in this video, because people keep saying that there is. They just didn't do that. They just went, oh, let's just block the words out. It's really so clear as you look at the way they handled this problem, and I put that in radio air quotes, they handled.

This is not just they were lazy or they were incompetent. This is clearly deliberate at a certain point. Yes, the devil's in the details of all of this. Exactly the fact that, yeah, so they would have, this is f***ing rape, would be the comment. And they would censor rape. And this would happen, and it was confirmed by the moderators exactly what they were doing. I saw this enough times. I said, what is going on here?

Yeah, they are censoring those words. And when they got in trouble for the stuff like the unconscious, the drugged, so then they started to take out the word drugged from a title, but leave the video up. And so you could see the title, it would be like...

You could tell that it would have said that, but just that one word would be taken out. The video is still there or they would swap it out. Things like that. Instead of actually acknowledging the inherent, deeply flawed business model that they set up, they had to do stuff like this. And it even goes down to things that we discovered, like the fact that they intentionally hired one person out of 1,800 employees, one person to work five days a week.

to review videos flagged by users as terms of service violations, including rape and trafficking. And what they did was they had a policy in their emails actually uncovered in Discovery where the CEO is discussing with his VPs these policies. And talking about them, and he calls it good and reasonable, they had a policy where a video had to be flagged 15 times.

in order for it to be put in queue for review. So a victim could have their video on Pornhub and then flag it 14 times. They could even flag it 15 times because it had to be over 15 times. And they had a backlog of 760. thousand videos. And we have evidence now of specific cases of prepubescent children who had videos on the site for years with 13 flags. 14 flags. And here you have the CEOs and the VPs discussing this policy.

saying it was fine. It's terrible. And Pornhub staff out there, if you send me a takedown request for this, I'm really backed up. I've got 800,000 requests.

for taking down this podcast. It's going to be a few years, but I'll get to it. I promise. I mean, this is publicly available information that is in court documents. And we can see that. You can imagine somebody going, you need to take this down. You're defaming my corporation. We're on it. I got somebody who works three hours a week and they are just slam.

It's a busy operation we got over here. So the private sharing on Pornhub, which I didn't know existed. I guess this is like unlisted videos. Tons of pedophiles are using this because it's basically like YouTube, but you can put up sex videos. and you can put up private stuff that is essentially not even going to be found by anybody because you need a specific link. So they're hosting this content too, which is, again, obviously illegal to even possess, distribute.

monetized or not because it's child sexual abuse material, there's points at which this book is upsetting. If you're a normal human who's even moderately well-adjusted, There's gross depictions of rape and abuse. You did a good job of towing the line. of this where it's not gratuitous, but you did a good job of explaining just how bad it is without making it traumatizing, I think, and I just wanted to give you props for that.

Not an easy topic to cover. I appreciate you saying that. Yeah, you're welcome. I kind of labored over that. I'm sure you did. And your editor was probably tearing her hair out. Just, oh, what can we leave in? They did want me to tone it down, and I did. I'm sure. I did. But also, I just said, look, at the same time.

It has to bring true. I didn't want to traumatize people. So I'm so glad that you said that. I did want people to experience it the way that I experienced it. They could feel how I felt. You do get that pit in your stomach feeling. without being like, I need to vomit out of my car window right now.

I was listening to it while driving, and it was just like, there's points where I was just like, this is, pause, take a couple breaths, roll the window down, get some air. But I think people will enjoy this book because, again, the payoffs are there, and we're getting to those in a bit. The ownership of Pornhub, my producer, actually said, hey, aren't they just in Montreal? Can't the RCMP just go in there and be like, hey, you guys are hosting child porn.

child sexual abuse material. Get this out of here. They're in Montreal. What's going on? Isn't this Canadian owned? But not really. So tell us how the ownership is. It's a very complicated ownership structure that we still don't fully understand even today. But they were based in Luxembourg for tax purposes. They had offices or moderation offices in Cyprus. They had offices in Romania.

in London, British Virgin Islands. They had their headquarters in Canada. So that's where they had most of their employees and they were operating. So that was their headquarters. They had offices in LA. Today, they have offices in Texas as well. They were all over the world. And so in that way, they did that on purpose in a way to avoid responsibility in any one place. I used to do real estate finance and you have these investors from like Saudi Arabia and you go.

Oh, that person's not investing in our U.S. entity. They're investing in our Cyprus entity, which whenever I hear Cyprus and British Virgin Islands, especially if you hear them all in one cluster. Now you also hear like Dubai or UAE, of course. So you hear these, there's certain places where you go.

Where's Guernsey again? Oh, it's an island off the Isle of Man. It's like, these are all places where you can basically hide money. Vladimir Putin's friend has an account there. That's the company you're in. They were hiding. And not only hiding money, they were hiding themselves. They were hiding their own identity.

from the public for years. So this is like shell company owned, I'm guessing, or different shell companies? They had, I mean, over, it was like 200 sister companies, related size P.O. boxes, bank account. Companies that would appear and then disappear and appear and disappear and interrelated. And it's just very complicated. That was probably the part of all of this that I understood the least.

That was the most difficult for me to wrap my head around. Yeah, you basically need a lawyer to decipher this nonsense. Forensic accountants and lawyers. And they did that. And the lawyers that are suing Pornhub today, they took... Two years of jurisdictional discovery, they went in and they've tried to understand all this. And in doing that, they actually were able to.

now rope in the hedge funds to the lawsuits. The victims are suing, and they're not only suing Pornhub and its individual owners, they're suing the hedge funds, they're suing Visa. and trying to hold everybody accountable for all of this. Oh, Visa? Oh, they're not going to like that, are they? The payment processors, I assume Pornhub takes credit cards for selling, what is it, premium stuff or whatever? No, it was for even the ads.

For buying ads, for selling the premium memberships, for the pay-to-download content, all of that was being monetized. by the credit card companies and PayPal. PayPal actually disengaged with them when that London Sunday Times story came out that I told you about. PayPal was like, we're out. Things are grim when PayPal is the upstanding citizen in this particular story because...

You think of credit card companies like, oh yeah, they're behind me, that somebody charged me for something they didn't charge me, you know, I called them right away. They did not immediately respond to your query and were horrified and unplugged the machine. Well, they said they were. They said they were so concerned and we were against this kind of content. But it was a lot of talk.

It was really hard. They were so concerned until they saw how much money they were making from. And they were charging a lot, you know, because these are high risk transactions. So they get to charge. more per transaction on porn transactions than normal transactions. I didn't even think about that. So instead of 1%, they're like, hey, look, we've got to charge 3.8%. Or more. Yeah. I've heard certain cards or different financial transactions are even more than that. So significantly more.

And what was interesting about all this, you know, at first we said, okay, looking at this, how do we move that? How do we go after this? And yes, of course, it was like public shaming. But one of the things that was early on we understood was it was the credit card companies. And we knew this because there was a site called Backpage.com. Oh, yeah. A number of years ago. It was kind of like Craigslist where they were selling kids.

And one of the things that was really effective was going after the credit card company. But then the former owner of Pornhub came forward. Fabian Tillman, the guy that had that $362 million loan to roll up the porn industry, and he's the one who put Pornhub on the map. And he had sold the company, I think, six or seven years before all this started. And he came forward to me.

In the summer of 2020, to say he wanted to help, and one of the things that he said was, go after the credit card company. The only thing they care about is the credit card company. That was a confirmation. Yeah. But hitting them in the wallet, that's always a good, generally a good idea. Yeah. Especially if that's their motivating factor. That's all they care about. That's the reason why we saw the payoffs that we did later on in the book with them taking down content.

So tell me about this Feroz guy. First things first, he sounds like a dangerous psychopath. This is not a nice person. He's gross by every metric that you can find. He just strikes me as a disgusting human. So I learned a lot about Feras through dozens of hours of conversations with company insiders from the company experiencing him as an employee, but also...

people who were close to the family. But I learned a lot about his personality, and it was interesting. I tried to be as detailed and honest as I could about him to describe his... character, who he was. He was actually very dedicated to his family at the same time. Isn't that weird? Willing to completely exploit other children and other people. It's also very mafia. The whole thing, the banking and shell companies just reeks of organized crime. And then, yeah, you got the heads of this thing.

I'm a family man, I have breakfast with my mom every day, but also I have child sexual abuse material on my website. And if I don't do it, someone else is going to do it. These sort of justifications that mobsters have. Yeah, I hope that people really do get to know as much as you can because they did hide themselves. So one of the things I really wanted to do as much as humanly possible. was let the world know who are these people.

What are they like? And it truly exposed them because at the same time that they were exposing for profit the bodies of unwilling victims since 2007 and profiting from that, they were hiding themselves. So they were using fake names like VP of Pornhub. Corey Ehrman was using pseudonyms. all the time in the hundreds of media articles. And the former majority shareholder of the company was completely unknown to the world. And he had hidden his identity for so many years.

Actually, Fabian, the former owner, is the one who told me his name for the first time. Interesting. And we were able to expose him, burned Bergmaier, and he was the majority shareholder leaving part-time in Hong Kong and London, and he was from Austria. But these men tried to hide themselves. So one of the things was, let's actually show the world who they are and hold them accountable. It's interesting, right? Because if you're in Silicon Valley.

and you invested in Uber, you cannot shut up about your good investment in Uber. And if you've invested in Duolingo, You can't stop talking about it. You invest in Pornhub. You got 13 shell companies, a fake name, another fake name, a fake house, a P.O. box, a fake car. Maybe. you're doing something that you are not proud of at this point, right? Yeah, exactly. It's very obvious. This is not a hedge fund that says,

I've got thousands of investments. I don't look at every single one. MindGeek, what is that? No, you knew damn well that there was something wrong because you hid your identity from that investment, and yet you're on Squawk Box talking about all your other investments.

Make it make sense, pal. Have you been threatened because you're dealing with a mafia-like business and shady characters with zero scruples? Yeah, definitely. That has been part of the whole process. Yeah, I've experienced a lot. Death threats, rape threats.

possession of child pornography, which never happened. Of course. That's kind of almost predictable, right? We're going to accuse you of doing the thing that we're doing because it's so ambiguous now. It's an old play. Yeah, that's happened. And yeah, there's been kind of a lot.

stress on my family through all of this as well. But it doesn't even compare to some of the stuff that the victims themselves have been attacked and had happened to them and what they've had to go through in identifying themselves and speaking out. has been so much worse. There was that strange Possibly not a coincidence that happened where a couple of victims came out.

speaking about this, and then weren't they attacked somehow? Yeah. It was at the same time within days of each other in different parts of the world. There were separate victims who had come forward publicly. A lot of the victims were coming forward anonymously and being connected to attorneys. I mean, at the time, I had victims coming forward as the petition was going viral and all the news stories and everything almost on a daily basis.

victims were coming forward. But some of them said, I'm going to put my name out there. I'm going to speak publicly about this. And it was three of them. And they were in different parts of the world. Within days of each other, each one of them was physically attacked. And they were just roughed up. It was an intimidation thing. One of them sent pictures of notes that she was getting on her windshield after work that were talking about her sexual abuse.

and things like that. And it was frightening. It cannot be a coincidence. It's not like somebody got mugged in Spain and another person had a threat happen in Baltimore. It's like very specific. Yeah, and that's the thing. It's that you think that. How could this happen? How could this be a coincidence? But at the same time, prove that it wasn't a coincidence. So you feel like in the sense, I felt like I was going crazy. What is happening here is how could this be real?

But it was like this was actually happening. Dealing with organized crime, though, that's the thing. I'm comfortable saying that because it's a company that engages in criminal activity knowingly or otherwise, depending on who you ask.

By the way, you've been a bit of a vigilante in the past as well. Yeah. There's the plumber who scammed your sister's car transmission. Tell me a little bit about that, because this is in your DNA, right? This is something. Yeah. I, you know, reflecting back on that, there are some stories people say like. why did you do this and how did you stick with it?

Some of that I think back on my history and sometimes I think certain personality traits are just genetic, like just in you. Yeah, I've had experiences over the years where a crooked plumber takes advantage of my... husband. So he's a builder and he takes all the money for a job he never does. Find out that he had actually done that to many other people looking on the Internet. They're complaining about the same guy.

texting him saying, hey, listen, you give that money back or you're going to regret it. He didn't listen. And I ended up connecting with the victims throughout the county. who all shared the same story, connected with the police, actually connected with an ex-girlfriend of his I found on social media. Oh, that's always the key, isn't it? And she told me...

A lot of interesting details and found out that he was going to try to take off to Hawaii with all this money that he'd taken from all these victims and actually found out the airline, the flight. And I told the police. And he was sentenced. And now he's paid everybody back with interest. Oh, my gosh. Amazing. I'm just imagining this son of a bitch sitting at an airport sipping champagne like, I've gotten away with it. This is amazing. And the police are like, there he is.

And then $400,000 plus interest later, this guy's just... I just couldn't let it go. It started with somebody that I care deeply for, and then this was so wrong, and I just had to go after it. And then a used car salesman. has sold my sister a lemon of a junkyard engine and failing transmission. And she drove it off the lot. The check engine light goes on. She begs him to take it back. He won't.

I go over there. Listen, this is wrong. You sold your lemon. Give it back. He wouldn't. I just stood out there protesting. I got a permit, stood outside of his little car dealership. for days in the rain, protesting, telling every single person that they sold a lemon and he lost all his business. And anyway, he finally did it. Yeah, because the news covers it once and it's like...

The news didn't cover it. Oh, they didn't? No. I thought they were going to be like, oh, no. The news didn't cover that. There was no news. It was just me with a sign. Saying, turn around, he sold us a lemon, failing engine, and day after day, he came out gun threats, yelling, his partner quit. I just said, I'm not leaving until you give it back.

And I was serious. And then he finally did. Wow. Yeah. He did the math finally. Hit him where it hurts, right? Like he was losing his revenue. Nobody would buy a car from him. You'd have to be crazy to buy a car from a dealership with a protester standing up front saying he sells lemons. Jeez, I love being on your team. I also am a person who has trouble letting things like that go.

Sometimes you have to, of course, but if you don't, if you're just wronged by somebody, I've got this personal policy where if a company screws me over, I want to do at least 10, ideally 100x the financial damage. So if I lose 50 bucks. Yes, I should let it go, but really I want to do $500 in damage. And often I overshoot because I've got a big platform. So if I say this online company screwed me over, don't buy from them.

Companies pay me a lot to advertise positive things on this show. So a negative impression, is it worth at least that much? Yeah. So all I have to do is a minute and a half of a monologue about why this company sucks. And usually after a while, you don't have to do that because you go to the live chat. They go, our policy is we're not going to refund this. And I go, here's what happened to the last company that I did. You just explain it. You go, I'll save you the Google. Here's a link.

Here are the stats. I'm going to say what happened, and I've got this chat logged. It's not going to look good. And then it's give me 24 hours, and you get an email from a manager that says, we're refunding the entire year. Sorry for the billing mistake. Good for you. I can't let it go because they're doing it on purpose. It is an item in their revenue. The amount we've been able to bill from people where they just don't check their.

statement for this particular charge. And they go, we'll refund 90 days because that's what you can dispute on your credit card. No, you added this without my permission. I am not paying you for whatever international phone service for a year. I would rather. swap my cell phone over and cost you $25,000 in lost business.

this. That's what I'd rather do. Well, good for you. I mean, you have the heart for justice being an attorney also in your past and knowing that they're doing that to other people. That's what really pisses me off. I can afford to lose 50 bucks. I can afford to lose 500 bucks. You know who can't? Somebody who that was their rent.

And now they're screwed. That really pisses me off. Yeah. So we have that same. We share that thing. Yeah. The threats you were getting were scary. They created escort ads with your name, which is. Creative a little bit. What do they do? They expect people to then call you and then the people are trying to say.

It was like intimidation tactics, just kind of harassment, right? Yeah. I currently have a situation right now, and it's not as nefarious as this, but just an AI thing saying that I'm a porn star using an interview and describing this particular scene that I was in and whatnot. But yeah, all of these things that were happening, they were intimidation, harassment. Some of them I can tie directly back to the company.

Some of them are just people who are financially incentivized, who support the company, who don't want to see revenue disturbed. are angry that this is happening partners whatever yeah random people doing this kind of thing yeah but that was certainly happening but i always had this feeling of this may be uncomfortable this may be painful

But when you're going through, it's like when there's purpose to it, it's so much easier to go through. And when you're seeing progress, fine, go for it. We're making progress. You eventually got the credit card company. How did you eventually convince these companies to drop what had to be a multi-million dollar line of business?

That was hard. We argued and I brought the evidence to the VPs of Visa and MasterCard. It wasn't until Nick Kristof released his groundbreaking article called The Children of Pornhub. He ends that article with these words. Pornhub is Jeffrey Epstein times a thousand. And he specifically called out the credit card companies in his article. Why are you still doing business with a company that distributes rape videos to the world?

And at that point, there was thousands of follow-on articles to that, and the pressure was on. There was journalists calling Visa and Mass. Why are you still doing it? who is a billionaire hedge fund manager, and he read The Children of Pornhub. He was incensed. He has daughters of his own. And he reached out, and I got connected with him, and he learned the story.

And not only did he just go on Twitter to express his dismay and call out Visa MasterCard, he knew the CEO of MasterCard from the tennis circuit. And he made a phone call. He sent some texts. He said, this is trafficking going on. Are you going to do the right thing? And Ajay Banga, who was the CEO of MasterCard at the time, said, I'm on it. And he was on it. And he actually, at that point, cut off the credit card companies and then Visa followed, Discover followed.

However, this was the time when they then, in a panic, because this was the worst thing that could happen to Pornhub, they took down 80% of the entire website overnight. It was gone. Over 10 million videos, over 30 million images. in what Financial Times called probably the biggest takedown of content in Internet history.

And that was 24 hours. All their unverified content was gone because they wanted to try to woo back the credit card companies. Look, we solved the problem that we swore was technically impossible. And we did it overnight. Right. Although they actually didn't. But however. So this all happened and made huge headlines, but I found out that two weeks later, The credit card companies quietly snuck back.

to the advertising arm of Pornhub. So it was kind of behind the scenes because people don't see those transactions. Look, it's a different entity called Traffic Junkie. Owned by Pornhub, owned by MindGeek. And then it was round two. It was two more years of fighting. And it was only until Bill Ackman got involved again. We went on Squawk Box calling out CEO Al Kelly of Visa after Visa was not let out of their motion to dismiss in the case where Serena.

Serena was a young teen. She was exploited on the site. Her videos were uploaded again and again, millions of views. She would beg for the videos to come down. She'd be hassled. They would say, prove that you're underage in the video. Prove that you're a victim. She didn't have to prove that when it was being uploaded. And it sent her on a spiral of despair. She dropped out of school. She was a straight-A student before all this happened. Never kissed a boy before.

She dropped out of school from bullying. She got addicted to drugs to try to numb the pain. She tried to kill herself multiple times. She wound up homeless living out of a car. But she sued Pornhub. And not only did she sue Pornhub, she sued its individual owners, the hedge funds and Visa. And Visa lost their motion to dismiss her case. And that is when everything. Sure. I assume they settled, right?

It's still ongoing. Oh, it is? Yeah. The discovery involved in this is a nightmare for them. But they lost the motion and that was when the pressure was on. So then we publicly were calling out Al Kelly. Her lawyer was on Squawk Box as well. And finally, he made a personal statement.

And he said, I'm a father and we're finally, you know, cutting off Pornhub once and for all. I'm taking hell for this at the country club. That was the final straw for me now that I'm personally being embarrassed. Yeah. Bill Ackman. But then it happened and got demonetized by the credit card companies, lost all mainstream advertisers. All of that happened.

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If you can't remember the name of a code of a sponsor, you can't find it, email us, jordan at jordanharbinger.com. We are happy to surface codes for you. It is that important that you support those who support the show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Layla Micklewick. The credit card companies eventually bailed, but how do they get paid now? Bank wire? Yeah, today they have bank wires that they can pay in crypto is the way that they are monetizing the site.

But enablers is the key word. There are the bad actors and then there are the enablers. Those who allow them to continue the exploitation for profit and who benefit themselves from the exploitation knowing that it's happening. And so as much as it's important to hold what I call corporate traffickers, mega pimps accountable for the exploitation, criminal exploitation happening, you also have to hold accountable their enablers. Judge Cormac Carney in California.

In a case that is suing Visa and Pornhub for monetizing child sexual abuse, what he said, Visa gave Pornhub the very tool through which to complete the crime of knowingly benefiting from child trafficking. I think he said it very well. When he rejected their motion to dismiss. Yes, exactly. The lawyers must have got that, and they're you-know-what puckered up real tight.

Because when it's just, no, I want to hear what the other side says, that's bad enough. But when it's, no, I think you enabled this completely and you were crucial in that. He called him like what it was is co-conspiracy. Yeah. That's the key to this is holding the bad actors and their enablers and the enablers have the power to stop them.

They just have to make a tough call. We're going to lose $25 million a year in fees. That's the price to pay. Yeah. But on the other hand, you're profiting from a criminal enterprise. It was good while it lasted. Turn off the faucet. It's the right thing to do.

You mentioned that they buy user-generated content in bulk from developing countries that don't verify or moderate. So they might buy a million videos, I don't know, from a Vietnamese website or something, and you just have no way of knowing. if any of that is legal in the United States or not. There's a near certainty that at least some of it is not. To the categories you describe in the book, we won't do it on the show, they're so barfy.

Examples are like runaways or like raped homeless teens. The one that stuck with me was people being sealed into vacuum bags or tortured in ice and waterboarding. It makes you go, what sort of unhinged psychopaths are watching this? the drive to watch people bang. Like, I get that. The torture part, that's where you go, wow, this is really...

Yeah. And they had hundreds of thousands, if not millions of views and had been on the site for years. Yeah. These videos. One of the things that happens is this dark kind of spiral where I hear this a lot from people who. come forward and say, hey, I was addicted to this since I was eight years old and 10 and 11. But obviously there's the psychopaths and the people who are just instantly drawn to that kind of content. But sometimes people go down a road, they don't even realize.

They're going down. The rabbit hole thing. So with porn, the dopamine hit, you don't necessarily need more porn, but you need different porn to get that same hit. And so what happens is you go more extreme and more extreme. Some people don't. But then it can lead to where you're watching things that you never would have imagined that you would have started with in the beginning. I would imagine there's also morbid curiosity that leads to... I don't know if they have an algorithm maybe they do.

Oh, they do. So that's how I ended up seeing so much of this illegal content because people all over the world, when they would come in contact with an illegal video on Pornhub, they would search around the internet and then they would send it to me. And if I clicked on the link, then the algorithm springs into action. So if you see one horrific rate video of an unconscious woman, then it thinks, OK, I'm going to push more of that. Then you get more and more. And so you go down that.

I call it the hellhole of rape on Pornhub. I wonder if Google and other companies are retargeting you. Do you get weird ads that pop up where you're like, oh, this has to be because of the Pornhub clicks? Oh, that has definitely happened to me. But to the point of ads, one of the things that was. horrific to me to realize, but not surprising. was I actually got to investigate Traffic Junkie, which was their ad arm, and the way that they would target advertisements. So they would sell ads.

First of all, they gather so much data about people. So people think they're going to a free tube site anonymously if you don't use a VPN, IP address and income and all this stuff. But anyway, they would sell ads to advertisers targeting specific. specific content. So they would suggest things like you could find rape in Chinese or not 18 or very young teen or screaming teen, all of these different things. And then they could advertise on a particular video.

to people who they understood would be interested in their product. So on a child sexual abuse video, I would see an ad that would say, delete your history after clicking here. And it was targeted to pedophiles so that they, oh, OK, let me click on that ad. Clever copy. Exactly. Oh, my God.

Disturbing. That's what I'm saying about like the rabbit hole, like the hell hole of your algorithm. Man, it really does show you how this can corrupt your mind. I'm not religious at all, but there's no way this kind of stuff is. not horrible for you, just psychologically to consume. You hear about it all the time with people who've been through things. There's no way there's not like some sort of porn PTSD that you get from looking at this crap on the web.

over a certain period of time, especially the horrible stuff. The scary thing, too, is that kids have free access to this site. The worst things I would never wish on my worst enemy to see that I have personally been dramatized by witnessing on Pornhub. Any child. Ten-year-olds now seeing that. Somebody messaged me two days ago that said, I got addicted to the free porn tube sites when I was six. And it took me on a dark path. And knowing that they're not only seeing.

The hardcore content and the porn content, but actually they could be witnessing real sexual crime as their sex education, creating their sexual template, creating their sexual desires and what they understand about sex from such a young age. It's horrible. Six years old. My son is five and a half. I have to help him build Lego sets, for God's sake. It's just way too young. How do law enforcement and regulatory agencies fall short when it comes to addressing these crimes?

So Pornhub was criminally charged by the U.S. government for knowingly profiting from the trafficking of over 100 women in a particular sex trafficking operation in San Diego. And instead of full prosecution, they were offered a deferred prosecution agreement. They were told to pay $1.8 million, which is nothing to a company like this.

And have a government monitor over their site for three years. And I think the way that they're failing in a situation like that is a slap on the wrist or nothing at all. Or we don't see them putting the resources. the time and the attention necessary to actually create a big enough risk. for these kinds of abusers to face serious consequences.

So this is just cost of doing business at this point. It becomes exactly. All right. That is the cost of doing business. And that is not serious enough for them to actually stop engaging in that kind of conduct. It has to be a sort of catastrophic. amount of money. That's why, like the hot coffee case from McDonald's, right?

If they just had to pay her $600, $6,000 medical expenses, they would have been like, we're not changing the temperature of the coffee. Once they had to pay, whatever, $12 million, they're like, dang.

We need to change the temperature of this coffee. You got to do something like that against these websites. So they're not going to listen. And that's why I'm really hopeful with regard to the civil litigation side of things, because it doesn't rely on anybody with the will of the victims and their amazing attorneys. And today, since 2020, we've had almost... 300 victims sue in 25 lawsuits, including class actions on behalf of tens.

of thousands of child victims and they're doing well. Those class actions are certified. They lost their motions for summary judgment. They're going to trial like they are doing well. And so I see I actually have more hope in the civil justice system to hit these companies where it hurt. than even the criminal justice system to actually hold them accountable. That's actually often how it goes. The standard of proof is a little bit lower. Standards can be a little bit lower.

It's just slow. Yeah, it is. The wheels of justice turn slowly. That is absolutely true. It is. Yes, but they turn. I would love to talk about the impact and the payoff. from your investigations and your takedown because The insurance and the lenders drop the CEO and the executives. Tell us what happened here. This is the part where I was just like, oh, I need to go get a coffee and turn the volume up, right? When I'm in my car. Yeah, that was...

pretty incredible what happened. So they deleted all of that content, but immediately they started getting phone calls. They were getting dropped on a personal level from their insurances, for their many rental properties that they had luxury rental properties all over Quebec. Suddenly their lenders are dropping them, their insurances. Suddenly they couldn't drive their Lamborghinis.

their Maseratis and all the kind of luxury cars they had because they were being dropped from their car insurances. They were blacklisted in Canada as a moral risk. A moral risk. So it's strange, right? Because... Let's say I drive a Lamborghini and then I suddenly get caught doing blow at a club with Leonardo DiCaprio. Now my car insurance can say, hey man, you're immoral. The drug use aside, we don't like what you do.

I love that these guys got dropped, but it is a little scary that an insurance company can decide what's appropriate behavior. I didn't know that that was even possible. Yeah, it seems like, wait a minute, what am I missing? Yeah, but in their case, I was glad that they were getting payback for us. It was just sick. He's a CEO and minority shareholder because they had been exposed and they were getting held accountable. He's taking Uber everywhere.

I mean, that was happening. They were losing mainstream business partners. All the mainstream advertisers were canceling. And the CEO and the COO were finally forced to resign. And... The company was sold as a distressed asset. My God, tell me you didn't immediately crack open a bottle of wine and just feast on the deliciousness of that revenge. That must have been.

So nice to see his personal life imploding. Like couldn't happen to a better guy. One of the things that was just reward in that moment of the big takedown that happened was the fact that I was getting calls from so many victims who were just crying. that for the first time in years, their rape videos were finally off of Pornhub. And it was like they could finally breathe because they had been fighting for so long for these to come down and finally they were gone.

And that was probably the most meaningful thing in all of this when that happened. But at the same time, we're still fighting. We still feel like justice hasn't been fully served. But we're glad for the things that have happened. It was so satisfying. And this is in the book as well. It's so satisfying to hear the Canadian parliament tear apart the CEOs and the executives of Pornhub over at MindGate.

They're not prepared for the questions, and you could just see the guy just sweating on TV and being like, oh my God, my life is over. Why did I agree? Somebody help me, and no one's coming to his age. It makes me want to download the video of that and the hearing and upload it to Pornhub with the title CEO brutally on camera by Canadian Parliament. Hashtag gangbang.

I know you have that on your computer for rainy days where you're just like, no, I'm having a bad one. I'm going to watch for us get bent over by. There's been some good like compilations, everything that they say, the way they answer. And it's very rewarding to finally.

see them being grilled and failing. You thought you were above the law. Here's you not being above the law and being embarrassed on TV internationally. Yes. Of course, later evidence shows they hid evidence from law enforcement. Shock. 13 years. Yeah. Hiding all of the child sexual abuse. So in that parliamentary hearing.

the heads of the leading child protection agencies in the U.S. and Canada, that they would have to report those videos, child sexual abuse, to them. It was mandatory reporting in Canada. And they testified. that they had not gotten a single report of child sexual abuse for 13 years. And the serious consequences of that is, I think. Yeah. Oh, man, that's disturbing to think about.

What about the employees? 1,800 employees. Don't these people wake up and go, oh, yeah, that New York Times article. Wow, I had a feeling we were up to no good. Surely people started to leave. Oh, they were just jumping ship. Imagine that on your LinkedIn. Hundreds of employees. You work there? Isn't that the thing from New York Times where you abuse kids? And you're like, look, I'm just an accountant.

Leave me alone. They will take it off LinkedIn. They don't want to have MindGeek on there at all. That's a hell of a resume gap if you've been a MindGeek for 10 years. After the New York Times piece. So many employees were jumping ship, just quitting. Entire departments were gone. Like the HR department was gone. One little petty bit of satisfaction as well.

new mansion that's being constructed it mysteriously burns down this is where people go oh my god that's terrible but didn't it turn out to be his neighbors or do we not know we don't know i see who did it Unfortunately, they were trying to kind of turn the fingers at me and the trafficking hub movement for motivating X, Y, and Z. But clearly it was a professional job.

It was done by somebody who knew exactly what they were doing. They raised that entire multi tens of millions of dollars of a mansion to the ground without even touching the neighbors. And it was in hours. It was a huge fire. It was insane that happened. Thankfully, they actually weren't in the house because they were building the house. They were at the last stage of construction.

So as much as I hate anybody and want to see people face justice, I don't want to see them. Yeah. But that did happen. And we don't know even to this day, was it. Somebody within industry was an angry majority shareholder who was angry. They lived in this place called Mafia Row in Montreal. And there's hints that it could have been their neighbors because their neighbors were so mad. That they had reporters knocking on the doors.

Of the neighbor's houses, the cameras in the neighborhood all of the time. And then they found out that. He had done all of this. They had been hurting children. And before that, they already hated him because he had... cleared like hundreds of trees to build his monstrosity of a mansion without a permit and all of this and they they were angry at him anyway

So that was the last straw. Tony Soprano. The neighbors. Yeah. You were on the wrong side when the mafia is you're just too immoral. I can't live near you. These guys who've made their living embezzling and, I don't know, extorting small business owners or whatever. Good point. I draw the line at this.

Did you ever think about quitting? I mean, people are threatening your family. They're threatening your kids. They're accusing you. You're getting calls from the sheriff that say you're being accused of having child sexual abuse material or whatever. I mean, there's got to be days where you woke up and went like, I can't.

Oh, yes. That definitely happened. And I wrote in a chapter called Before You Break. And it was because so much was piling on at once. And my uncle, who I consider my brother, was dying of cancer. And I was seeing him through the stages of death. At the same time, all of this was so intense. And I was so conflicted, too, because I have two young kids and I'm spending so much time on this. And it was just.

hard. And there were times that I just, I don't want to do this anymore. But I felt like it is an honor and a privilege. of a lifetime to have the opportunity to be able to lead something like this. And sorry, I'm getting emotional. That's great to hear. Yeah, I just couldn't. As much as I really wanted to, I really didn't. because I wanted to see this through to the end, and I wanted to see justice fully served, and I still do. Yeah.

Pornhub is still online though, man. Like what's next for you? Because it's not gone. Do you want to get rid of the whole thing? What's the goal here? There's still work to do. My dad taught me a lesson. He was a man of integrity. And growing up, if he said something, he meant it. You knew that he was going to. At least as much as he possibly could try to do what he said he was going to do. And I feel that way. It wasn't a light thing when we started this to say the petition is called.

Shut down Pornhub and hold its executives accountable. And I still feel that justice fully served in this case looks like. We're 91% of the way there. So they have had to take down 91% of the entire website. 91%. Yeah. So since the book was written, more has come down. And we found out that they've gone from 56 million pieces of content to 5.2 million today. Wow. Yes. And so they're 91%.

And the rest of the content that's on there, most of that was only verified uploaders. And we know the problem with that. The individuals in the videos were not verified. But not the people who are in the videos. Yeah. So they need to take down the rest of that content. It's not important just to see justice served to get vengeance for victims. And that's important. That's important for their healing. Yes, the wrong was recognized, right? And paid.

for what happened. And that's an important journey on their healing process. However, it's also important to be a deterrent to future abusers. Because this is a risk-benefit calculation. And until we make the risk greater than the benefits that these companies get by maintaining the status quo, they will continue. And so we have to make an example out of Pornhub to say, and we're seeing this already, like the other porn two types are already trying to.

clean themselves up, to get rid of illegal content, to change their upload. They don't want to end up like Pornhub. You made an example. Exactly. And that's why when we're fighting trafficking, we have to increase risk and we have to eliminate profitability. But we also want to see policy put in place to make sure this doesn't happen again. So really the solution at scale for this.

is to mandatory third-party age and consent verification for every single person in every video. Otherwise, it's just trust me, bro. Oh, I would never want anybody to give their ID to Pornhub. Not a million years. I can't imagine they have. This is all stored encrypted and we're not going to misuse this at all. They're facing a class action right now for data exploitation as well. Yes. User data exploitation. So they were without consent.

Gathering user data and help monetizing it and whatnot with advertisers and Google. All of that. So they're facing that. So I would never want that. But there are reliable, privacy-respecting, third-party companies that can agent consent verify. And that has to be done and it has to be done at scale. And so what I think is really key here is, yes, governments have to do this.

But the credit card companies have to do this because when Visa says we do not do business with user-generated porn sites that don't verify agent consent immediately, quickly, internationally. Porn companies that are highly motivated by profit.

will quickly fall in line. They'll figure out a solution. They will immediately figure it out. Because it creates an immediate market for that third-party verification. And that overnight becomes $100 million plus or whatever business. The financial transactions, they will. For sure. I mean, even if you charged at scale 25, 20 cents per verification or 5 cents, the scale is enormous. Pornhub has more traffic than Netflix. Those millions of videos, let's say it costs.

25 cents to validate the models in each one. This just adds up so stinking fast. Yeah. It's crazy. And that's why they want to resist it, right? Because they don't want to pay. It's their money. They don't want to pay. But that's why these things have to come by force. They have to come through continued public pressure coupled with strategic civil litigation.

That puts enough pressure on the right pressure points, financial and the public perception to force those changes to get Visa to do this, MasterCard, governments. And then I think we're going to have a safer internet. for our kids, for generations to come. In part, thanks to you.

Well, thanks to all the people. I have to pass that on. Yeah. I had the honor of a lifetime leading this movement, but I'm an activist and I was able to help activate people. And it was this amazing team from journalists and lawyers and law enforcement. victims, most importantly, who came together. Those people are very brave. The victims are very brave because

If I had a video of me being drugged and raped as a kid, I don't know if I'd be like, I'm going to shout from the rooftops about how wrong this is. I might just be like, I just want to go on with my life, man. This is humiliating. Yeah. Some victims like. 100%. They feel justified. They feel like that. Then there's others. And maybe it's that DNA thing, right? Maybe it's like it's in them. They have this fire. Like they want to sound the alarm. And they're really motivated too by.

I don't want anyone else to have to go through what I went through. Very admirable. Why do you think the public remains largely unaware of this particular issue? It is shocking to me that after five years of this viral campaign, of all the thousands of media articles that have been written, the lawsuits, everything that's happened. Most of the time, most people say, I had no idea that it's happening. That's a problem. And I think it's just because we just haven't read.

saturation point where we've talked about it enough for it to be common knowledge. And so that's why I'm so grateful for conversations like this. And I think it's because people are uncomfortable. They're afraid to talk about it. It's one of those things that it's affecting everybody in some way. We're all in contact with this free user-generated porn industry. but nobody wants to talk about it. That's true. Even my friends and my producer wife were like,

Oh, this is kind of an icky topic. Not like we shouldn't cover it. That is a thing. It's even with the release of the book and there's whatever shows you can go on as an author when you release a book. And a lot of them that reach a huge audience are like, it's too heavy. It's too dark. Yeah, we want to like laugh and we want to, you know, and so people. want to a lot of times kind of shy away from these uncomfortable and dark topics you know what though

podcasts that will cover this. We sell way more books than those morning shows, as fun as they are. Yeah. The five-minute segment on Morning Joe is just not going to move as many copies of something like this anyways. I appreciate the fact that this obviously is not the first time you've been covering this issue of sex trafficking. I know I've heard other episodes that you've had on this.

And you definitely don't shy away from the hard topics. No, if you're not going to talk about things that matter, you might as well have a morning. TV show on network TV. No thanks. Yeah. If you could speak directly to the executives at Pornhub or the financial institutions, what would you say? I would just say you are knowingly benefiting from the exploitation of countless victims and you actually have the power to stop it now.

Because the porn sites are highly motivated by the credit card companies, and they absolutely had the power to stop it. And we did say that, but they didn't want to until they were forced to. Until they were forced to. Yeah. Holding their feet to the fire. You're a badass, man. Maybe I'm just a former half-assed lawyer with a strong sense of justice, but it is so satisfying to see these people's feet held to the fire.

The banks, the credit card companies, the abusers, the traffickers, I just, I got to hand it to you. I'm on team takedown for sure. And I'm waiting for them to come after me for, oh. She was slandering us. I don't shy away from a good fight. Scientology tried that too. And I was like, let's go to Discovery where we dig in all of your records. Good for you. Go ahead. And then they just suddenly don't care anymore because they were never actually going to do it. They love to scare you.

And then when it comes down to, no, I want you to pay your lawyer $30,000 retainer so that I can dig into your records too. They're just like suddenly, well, actually, you're a small fry. We don't really care. Now you need to decide whether or not this fight is worth it. Good for you. I really like you. Likewise. Right back at you. Layla, thank you very much for coming on the show. Thank you for having me.

You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger show with Amanda Catarzi, who was raised in a cult and later sex and labor traffic. The women were trained to be insanely submissive, like you could never say no. And then the men were trained in a very military way. These people are well-armed and well-trained. And it's a whole group that thinks that the world is evil and they need to repopulate the world with their people to bring the kingdom of God.

When you turn 13 in that culture, you're an adult. So to be 13 years old, being courted by men twice my age, three times my age, to see if I would make a good wife, it was just kind of outrageous. So I moved to California to go to school and I start training MMA. And my trafficker was there. He was actually one of my boxing coaches. Then he's like, you know, I like you. And so now we're dating. So this is my first adult relationship. twice my age at this point.

And then he would always take me up to his... cabin on the mountain, which was really far away from everybody else. No phone service, isolation, and it was on a Native American reservation. So whatever they wanted to do to me, they could, oops, you accidentally got gang raped. That was very common. of going to go train and then all of a sudden now that you

You fought 12 rounds, now you're gonna be right. A girl ran a red light and T-boned my truck. So I pull out my phone and I text my trafficker and I say, hey, I almost just died in a car accident. He said, is your face fucked up? And I'm like, no. And he said, well, you're still f***able then.

Something isn't right here. This isn't who I want to be. This isn't what I want. And it was like I was coming out of water. I had this moment of clarity. And I knew something wasn't right. And I knew this wasn't. what I wanted and I knew I needed to act fast in order to get out of that situation because I knew I'd get sucked back in. To hear how she escaped her dire situation, Check out episode 631 of The Jordan Harbinger Show.

Fantastic conversation. Man, I really love this one. The gross irony here is that this video is almost certain to be demonetized on YouTube. Audio version, we have much more leeway, but on YouTube, they're going to demonetize this almost certainly because of the subject matter that we are discussing.

But if we were, I don't know, say raping underage kids and filming it, we could easily monetize that video with no problem whatsoever on sites like Pornhub. And that is just insane to me. Horrifying. By the way, how satisfying was it when the dude had his unoccupied house and probably uninsured house burned to the ground by his neighbors? His cars are uninsurable.

Like they say on the classier parts of the internet that I frequent, the dildo of consequences rarely comes lubed, which is very apt for this episode and something I would normally never say, especially in public. But while we're here, am I right, folks? All things Layla Micklewaite will be in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com. Advertisers, deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show.

All at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who make this show possible. Also, our newsletter, We Bit Wiser, very concrete, specific, practical, something that'll have an immediate impact on your decisions, your psychology, your relationships. In under two minutes, we send it pretty much every Wednesday, every in quote.

And if you haven't signed up yet, I invite you to come check it out. It is a great companion to the show. Jordan Harbinger dot com slash news is where you can find it. Don't forget about six minute networking over at six minute networking dot com. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. This show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Ian Baird, Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember.

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