The Real Pornhub Story

MindGeek's international pornography juggernaut was rife with child sexual abuse, sex trafficking, rape, racism, and other exploitive material.

Dani Pinter, from NCOSE's Law Center, was recently featured in the Netflix documentary Moneyshot: The Pornhub Story. Read below to learn more about cases of exploitation, justice for survivors, and policy solutions.

Pornhub has profited off the sexual abuse of women, children, and men. Now, survivors are stepping forward and seeking justice.
Do you stand with them?

Victories

When we work together to shine a light on the exploitation and abuse happening on platforms like Pornhub, corporations like Mastercard and Roku will take action.

These corporations all cut ties to Pornhub thanks to efforts like the #DismantlePornhub campaign

THE BIGGER PICTURE

The 2023 Netflix Documentary

The Netflix documentary Moneyshot: The Pornhub Story addressed multiple narratives around the rise of the popular pornography website Pornhub—but most importantly it shed light on cases of the company profiting from and facilitating sexual exploitation. [Content warning: this documentary includes nudity, child abuse references, language, sexual violence references.]

Dani Pinter, a lawyer with the NCOSE Law Center, was interviewed for the documentary.

A major take away from the documentary, that both NCOSE and most pornography performers interviewed agreed on, is the need for strict age and consent verification and improved moderation in the pornography industry. You can help join the call for this common-sense reform by signing this petition.

NCOSE’s goal is to create avenues of justice for survivors and bring accountability to facilitators of sexual exploitation.

We wish to walk alongside survivors, elevate resources and survivor voices, and to enable access to justice. NCOSE’s Law Center files lawsuits on behalf of survivors, seeking monetary damages on their behalf and accountability for those who profit from abuse. Learn more at https://sexualexploitationlawsuits.com/

It Goes Beyond Just Pornhub

Other pornography platforms like OnlyFans, XHamster, and XVideos, and even mainstream platforms like Twitter and Reddit and more, have facilitated forms of child sexual abuse, sex trafficking, or image-based sexual abuse. We need greater corporate responsibility throughout all online platforms to verify age and consent for people depicted in any explicit content they host and/or profit from.

Read More:

Pornhub’s mountainous volumes of unverified content are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the abusive, degrading, and harmful content that Pornhub’s very business model is based on.

Regardless of whether or not an account is “verified,” there is no way to make Pornhub safer or to prevent the abuse and trauma inherent in pornography by eliminating unverified accounts because the abuse and trauma are also perpetrated by individuals and entities behind “verified” accounts. Case in point: GirlsDoPorn.com was a verified user on Pornhub, but many of those videos were of sex trafficked women. Or the young girl who was missing – until her mother found over 50 “verified” videos of her daughter posted to Pornhub by her traffickers.

Pornhub cannot sanitize the fact that its audience wants abuse material by simply erasing some videos with a flip of a switch. The reality of the matter is that mainstream pornography goes hand-in-hand with content involving children, rape, incest, racism, and extreme violence against women.

These are the themes and types of material Pornhub has built their empire on.

These are the themes and types of material that the entire pornography industry are built on.

The sexual abuse, exploitation, and crimes that have come to light surrounding Pornhub are not unique to Pornhub or to pornography “tube sites.” Sexual abuse and exploitation are both inherent and endemic to the entire pornography industry at large.

Accusations about the abuse and exploitation that the pornography industry is rife with are not new. Pornography performers have reported these types of incidents numerous times before (Content Warning: some of these links may describe or depict disturbing details):

In any other profession, a pattern of abuse this significant would lead to interventions by the law. Yet the pornography industry keeps getting a pass. It is past time to acknowledge that this business refuses to consider reform because it can’t be reformed. It is naïve to think an industry that equates acts of violence with sex and which fetishizes forced sex does not give license to these abuses. Pornography is real. The women in it are made to endure its abuse and the women outside of it are made to endure its consequences.

This should not be so.

The pornography industry would love for the public to believe it is a reputable industry that harms no one and only features fully-willing performers. This is not reality.

In reality, the porn industry and its massive profits are built upon sexual objectification, abuse, trafficking, and exploitation of all kinds.

The data and the research expose this as reality.

Producers who have come out of the porn industry expose this as reality.

Performers who have come out of the porn industry expose this as reality.

Regular people and their stories of abuse and exploitation expose this as reality.

Children and their stories of abuse and exploitation expose this as reality.

It’s well past time to stop ignoring the data on the abuse and exploitation correlated with the pornography industry. That’s why the National Center on Sexual Exploitation has been—and will continue—working diligently to see exploitative entities like Pornhub brought to justice. 

Ongoing Developments

26 States Attorneys General Send Letter to Pornhub’s Parent Company

Attorneys General Alan Wilson, Dave Yost, and 24 others, crack down on Pornhub site loophole that could allow for sexual predators. In a letter to Aylo, the company formerly known as MindGeek, the attorneys general question Pornhub’s practices for vetting user-uploaded content to ensure participants are consenting adults, rather than victims of child sex abuse and other crimes.

SURVIVOR STORIES

Lawsuit Filed Against Pornhub

An accomplished assembly of survivor-focused and commercial litigation law firms have jointly filed a class action lawsuit against MindGeek, the parent company of Pornhub.

The Children of Pornhub

Groundbreaking New York Times articling highlighting the experiences of numerous survivors who had their abuse and exploitation filmed and distributed on Pornhub.

SURVIVOR RESOURCES

Spread The Word