More than 30 women have filed a lawsuit in California against Pornhub, accusing the platform and its parent company of knowingly profiting from rape and sexual abuse material, and content featuring minors.
Lawyers representing 34 women are accusing one of the world’s largest adult video sites of creating a vibrant marketplace for child pornography and ‘every other form’ of unwitting sexual content and are seeking compensation.
– This is a rape case, not a pornography case – the complaint said, describing the site as – probably the largest unregulated repository of child pornography in North America and far beyond.
What is Pornhub being sued for?
In the lawsuit, they accuse MindGeek, the adult entertainment empire that owns Pornhub, of being a ‘classic criminal enterprise‘ whose business model is based on exploiting sexual content without the consent of the people who appear in it.
According to the lawsuit, MindGeek owns more than 100 porn sites, including Pornhub, RedTube, Tube8 and YouPorn, and receives about 3.5 billion visits each month.
Lawyers for the plaintiffs also accuse MindGeek of running an ‘incendiary campaign‘ online to discredit the victims, as well as making ‘threats of physical violence and death’ against them‘.
All but one of the plaintiffs, who live both in the United States and abroad, wished to remain anonymous. Fourteen of the plaintiffs said they were minors when they were filmed and should be considered ‘child sex trafficking victims.
Futile attempts to remove video from platform
Serena Fleites, the only plaintiff who is not anonymous, said she learned in 2014 that a ‘nude, sexually explicit video’ her boyfriend forced her to make when she was just 13 years old had been uploaded to Pornhub without her consent.
The video remained on the platform until the teen, claiming to be her mother, asked Pornhub to remove it. However, the video was not taken down for several weeks, during which it was downloaded and re-uploaded by several other users. Each uploaded video required a new request to remove it.
Visa is also being sued
Visa Inc, one of the world’s largest payment processing companies, was also sued. Visa was sued for knowingly profiting from human trafficking by providing merchant services to MindGeek.
Both Visa and Mastercard suspended payment processing for Pornhub in December after a New York Times article accused the site of hosting illegal content, including child pornography and rape videos.
According to U.S. media reports, Montreal-based MindGeek described the lawsuit’s allegations that it operates a ‘criminal enterprise‘ as – completely absurd, utterly reckless and categorically false.
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