Victims of a sex-trafficking operation hit embattled adult entertainment site Pornhub and its parent company Mindgeek with a multi-million dollar lawsuit for hosting non-consenting content and refusing to remove it even after repeated requests.
Forty victims of sex trafficking operation GirlsDoPorn filed a lawsuit Tuesday against Mindgeek, demanding more than $40 million in damages. Each victim is asking for at least $1 million, as well as the money generated by Mindgeek from hosting and promoting their videos, as well as legal fees, Vice reported.
“As a proximate result of MindGeek’s knowing financial benefit and participation in GirlsDoPorn’s sex trafficking venture, Plaintiffs have suffered damages, including, but not limited to, severe emotional distress, significant trauma, attempted suicide, and social and familial ostracization,” the complaint reads.
The FBI indicted GirlsDoPorn for federal counts of sex trafficking in October 2019, Vice noted. Site owner Michael Pratt is on the FBI’s Most Wanted list.
It’s alleged that all 40 victims named in the suit became suicidal over the harassment they received from their videos being spread online without their consent.
One of the victims says she begged on the site’s service portal for her video to be taken down, informing the site that she’d kill herself if it wasn’t removed. “Im going to kill myself if this stays up here,” she allegedly wrote. “I was scammed and told this was only going to be on dvds in another country. Please im begging you please ill pay!”
“They scammed me and told me it was only going to dvds in another country. Please this is ruining my life,” she posted in another message.
“Girls Do Porn was a sex trafficking operation that forced and coerced dozens of women as young as 18 into sex on camera, and lied to them about where and how the videos would be distributed,” Vice outlined. “The women were told by everyone involved, from cast and crew to the owner, that the videos would not appear online. After filming, their videos were uploaded to Girls Do Porn’s own site, as well as Pornhub, where the Girls Do Porn monetized its videos as a Pornhub ‘content partner.’ Pornhub also promoted Girls Do Porn as a content partner even after women in Girls Do Porn videos came forward about abuse and sued it.”
Sunday evening, Pornhub scrubbed millions of videos, an estimated 60% of their content, from their platform. The move came as a consequence of Visa and Mastercard announcing Thursday that they’d prohibit the use of their cards on the pornography site.
Visa and Mastercard revoked the use of their cards following a New York Times report that exposed Pornhub for hosting videos of rape and sex trafficking victims — something long known by activists.
Pornhub “is infested with rape videos,” wrote Times writer Nicholas Kristof. “It monetizes child rapes, revenge pornography, spy cam videos of women showering, racist and misogynist content, and footage of women being asphyxiated in plastic bags. A search for ‘girls under18’ (no space) or ‘14yo’ leads in each case to more than 100,000 videos. Most aren’t of children being assaulted, but too many are.”