Pornhub-owner MindGeek denied allegations from a non-profit organization that exposes sexual exploitation claiming more than half of its employees were likely laid off following the resignation of two of the company’s top executives on the same day.
Reuters reported on Tuesday that MindGeek said Chief Executive Officer Feras Antoon and Chief Operating Officer David Tassillo resigned after more than a decade of running the adult website company, adding that despite both departures being planned earlier this year, the former executives will remain shareholders of the company.
However, the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, the non-profit that made the allegations, said in a statement Wednesday that the reported layoffs, which come from layoffstracker.com, “are more evidence that the infrastructure of the pornography industry is crumbling and that MindGeek needs to be investigated.”
“It is no coincidence that MindGeek’s two top executives have fled amid a growing number of lawsuits we and other law firms have filed on behalf of sex trafficking survivors whose abuse has been shown on Pornhub,” Dawn Hawkins, CEO of the center said. “And because of the intense outcry from survivors, advocates, corporations, and even from news outlets like the New York Times, The New Yorker, and the BBC that revealed Pornhub’s criminality.”
But MindGeek told The Daily Wire such allegations are “categorically false.”
According to MindGeek’s LinkedIn page, the company employs over 1,400 workers worldwide, but according to former employees, the company has undergone major restructuring, causing multiple teams and employees to face layoffs.
Last year, MindGeek faced a lawsuit alleging the company violated federal sex trafficking and child pornography laws. Such violations led credit card companies like Visa and Mastercard to suspend processing payments on Pornhub following a New York Times report revealing illegal content on its website, according to Reuters.
Hawkins said that for the last decade, MindGeek has faced numerous survivors who came forward about their sex trafficking or child sexual abuse being filmed and then uploaded, monetized, promoted, made downloadable, and shared countless times on Pornhub and other MindGeek-owned websites.
“Pornhub has profited from the mass distribution of filmed sexual crime as well as non-consensually recorded and non-consensually uploaded videos,” Hawkins said.
Hawkins also called on the United States to hold Pornhub accountable for mass criminal exploitation, considering the website has servers in the country.
“As long as pornography tube sites don’t have to ensure that all who are depicted in explicit material have truly consented to participate or that all are actually adults, more criminality will happen in this pernicious industry,” she said. “Currently there are no such regulations for pornography tube sites, and as a result, thousands of victims are powerless in removing recordings of their abuse while Pornhub and other websites make millions of dollars from their trauma.”
During a virtual U.S. Congressional briefing in 2021, the non-profit presented evidence of the rampant criminality on Pornhub and included testimony from survivors.
Sexually abused children and trafficking victims have filed multiple class-action civil lawsuits against Pornhub in the United States and Canada.