Pornhub accused of profiting from child porn by 34 complainants, Judge rules case can go forward

Fleites is joined by 33 other plaintiffs in her lawsuit against MindGeek; she also implicates Visa as a complicit partner by way of processing payments for MindGeek

MindGeek, the parent company of PornHub and many other porn sites, is in hot water as they face down a myriad of coming legal issues related to their witting practice of harboring, storing, promoting, and profiting off child porn from 34 different women who, at the time their content was produced, were under the legal age to perform in pornographic content.

Very clinical way of describing it, I know. Especially when you learn more about Serena Fleites and the ordeals she endured. I would rather start this off by talking about her situation and how it has been a 6 years-long hell for her.

Serena Fleites, as any young girl might be, was impressionable enough that she caved to the demands of a boy she had a crush on. The boy asked her to make him a nude video and she did so. What did he do to thank her? He posted it on PornHub. This started a chain of events that would lead Serena down a road few could come back from.

Initially, she tried impersonating her mother and informing PornHub that she was 13 at the time the footage was filmed, qualifying it as child pornography. While this did eventually succeed, by the time PornHub removed the video from their website, several weeks had passed. This was more than enough time for an army of perverts to download the video and reupload it numerous times.

When she asked for all the reuploads to be pulled down, rather than just take them offline for being child porn, PornHub demanded a photograph to prove that Serena was the girl in the reuploaded video. A baffling thing to ask when the girl was clearly underage, which should've been more than enough, as U.S. District Judge Cormac Carney of the U.S. District Court of the Central District of California stated, writing," Assuming Plaintiff’s allegations are true, the Court is at a loss to understand why such photographic proof was necessary."

This situation started a chain reaction, starting with being ostracized and bullied at school so severely that Serena began skipping school, and eventually had to unenroll from school entirely and instead attend courses online to get her education. Fearing what her mother might think, Serena's relationship with her mother suffered. It was odd to Serena's mother why an otherwise good kid would suddenly start skipping school.

Things only worsened from here, as Serena moved out to live with her sister, only to return home a year later, and attempted suicide by attempting to hang herself with a power cord. Luckily she was stopped by her younger sister and her mother's boyfriend, saving her life. This wouldn't be the last time she attempted suicide, and eventually she moved out to live with a friend, as facing her family after attempting suicide became impossible for her.

It was there that Serena would be introduced to heroin by an older man, who would go on to pressure Serena to do sexually explicit videos for him in exchange for a fix after he had been the one to get her addicted to heroin. He freely sold these videos on craigslist. Keep in mind, she is still a minor at this point. And naturally, we circle back around again to PornHub, where some of the videos ended up once again, exacerbating the problem that had led poor Serena down this path in the first place.

It took until June of 2020 for the last vestiges of these videos to finally be pulled from PornHub. MindGeek, PornHub's parent company that operates a porn empire for those keeping track, also uploaded content featuring Serena Fleites on their other websites and earned ad revenue from the videos being on their websites.

Hey, great for them, right? Meanwhile, the girl they were making money off of was addicted to heroin, intermittently homeless, suffering from severe, almost suicidal depression, and doing all this on her own, while estranged from her family. If that isn't a microcosm of how heartless corporations can be, I don't know what is.

Luckily, this girl might just get some relief at their expense, soon.

So, I mentioned Visa earlier, let me tell you how they factor into all this.

Visa's name gets brought up in this lawsuit because, as the judge writes," [The] Plaintiff adequately alleges that Visa knew that MindGeek’s websites were teeming with monetized child porn from its own due diligence and discussions and negotiations with MindGeek, PayPal’s decision to cease doing business with MindGeek, communications from advocates with which Visa interacted, and from the New York Times Article.” The article the Judge is referencing is called “The Children of PornHub” seen here.

Visa’s argument to the contrary is summarily picked apart by the Judge when he highlights their erroneous legal assessment of a case Visa referenced as precedent to absolve them of liability, which is the case of Perfect 10, Inc. v. Visa Int'l Serv. Ass'n.


Judge Carney argues that, in the Perfect 10 case,” Visa was sued for
contributory and vicarious copyright infringement for processing credit card charges incurred by customers purchasing infringing images from numerous offending websites.”

The difference is, as Judge Carney explained,” While Perfect 10 has alleged that [Visa] make it easier for websites to profit from this infringing activity, the issue here is reproduction, alteration, display and distribution, which can occur without payment.”

In other words, Visa’s assessment is wrong in that they believe they’re being punished for providing incentive to produce and proliferate child porn for profit directly from child sex traffickers by processing payments for MindGeek. What they’re actually being punished for is knowingly providing the tools necessary for MindGeek to monetize child porn. Visa can’t get by on ignorance because of due diligence involved with entering into an agreement to become a payment processor for MindGeek in the first place.

Visa’s public statement response reads like typical corporate windbaggery, to coin a term.” Visa condemns sex trafficking, sexual exploitation and child sexual abuse materials as repugnant to our values and purpose as a company. This pre-trial ruling is disappointing and mischaracterizes Visa’s role and its policies and practices. Visa will not tolerate the use of our network for illegal activity. We continue to believe that Visa is an improper defendant in this case.” Like I said - typical.

MindGeek’s flailing in this matter is covered in detail in the Judge’s ruling, with some interesting practices coming to light, according to Fleites’ accusations. This is where it gets even weirder.

Let me tell you about the tactics employed by MindGeek Vice President Corey Urman, who adopted a playbook you’d expect more from a user of 4chan than the Vice President of a company. According to the court documents, Urman would adopt pseudonyms such as “Blake White” to discredit the allegations made against MindGeek, and even employ ‘operatives’ under their own anonymous handles to do the same.

In particular, after Laila Mickelwait, Founder of TraffickingHub and Founder/CEO of the Justice Defense Fund, published an op-ed in the Washington Times describing the proliferation of child porn on PornHub, Urman took to his keyboard to write an email to media outlets to attack Mickelwait’s character by branding her as a member of an anti-LGBTQ, anti-women group. I can’t believe a Twitter bot could be a Vice President of anything, but here we are.

That’s not all, apparently “Blake White” allegedly defended his company’s practices to Insider.com in January 2020, stating that PornHub immediately removes illegal content when it’s brought to their attention. This runs counter to Serena Fleites’ personal experiences with trying to get her own videos removed from the platform.

Remember how I said Urman allegedly employed ‘operatives’ in defense of PornHub? Enter “EyeDeco” - an as-of-yet anonymous croney of Urman’s who went as far as the harassing and doxxing ( releasing personal info, for the uninitiated ) of activists and victims of PornHub’s nefarious practices, according to accusations contained in the court document.

Oh, and did I mention EyeDeco apparently got the personal info of victims directly from Urman himself? The plot thickens. When it came to Serena, allegedly at the behest of Urman, EyeDeco took to social media, trolling her by stating that “Serena seems like she knows and has known for quite some time exactly what she is doing aka #grifting.”

I can debunk that notion right now - grifters usually aren’t struggling to maintain a residence due to the money they’re earning from said ‘grift’.

If all this wasn’t worthy of jail time for some scumbags in MindGeek’s employ, there comes the accusation that MindGeek has repeatedly stated publicly that they kept every single piece of content ever uploaded to their servers on said servers, even after said videos were removed from their websites. This means that MindGeek is - or was, depending on if they gave their servers the Hillary Clinton email server treatment - sitting on a massive cache of child porn they’ve collected from user uploads over the years.

For my part, I hope they got caught red-handed and suffer the most severe consequences they can under the law. Serena’s story is no doubt one of countless others, young kids exploited for the personal gain of their abusers and hosts of the resulting abuse materials. They were used, abused, discredited, and scattered to the wind. That should be enough to get anyone’s blood boiling.

The gist of it all is this; profits apparently meant more to MindGeek - and by extension, Visa - than the victims did. I don’t know what will happen with this but I will provide updates as I have them. Let’s all hope for the right result.

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