Laila Mickelwait wants to make the internet a safer place. And she believes she can do that via one big change: mandatory, reliable, third-party age and consent verification for every individual in every video or image uploaded to every user-generated porn site.
Through her 15+ years of advocacy work — she’s the founder and CEO of Justice Defense Fund and founder of Traffickinghub — Mickelwait has shed light on the amount of “online sexual crime” Americans consume, meaning videos that involve abuse or trafficking. She unpacks that work in her new book Takedown: Inside the Fight To Shut Down Pornhub for Child Abuse, Rape, and Sex Trafficking.
While she’s been credited with causing “PornHub to instigate more age verification checks,” Mickelwait’s efforts have also been criticized for being anti-porn. (She previously worked with Exodus Cry, which believes “porn use is a detriment to public health for many reasons,” and has links to the International House of Prayer Kansas City, a powerful American evangelical Christian ministry whose founder has a problematic past.”) But Mickelwait tells us that part of her identity has been misunderstood: We spoke to her about her quest to change user-generated porn sites. We’ve also got an excerpt from Takedown that shows just how easily users can upload illicit videos to one of the shadiest corners of the web — with virtually no checks and balances.
Katie Couric Media: What inspired you to do this work?
Laila Mickelwait: My inspiration stems from a profound desire to combat criminal sexual exploitation and trafficking, a cause deeply rooted in both personal and professional experiences. My journey began over 15 years ago, driven by a commitment to human rights and justice. The catalyst for my work was my father’s passion for human rights issues and how he instilled that passion in me even from a young age. His sudden passing intensified my resolve as I sought to honor his legacy by never giving up the fight to bring justice to victims and hold abusers accountable. Becoming a mother further fueled my determination to protect children from sexual crimes, transforming my grief into a force for change.
What do people get wrong about your efforts?
A common misconception is that my efforts are aimed at banning the legal pornography industry. This is far from the truth. My focus is on eliminating illegal and criminal non-consensual content, such as child sexual abuse material, rape videos, and trafficking. The goal is to hold platforms accountable for their failure to implement proper age and consent verification measures, not to infringe on personal freedoms when exercised legally.
What would you say to those who label you as “anti-porn”?
I would clarify that my stance is not against legal adult pornography but instead against filmed sexual crime scenes masquerading as porn on the world’s largest porn sites. My fight is against real sexual crime that’s being filmed, monetized, and globally distributed, and against the criminal exploitation and abuse facilitated by platforms like Pornhub that fail to reliably verify age and consent, thereby becoming complicit in the harm inflicted on countless individuals. My advocacy is about stopping the distribution and monetization of filmed sexual crime.
How can porn safely exist? What is your end goal for the industry?
For user-generated online porn to safely exist, it must be underpinned by rigorous and reliable age and consent verification processes for every single individual in every single video on every website distributing such content. It must also be for adult eyes only. There must be reliable measures to prevent the upload and distribution of illegal content and ensure that those viewing the content are adults.
My end goal is to create a digital environment where exploitation and abuse aren’t tolerated, and justice prevails for victims of online sexual crimes. This involves the full weight of justice being brought to bear on companies like Pornhub that have exploited countless victims with impunity for profit, pushing for legislative reforms, corporate responsibility, and a cultural shift that understands the importance of justice, protection, and regulation for these websites. By achieving these goals, we can make the Internet a safer place for generations to come.
Below is an excerpt from the Discovery chapter of Mickelwait’s new book, Takedown (courtesy of Thesis, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group):
My informal maternity leave has ended, and I am working from home part-time, on an hourly basis for the anti-trafficking organization Exodus Cry. I know how fortunate I am to have this arrangement. And how fortunate I am that we don’t need my income; my husband, Joel, and I have been married for 12 years and he provides for me, Jed, and our three-year-old daughter, Lily Rose. Though round-the-clock nursing practically immobilizes me, at least I can still research and post online while I hold my phone in one hand and keep Jed supported in my other arm.
Tonight, as I rock Jed in the darkness of my bedroom, I turn once again to thinking about this work. I remember a story I read nine days after he was born — a story I keep coming back to. A 15-year-old girl from Broward County, Florida, was missing for a year. She was finally found when her distraught mother was tipped off by a Pornhub user that he recognized her daughter on the site. The mother found 58 videos of her child being raped on Pornhub that were uploaded by an account named “Daddy’s_Slut.”
Her daughter’s filmed assaults were being monetized with advertisements and offered as pay-to-download content to 130 million daily site visitors. This meant users could download, possess, and reupload the videos again and again across the internet for the rest of the girl’s life.
The girl’s mother notified the police, who matched the perpetrator in the videos with surveillance footage from a 7-Eleven convenience store and identified him as 30-year-old Christopher Johnson. When the police rescued the girl from his apartment, she told them he filmed the videos inside the apartment and also impregnated her.
It’s hard for me to believe Johnson was only charged with lewd and lascivious battery and Pornhub is facing no consequences. I’m frustrated by the fact that there is nothing I can do about it besides share the news article on social media.
Each time I think about the story it strikes me that this young teen’s abuse videos would have been side by side with a sea of similar-looking content on Pornhub. I know from my advocacy work and Pornhub’s own press statements that one of the most-searched terms on Pornhub is “teen.”
A quick search for the word “teen” turns up titles such as “Young Girl Tricked,” “Innocent Brace Faced Tiny Teen Fucked,” “Tiny Petite Thai Teen,” “Teen Little Girl First Time,” and on and on ad infinitum. Many of their videos feature girls who look thirteen years old at best — girls with braces, pigtails, flat chests, no makeup, and young faces, holding teddy bears and licking lollipops, all while being penetrated. Pornhub claims such videos are “legal” and “consensual” content made to satisfy “various user fantasies.”
They are saying these are merely adult actresses made to look like underage teens and everyone seems to believe them. And it isn’t just this victim’s story that has been bothering me lately. I have been heartbroken by a criminal case in the news about a mother of two small children, like me. Her name is Nicole Addimando and she is being sentenced to life in prison in New York for killing the man who repeatedly sexually tortured her, filmed it, and uploaded the abuse to Pornhub.
Then there is the GirlsDoPorn sex trafficking operation out of San Diego, California, that has been getting headlines. The trafficking ring tricked, coerced, and forced over one hundred women into sex videos that were uploaded to one of Pornhub’s most popular “partner channels” and viewed over 600 million times on the site. Twenty-two of the victims won a civil trial against GirlsDoPorn, which led to criminal convictions.
The ringleader fled the country and is on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted List. Pornhub is somehow escaping any consequences for what happened.
It isn’t only underage teens and adult victims on Pornhub that have recently ended up in the news. A few weeks ago I read an investigation in the London Sunday Times, “Unilever and Heinz Pay for Ads on Pornhub, the World’s Biggest Porn Site,” which revealed that dozens of illegal videos were found on the site within minutes, some of children as young as three years old.
Shortly after, Pornhub’s spokesman repeated his company’s same canned line about how horrific child abuse is, followed by their standard deflection: “Oftentimes videos described as ‘hidden camera footage’ or ‘young teen’ are in fact legal, consensual videos that are produced to cater to various user fantasies. They are in fact protected by various freedom of speech laws.”
I noticed his choice of the word “oftentimes.”
Pornhub has been claiming they don’t tolerate criminal material on their site, and these are actors and actresses pretending. But do they really check the millions of videos and images on their site to make sure they’re of consenting adults? With 6.8 million videos uploaded each year, how could they?
The idea that Pornhub properly vets these videos for the age and consent of their subjects is an assumption I’m making along with hundreds of millions of other people. Perhaps it’s because Pornhub has done an effective job of presenting themselves to the world as a mainstream brand. People wear their apparel proudly in public and Pornhub even has a philanthropic arm called “Pornhub Cares.” With massively marketed PR campaigns to save the oceans, save the giant pandas, save the bees, plant trees, and even donate to breast cancer research, Pornhub sends the message that they care about health and safety. Besides this, millions of people each year go through the process of uploading content to Pornhub and no one has sounded any noticeable alarms about the process. Everyone, myself included, has assumed it’s fine.
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Jed has finally settled down and as I hold him in my arms pondering all this, a phrase my father used to say comes to mind. “Assumption is the mother of all screwups.” His wise words resonate. If the assumption is wrong, it would certainly be the mother of all screwups for advocates like me who would have let it go unnoticed.
Suddenly I have an idea. I am going to upload content to the site myself to see what it takes and how the videos are screened. I’m going to test Pornhub.
I lay a sleeping Jed in the center of the bed and sink back into the recliner with my laptop and phone. I get my wallet ready in case I need my driver’s license as ID, and I begin typing in my browser’s navigation bar: Pornhub.com.
On the left side of the dark page, its categories are listed: “Amateur,” “Anal,” “Arab,” “Asian,” “Babe,” “Babysitter” . . . going down further: “Old/Young,” “Party,” “Pissing,” “Public,” “Rough Sex,” “School,” “Small Tits.” Then, the category with the most sex trafficking implications: “Teen.”
I click the “Sign up” button and enter an email address. They want a username and password. Next, I’m directed to confirm my email address by clicking a link. Done. I wait for the site to verify my identity.
Nothing.
That was too easy.
If I’m a child abuser or sex trafficker, what are the checks on uploading videos and images of my victims?
I find the “Upload” button, click, and just like that I’m instructed to choose a file.
I take a video of the rug in the dark room and my computer keyboard. I go to upload the video and they prompt me to click a box with fine-print legal jargon that I don’t bother to read, and neither does anyone else. The file is accepted. I glance at my wallet sitting on the desk beside me. The next step must be entering some kind of ID. Maybe there is a consent form? Nope. There is no other prompt for anything else.
I’m not asked for an ID to prove that I’m over 18, or that the subject of the video I’ve uploaded is not a child. Neither am I asked for any documentation of consent pertaining to the people in the video, to ensure they are not victims of rape, trafficking, assault, or revenge porn.
No form. No check.
Moments later, an email notification pops up. It’s a message from Pornhub.
“Congratulations! Your video is now live!”
The email has a URL linking to the file I uploaded minutes earlier, which is now available to the five million visitors on Pornhub in that hour alone. Congratulations? What if the video was of a 14-year-old being raped? It would be live on the site right now for anyone to download for free and recirculate.
I look at the Pornhub search bar to see the number of videos on the site today: 10,758,054.
Almost 11 million videos are available this day, along with 40 million images, presumably acquired through the same nonprocess I just went through. And that is just what is on the site today. Pornhub has a vast library of content amassed on their servers since its creation in 2007.
If Pornhub isn’t verifying age or consent, how many of these eleven million videos are of real sexual assaults? How many are of children? I realize Pornhub’s servers are potentially the largest collection of child sex trafficking and rape in North America, if not the world. The world’s largest porn site is likely infested with real sexual crime. The site is set up to enable abuse. Does anyone besides me realize this?
How come none of the millions of other Pornhub uploaders have said anything about it? How could I have not thought of testing the upload process sooner? Most important, what do I do with this information now?
In this moment, I forget that quitting ever crossed my mind. Pornhub has been hiding its dirty secret in plain sight for over a decade, and now I know I must find a way to expose it. But how?
Excerpted from Takedown: Inside the Fight to Shut Down Pornhub for Child Abuse, Rape, and Sex Trafficking by Laila Mickelwait, published on July 23, 2024 by Thesis, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group
