Autorentext

Laila Mickelwait is the Founder and CEO of the Justice Defense Fund and the Founder of the global #Traffickinghub movement supported by millions around the world. She has been combating the injustice of sex trafficking since 2006 and is a leading expert in the field.

Klappentext

The gripping, true story of one woman’s battle to expose and shut down a criminal online porn empire.

Pornhub was the 10th most visited site on the Internet, often praised as a progressive champion of women. Then one day, an activist discovered a secret they had been keeping from the world for over a decade: it was infested with child sexual abuse and rape videos.

Now for the first time, anti-trafficking expert and mother of two Laila Mickelwait tells the story of her battle against Pornhub’s billionaire executives and the credit card companies who helped them monetize the abuse of countless victims—some as young as three years old. Readers will follow her from her first horrifying discovery of criminal content on Pornhub to closed-door meetings with credit card executives, White House and Justice Department senior officials, a powerful hedge-fund manager and more. Through insider accounts from Pornhub moderators and executives, you’ll meet the world’s first online porn tycoon, AKA “the Zuckerberg of porn,” along with Pornhub’s top brass (known internally as “The Bro Club”) who operate in secrecy.

The culmination of years of activism, Takedown is the true, never before told story of how Mickelwait mobilized a movement of two million people that resulted in "the biggest takedown of content in Internet history." (Financial Times)

Zusammenfassung
**NATIONAL BESTSELLER

The gripping, true story of one woman’s battle to expose and shut down a criminal online porn empire.**

Pornhub was the 10th most visited site on the Internet, often praised as a progressive champion of women. Then one day, an activist discovered a secret they had been keeping from the world for over a decade: it was infested with child sexual abuse and rape videos.

Now for the first time, anti-trafficking expert and mother of two Laila Mickelwait tells the story of her battle against Pornhub’s billionaire executives and the credit card companies who helped them monetize the abuse of countless victims—some as young as three years old. Readers will follow her from her first horrifying discovery of criminal content on Pornhub to closed-door meetings with credit card executives, White House and Justice Department senior officials, a powerful hedge-fund manager and more. Through insider accounts from Pornhub moderators and executives, you’ll meet the world’s first online porn tycoon, AKA “the Zuckerberg of porn,” along with Pornhub’s top brass (known internally as “The Bro Club”) who operate in secrecy.

The culmination of years of activism, Takedown is the true, never before told story of how Mickelwait mobilized a movement of two million people and together they accomplished "the biggest takedown of content in Internet history." (Financial Times)

Leseprobe
1

The Discovery

If the woman never, uh, really . . . cried . . . too much. . . ." The man halts as he collects his thoughts, and then continues in Greek-accented English. "Uh, it's a weird thing to say: We wouldn't consider it rape . . . At the end of the day we just had to guess if it was rape or not."

There was a lot of guessing in his former job as one of Pornhub's content moderators. For three years he had been employed by MindGeek, the company that owned Pornhub, to guess about consent in videos, and to guess about the ages of people whose most intimate-or traumatic-moments lived on their site. Was she eighteen or sixteen? A petite nineteen-year-old dressed as a fourteen-year-old, with pigtails and a teddy bear? "No one really likes to watch children suffering. We just had to review them, get past them, and finish the video and go to the next one. If we stopped to think about it, we wouldn't get anything else done."

Regretful of the work he had done, this moderator reached out in the summer of 2020 to tell me what it had been like to work for MindGeek and Pornhub. He had been one of only thirty moderators working ten at a time, on eight-hour shifts, tasked with viewing a thousand or more user-uploaded videos per shift. If they viewed fewer than seven hundred, they would be reprimanded by management.

"Our process of reviewing every video was to fast-forward through them with the audio shut off, so it was muted. . . . So that was a flaw in our system." Using that system, you can't hear genuine cries for mercy or see the terror and pain in a child's eyes.

And in cases when a content moderator couldn't tell how old someone was? "They wouldn't really care. They would just pass it and it would be okay. It's more money for the site anyway," he said.

"The lines of consensual to nonconsensual are often very blurry in porn," the moderator told me. "So, for us, it was very hard for us to make that distinction."

It's impossible when your employer doesn't want you asking too many questions.

Before my conversation with that moderator, a man in Alabama named Rocky Shay Franklin drugged, overpowered, and repeatedly raped a 12-year-old boy. Franklin filmed the assaults and uploaded twenty-three of the rape videos to Pornhub. The videos were monetized with advertisements and sold as pay-to-download content. Pornhub and Franklin split the profits from the sale of each video. Franklin was sentenced to forty years in prison for what he did.

The court documents detailed how before Franklin was sentenced, police reached out to Pornhub multiple times to get the assault videos taken down but were ignored. The videos were finally removed after seven months and multiple demands by police. By then the rapes had been viewed hundreds of thousands of times and downloaded, guaranteeing the child's trauma could live online forever.

When this story begins, I had yet to learn these details, but I did know about crying children. You could even say that my battle against Pornhub unexpectedly started because I was pulled out of bed one night by my own baby's tears.

In the dark hours before dawn on February 1, 2020, my baby’s piercing scream startles me awake for the fourth time that night. I collect Jed from the bassinet beside my bed, wanting to comfort him but knowing any success will be fleeting. I feel powerless, battered, and drained-I’m afraid of how long this might go on. Three months ago Jed had an emergency birth complication called shoulder dystocia. He survived without permanent damage, but he hasn’t stopped crying for more than a few hours at a time since birth and I’m at the end of my rope.

In a different season of my life I would have prayed for God to heal Jed's pain, but since my dad's sudden death I stopped believing that God cares about human affairs or even hears when we call for help.

I am disillusioned, not only with my faith but also with my anti-trafficking work.

I have spent thirteen years trying to make a difference, with no real progress. I fought for seven years to pass a sex trafficking prevention bill in the US Congress that could have an impact on trafficking worldwide, but it faced endless roadblocks and ultimately failed. I traveled country to country screening a documentary about sex trafficking to audiences of thousands around the world. Each time I would watch them weep as victims told their stories, but most wiped their eyes when it was over and never thought much about it again. I don't fault them; people feel compassion for victims but don't know what they can do to help in a meaningful way. Honestly, at this point neither do I.
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