A campaigner fighting for a pornography website to be shut down – after she found dozens of examples of rape, torture and child abuse – has documented her Erin Brockovich-style battle in a new book.
Laila Mickelwait’s book Takedown: Inside the Fight to Shut Down Pornhub for Child Abuse, Rape and Sex Trafficking is published this week and documents her five year campaign to force the Canadian pornography website out of business.
Anti-trafficker Mickelwait, who was raised in Southern California, first became aware of how content could be uploaded to the site without scrutiny in 2020, after reading about a missing 15-year-old in 2019 who was found after she was spotted in content on the site.
Mickelwait, 41, who was working for a not-for-profit sexual exploitation charity at the time, decided to test how easy it was to upload videos and found that everything she posted – including blank videos – went live without checks by the adult industry video site, which has 5.8 billion monthly visitors.
Anti-trafficker Laila Mickelwait’s book Takedown: Inside the Fight to Shut Down Pornhub for Child Abuse, Rape and Sex Trafficking is published this week and details her four-year fight to close down the Canadian pornographic site
Mickelwait discovered in 2020 while working for a not-for-profit sexual exploitation charity that video content wasn’t subject to verification on Pornhub, allowing criminals to post videos of child abuse, rape and torture
Using the hashtag Traffickinghub, she launched a one-woman campaign, which many have said is similar to the approach taken by Erin Brockovich, to try and force Pornhub to close, gathering evidence and posting on social media about her campaign.
She wrote on X: ‘It’s time to shut down super-predator site Pornhub and hold the executives behind it accountable.’
In a video to publicise her new book this week, the founder and CEO of the Justice Defense Fund, described her initial shock at how easy it was to upload potentially criminal content, and says she won’t stop campaigning until ‘Pornhub answers for what they have done’.
Describing the upload system, she said: ‘In under ten minutes, with only an email address, I was able to upload content that went live on the site.
‘They weren’t asking for an ID. They weren’t asking for a consent form to make sure this wasn’t a rape or trafficking victim.’
The mother She says the site had become ‘infested with real sexual crime’.
Several whistleblowers have confirmed to her that what she found was true, and even the site’s former owner contacted her to say he wanted to help.
She writes in the book: ‘I was getting links sent to me by victims from around the world. It was like a tsunami. Pornhub was not just a website but a crime scene.’
She asked Visa and Mastercard to cut ties with the brand, a request to which they were initially resistant but eventually did.
Many civil cases have since been brought against Pornhub, with the campaigner saying those legal cases triggered attacks from the company on both her and the victims, saying: ‘They don’t want to stop, they’re making a lot of money’.
Mickelwait says she’ll stop at nothing to get answers from Pornhub, which, she says, has more than 300 victims worldwide who’ve come forward saying they didn’t consent to content posted on the site
Eventually Pornhub deleted, she says, 80 per cent of their content, wiping out 10 million videos after removing videos by those who refused to be verified.
Breaking down in the video trailer for her book about her investigation, she says victims were ‘so happy and so relieved because for the first time in years, their rape videos were off Pornhub’.
So far, Pornhub has made some efforts to improve the site’s moderation, using AI and more moderators. In September, an age verification process will be implemented for videos being uploaded.
However, Mickelwait, who has been researching and combating the injustice of sex trafficking for over 15 years, says she won’t stop until she has answers from Pornhub on how such content was allowed to be uploaded – and says she want the company’s owners and executives to finally face justice via prosecutions.
Takedown: Inside the Fight to Shut Down Pornhub for Child Abuse, Rape and Sex Trafficking is published July 23rd by Penguin Random House