It’s Way Worse Than You Think: P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait

Introduction

PornHub is Jeffrey Epstein time a th000 could you please give us your name Jeffrey Epstein PornHub had done an amazing job at spending millions of dollars making it this household mainstream brand name for porn where people were wearing their apparal in public you know we're walking New York Fashion Week and there was faux commercials on Saturday Night Live the site makes most of its money by selling 4.6 billion ad Impressions on PornHub every single day so they call it the underage guessing game where they're just playing rush and roulette with people's lives they're trying to guess who's 16 and who's 18 what's rough sex and what's rap the solution at scale to this problem is age and consent verification for every single person in every video well duh yeah like duh right like how is that not already the standard and it's not just a free-for-all on the side of uploading they're not verifying the ages of those who are accessing the free point sites either kids are being exploited in front of the screen and they're being exploited in back of the screen Lyla mwe welcome to my podcast thank you for having me so glad to be here yeah thanks for coming out this is a horrifying topic but we should get into it yeah so I'm going to ask a bunch of questions first off um can you give a brief background about who you are and how you got into what you do of course yeah I am you know the founder and CEO of the Justice defense fund founder of the trafficking Hub movement traffic tring Hub movement to shut down PornHub and hold its Executives responsible for globally Distributing and profiting from rape child sexual abuse trafficking all forms of non-consensual content and I've been in the fight against trafficking now almost 20 years so it's about 18 years now and in the context of that I you know number of years ago started to realize that trafficking wasn't just happening offline you know back alleys and streets and things like that but actually it was being filmed and it was being distributed online we live in a digital age and that's what was happening and so I began to investigate the intersection between what I call the big porn industry just like there's big tobacco and big farmer there's a big porn industry it's dominated primarily by one company the parent company of PornHub but I began to investigate this intersection between child sexual abuse trafficking and the big porn industry and I made a discovery one night early 2020 middle of the night unexpected moment that kind of just changed the course of my life over the last 5 years it launched the trafficking Hub Global movement and so much has happened since then uh you know what happened was at the end of 2020 or sorry at the end of 2019 it was a few days after my son was born it was about nine days after he was born I read a story I was paying attention to the headlines and I read a story about a girl a 15-year-old girl from Broward County Florida who had been missing for an entire year and she was finally found when her distraught mother was tipped off by a PornHub user that he recognized her daughter on the site and oh my gosh yes and she was found in 58 videos being raped for for profit and police actually matched with an account named daddy slut and police had matched the rapist face from the videos to surveillance footage from a 7-Eleven and they rescued the girl she had been impregnated and it was just like a Horror Story and I just couldn't get that story out of my mind and then at the same time the London Sunday Times released an investigation and they had found dozens of illegal videos on the site within minutes even children as young as three years old and it wasn't just children that were ending up in the headlines around the same time um there was a hundred victims adult victims of trafficking that were being trafficked by this operation in San Diego and they had a partner channel on PornHub they had uh it was I think uh over 800,000 subscribers over 600 million views on these women's trafficking on PornHub on a channel called girls do porn uh and the abuser that was running the operation he was on the FBI's 10 most wanted list and uh you know so it wasn't just children who were being abused it was adults and one last horrifying story I remember at the same time that was just coming back to me again and again was this woman called Nicole aando from New York and she was the mother of two young children and she was being raped and abused by her partner Tor sexually tortured by her partner who was then filming the videos and uploading them to Pornhub and she killed him in self-defense and then she got sentenced though to life in prison my gosh life in prison separated from her two young kids thankfully she had an amazing legal team and she got that reduced down to seven years and that's still insane but it still was like heartbreaking and so all of these stories were just haunting me and I had this question how in the world did this abuse end up on PornHub and I decided to test the upload System One Night in the middle of the night and I found out what millions of people already knew because millions of people were uploading to Pornhub every year and that was that all they were requiring to upload was an email address so that anybody anonymously in under 10 minutes anywhere in the world this is the YouTube of porn you know at the time they had 56 million pieces of content on the site they had in 2020 170 million visits to the site per year 62 billion visits to this sorry 170 million visits per day 62 billion visits that year and enough content uploaded that year in 12 months that it would take 169 years if you put those videos back to back to watch that content so this was a massive site they had more visits than Netflix and Amazon wow were huge and they had this dirty secret hiding in plain sight that they had no verification of ID to make sure that these weren't children in the videos being uploaded no consent form to make sure that these weren't rape or trafficking victims and putting those dots together quickly I understood okay this site is actually infested with videos of real sexual crime which it was it was totally infested with sexual crime and that PornHub wasn't a porn site it was actually crime scene and I Saidi have to sound the alarm on this what's going on on this site and that's how this story began this is how um the trafficking Hub movement to take down PornHub started 5 years ago that's insane if you guys aren't on Peterson Academy you're missing out there are over 25 8h hour courses on there from people like Veri Michael malice Keith Campbell my dad has three 8h hour courses out now including n Sermon on the Mount and intro to personality which is excellent Brian King's on there David Eagleman on brain plasticity just came out which I love go to Peterson academy.com and come in and see what it's like we have a 7-Day money back guarantee so you can poke around the website look at the courses and get a refund if you want no strings attached any age is welcome the courses are University level thanks guys enjoy the rest of the podcast I remember as a teenager like not being on PornHub or anything but I remember hearing it thrown around around and things but I never knew that any of that wasn't just like adult porn stars being paid to perform and then uploading like that's what I assumed that that's what everybody assumed I mean because porn had had done an amazing job at spending millions of dollars making itself kind of this household mainstream brand name for porn where people were wearing their Apparel in public and they you know were walking New York Fashion Week and there was faux commercials on Saturday Night Live about PornHub and you know joke wink wink you know it was this like kind of cheeky household name brand for porn and they even had an arm of PornHub called PornHub cares so it was like their philanthropic arm and they would do these so gross crazy PR stance that you know they would save the whales and save the bees and um donate to breast cancer research and save the pandas and all of this stuff that they would do to kind of present this facade to the world that they cared about health and safety that they were a you know a safe brand and you know the key word that you just said was assume and like that's what I did that's what everybody did and my dad was a really wise man and he often said assumption is the mother of all screw-ups and that's exactly what everybody was doing and then like all it took was testing the upload system and I you know I took a a video of of my keyboard and the rug in the dark room and I uploaded it and with a VPN people could even anonymously do this so you could just create any random email address and then you could upload the content it would go live on the site and this is literally anybody could become a pornographer with anyone with an iPhone anyone with a camera anywhere in the world like in the back of a car in a park in a hotel room anywhere could upload a video and so much of it was actual sexual crime all the way from Child rape to non-consensual content we call Image based sexual abuse revenge porn that kind of content even stolen content so you know porn performers themselves hated PornHub because they would allow stolen copyrighted professionally produced porn content to be uploaded as well so it was all kinds of illegal content all over the site so what happened a number of years ago they had to delete a bunch of their videos right can you explain what happened then yeah did that have anything to do with you yes okay let's go let's go yeah so what happened was um you know after I made this discovery uh I was horrified I said what am what am I going to do about this I have to sound the alarm on this I don't know what else to do besides post on social media all I had was a Twitter account um you know was an anti-trafficking activist who' spent you kind of years trying to you know raise awareness only have a few thousand followers on social media but I started the hasht trafficking Hub uh because per definition anybody that's under the age of 18 or anybody that is used in a non-consensual sex act by force fraud or coercion so if they're an adult and it's by force fraud or coercion or if they're a child and this is a commercialized sex act so it has to be done for something of value uh then that's an act of trafficking per definition so every child on PornHub every non-con essensual video that's on PornHub is actually an act of trafficking per definition so that's why I said PornHub is not you know it's not PornHub it's trafficking Hub and I started that hashtag it started to take uh um you know people started to share it I wrote an oped about that in the Washington examiner with the findings of these stories and the upload system uh and that started to go uh viral people called on me to start a petition which I did uh and that started to go viral so today we have 2.3 million signatures from every country in the world on the petition to shut down PornHub and hold its Executives accountable and people can still sign that today it's at trafficking hubp petition.com and people are signing it every single day hundreds of media articles started to be written about this um and as this was all kind of spreading online victims were seeing it so victims started to come forward to me almost every day oh my gosh that's a lot to handle whistleblowers from the company started to come forward to share the inner workings of the company at one point the former owner of PornHub came forward to say he wanted to help um which was crazy and all of this culminated in 20 at the end of 2020 Nick Kristoff from the New York Times he U you know took notice of all that was going on and he engaged in a six-month investigation I was connecting him with whistleblowers I was connecting him with victims and he released this kind of groundbreaking article called the children of PornHub and it sent shock waves around the world he ended with the words uh PornHub is Jeffrey Epstein times a thousand and we were calling out the credit card companies all year you know I had been engaged in conversations with the VPS of Visa the VPS of MasterCard because we understood we have to hit them where it hurts if we want to actually stop this and hold them accountable but they were resist in and then Nick Kristoff called visa and MasterCard and discover out in his article he said why are the credit card companies processing and and and benefiting from um child trafficking and rape on PornHub and the pressure was on and finally Visa Mastercard and discover all cut ties join PayPal cutting ties with the site leaving them with only cryptocurrency and Bank wires as payment options okay and then in a panic the owners of the site did did the unthinkable for a free porn tube site because they depend on massive amounts of content to drive traffic they took down 80% of the entire website overnight over 10 million videos over 30 million images in what Financial Times called probably the biggest takedown of content in Internet history um they lost all major advertisers they the CEO and the COO over forced resign the secret majority shareholder was found and exposed he was hiding himself from the public they were criminally charged by US government for intentionally profiting from trafficking and today they're being sued by hundreds of victims in 25 lawsuits including class actions on behalf of tens of thousands of child victims and the site was sold as a distressed asset and today they've actually had to take down 91% of the entire website is gone so they've had to and we're not done yet because the call to action at the beginning was shut down PornHub and hold its Executives accountable and we still have yet to see Justice fully served but we've come a long way so this is kind of what happened that's that's insane oh my gosh that's a lot of information 91% of it yes they went from 56 million pieces of content in 2020 to 5.2 million pieces of content today and those millions of pieces that are on the site today are still mostly unverified content meaning they didn't verify the agent consent of the individuals that are in those videos they only verified the uploader so like they didn't used to even do that that's not yeah they they didn't even use to verify the uploader but now they say well we verified the uploader but that that doesn't actually solve the problem U there was a verified uploader named Rocky sha Franklin in Alabama and he drugged and overpowered and raped a 12-year-old boy and he uploaded 23 of those rape videos to Pornhub with titles that indicated clearly that this was the abuse of a child and police reached out multiple times demanding they come down seven months went by they were ignored the child's rape stayed up getting hundreds of thousands of monetized views and he was in a profit sharing relationship with PornHub and today he's he was arrest I mean he's arrested he was sentenced to 40 years in prison but he was a verified uploader so clearly that doesn't actually solve the problem just to verify the the person uploading how are people making money off of this is it through advertising on PornHub so most of it is so the site makes most of its money by selling 4.6 billion ad Impressions on PornHub every single day okay so they monetize free porn so free porn's not free right it is monetized heavily monetized but some of the people so it was about 20% of the people that were uploading were doing it in a pay to download situation with PornHub where they would put the content behind a pay wall and you would have to pay to download those videos and that's Rocky Shay Franklin was in that situation a number of the victims like the 15-year-old girl from Florida that I described she was one of those that was paid to download her rape video on PornHub um but most people are uploading and they don't get money for it they it's for views clicks shares kind of like social currency the reason why people are uploading to Facebook or Instagram is is why they're uploading this is so awful I guess the people uploading behind a pay wall were thinking well anyone is going to download and pay for this content they're not going to be the ones that get me in trouble I just how I I guess my question is this was all illegal right oh yeah oh yeah and people were aware they were doing illegal things obviously yes well most of them could do it an ly because they could even use a VPN so that you could even detect the IP address and even in cases where PornHub knew that so that they would actually have to take down a video of a child or a victim would reach out beg them to take down that content you know there's stories um like Serena uh flight test from Bakersfield California you know she's uh was the feature of that New York Times piece by Nick Kristoff and today she's suing PornHub its owners she's suing Isa she's doing the hedge funds that funded the parent company of mindgeek or PornHub called mindgeek but she you know she was a young teen so she uh you know was a straight A student she had never kissed a boy before and her boyfriend or the the boy that she had a crush on coerced her into sending nude images and videos of herself to him which she did and then he shared them with classmates they started to get uploaded again and again to Pornhub getting millions of views she would beg for those videos to come down and then she would be hassled if they even answered at all so they would say prove that you're a child in the video prove that you're a victim in the video obviously she have to prove anything to have the video uploaded to Pornhub and she testified before Canadian Parliament about all of this um and if she did get it down it would just get re-uploaded again and again and again and victims call it the immortalization of their trauma so they say it's like one thing to be abused but then it's uploaded and then it's distributed online in perpetuity so they know that even after they're dead like this will go on and on and on and so this sent her into a spiral of Despair she dropped out of school she's being bullied she got addicted to drugs to numb the pain she tried to kill herself multiple times um because of you know just actually victims of this kind of abuse have a 50% suicidal ideation rate and then she ended up homeless living out of her car oh my gosh so yeah that was her trajectory um but she was you know one of so many of these teens that were being abused for profit on PornHub and PornHub knew that this was happening but they actually hid that from authorities for 13 years so you know what uh the the leading heads of the child protection agencies in Canada and the United States testified that for 13 years until all of this happened they were actually hiding the child abuse from Authority so they weren't reporting it even though we have mandatory reporting laws so you know for that's so horrifying because imagine how many kids could have actually been rescued and saved if they weren't trying to hide the child abuse from authorities for all these years but they were wasn't one of the owner houses burned down this is a company so mindgeek is that a company out of Montreal in Canada yes yes they're headquartered there yeah yes it is a Canadian I mean every body thinks of it as a Canadian company based in Montreal they had 1,800 employees in Montreal wow they only hired one person out of 1800 employees to be reviewing videos flagged by users as terms of service violations including rape and trafficking one person five days a week if you're going to be evil might as well be all like don't spend money on that yeah um out of those 1,800 employees they only had 30 moderators uh you know 10 per shift reviewing thousands of videos so they would review if they reviewed less than 700 videos per eight hour shift they were reprimanded they normally had to watch 12200 videos some of the more experienced moderators were flipping through up to 2,000 videos per eight hour shift on PornHub and they were just guessing so they call it the underage guessing game where they're just playing Russian roulette with people's lives they're trying to guess who's 16 and who's 18 who's what's rough sex and what's rape they they nobody could tell so they were literally just guessing and they guess wrong all the time oh my gosh yeah but they were Canadian but they're also International so you know they were based in Luxembourg for tax purposes they had offices in Romania and Cyprus and Texas and la and the UK there are this multinational corporation so why hasn't it why didn't they get shut down how much are they worth how much are they worth now well they were a multibillion dollar Corporation so in order to understand PornHub you really have to understand the parent company so PornHub was owned by a parent company called mindgeek and with a $362 million loan they had rolled up essentially rolled up the porn industry under one company so they owned you know Playboy digital they owned you know what yeah most of the world's most popular subscription sites pay sites Brands tube sites so it wasn't just PornHub it was like PornHub and its sister side so PornHub up porn tube baate extreme tube gay tube x tube I mean I could go on and on they owned all of that so they owned it's estimated about 80% of the world's most popular porn sites and Brands were under this one company and so they were worth multiple billions of dollars however it was just sold for 400 million um as a distressed asset still a lot but you know it was not not what they were um for sure because they've lost advertisers credit card companies you know they've definitely faced a reckoning so far but wow yeah well good for you well it wasn't sounds like a stressful job yeah it was a lot a lot of people the lawyers the victims the attorneys it was I mean it was really amazing to see and even today like still see like we had 600 organizations come together you know hundreds of survivors it was really like it was truly a movement it is truly a movement all so many you know 70 members of parliament in Canada came together from eight parties like when do you see people from eight parties come together right on something on something like this they could align in their views yeah so that you know it was it's a it's been a lot a lot of people coming together and I'm just honored to have a part in leading what's happened that's horrifying ew oh I like I knew I knew about you I knew what you do I know you were on my dad's podcast like I know about this but like hearing about it it's so disturbing what kind of person is like what do you do as a job oh I own these companies who are these people well I tried to profile I mean my gosh had dozens of hours of interviews with family insiders with company insiders who actually knew the owners well and they had hidden themselves from the public for so many years you know they used fake names they used um fake profiles they tried to throw people off by putting they hired you know SEO companies to put fake pictures and fake profiles online um you the secret majority shareholder of the company nobody knew who he was for years nobody knew he even existed he used like he was completely hidden and now finally exposed and he's personally being sued by dozens of victims uh for what's happened but and he's being sued because he was fully aware of what was going on I mean if he hid himself then he knew well something the way that the victims are suing is under our statutes in the United States that say um you know there's knowingly benefiting from a trafficking Venture is the law so you know if uh a company or even if an enabler like the credit card companies for example like under our trafficking statutes you can't knowingly benefit from a trafficing venture so whether it's the owners the company enablers like they can help be held accountable under our laws both criminally and civil for knowingly or should have known so it's like you knew oh okay should have known you should have known that this was happening and then and then victims have the ability to actually try to hold them accountable which they're doing right now and they're making a lot of progress they're making amazing progress in the courts which is really encouraging to see okay good yeah so you you said people had set up like I didn't realize that people were being kidnapped and trafficked just to make money on PornHub I didn't realize kidnapping was taking place too I mean like rape is already bad enough in like coercive relationships and that kind of thing that's kind of when I heard about you I was thinking okay so a lot of this is like revenge porn or something like that but people were also being fullon kidnapped children there was a story just last Friday of a 21-year-old man in North Ireland named Steven mckany and he tricked coerced black blackmailed three young boys to come to his house and he actually overpowered them and physically brutalized them where he they had brain bleeding from the attacks and he raped these three boys and he uploaded videos of their rapes to Pornhub and he got sentenced last Friday to 23 years in prison for doing that and I mean horrifying actual how many people so you talked about the number of videos and everything and the content that was removed how many people were uploading like trafficking what do you call them videos yeah or illegal content nonconsensual content I mean we don't have like a precise number but the site when I say the word infested I actually mean infested I mean you could find you know when all this was really going down they've tried now they've gotten in huge trouble right so they've tried to now they have a government monitor over the site and you know they've they've had such huge repercussions that they're trying to clean this stuff up now too late they don't get any credit for that but like you could search drugged drunk coerced you know rape and different kinds of languages uh CP you know all of these things clearly indicating abuse and you would go on what I call uh like the black hole the hell hole of rape on the site where it would be the most obvious from the most obvious to you know just the non-consensually uploaded stuff that you know somebody could actually videotape it with a partner consensually and upload it non-consensually but they even had like unconscious people women on the site where you would have like a masked rapist and he would actually be lifting the eyelids of the victims and touching their eyeballs to prove that they're unconscious in the videos and these would be on PornHub for years so bad what yeah for years they would be on PornHub and that would and then the algorithm will spring into action because they want to serve up if they think somebody watch that they're they're going to serve more and more and more of that same kind of content you know te and it wasn't just like adults unconscious rape it you they had so many teens on the site that were being brutally abused homeless teens crying like these were some of the tags and titles um and they were actually we have legal Discovery and court documents now showing they knew down to the dollar how much they were making on these tags titles categories where they understood that there were they were infested with illegal content so like the teens the very young all of that and like recently court documents showed that the executives refused to even take words off off the site like childhood minor young girl things like that um so I mean the complicity of when I say like shut down PornHub it's not something that I said like just to be you know extreme about it or just to um you know be inciting people it's it's because the level of complicity that we've seen and the way that this has been done since 2007 to literally destroy destroy the lives of so many victims like the only response is the only justifiable response to that is shut down PornHub and put its Executives in prison and the reason why that's important is because victims need that for healing they need to well even the people working there going through videos yeah like like Honestly though like how warped do you have to be to be like yeah I'm a Content moderator going through 2,000 like yeah you're not seeing the world clearly if you're like yeah that seems okay I don't know like at least just the at least the executives yeah of they were you know they were making the decisions they were saying listen you know the role of the content moderators like what they said was we understood that our role our job was not to limit content that was going up on the site but it was to let as much content go through as possible because the freep porn tube sites like they rely on massive amounts of content content to get those Google search results to drive that content so they didn't really care what was in the videos they just wanted videos they just wanted a lot of video so they had no incentive to take those videos down but yeah I mean like some of the moderators they just saw the headlines like they they came forward they showed schedules documents one of the moderators today I would consider him a friend I've spent so much time with him understanding how all of this worked and he really had a hard time with this because he was sexually abused as a child and he gave permission for me to share that um but that was one of the reasons why when he saw this he just said I can't I can't keep quiet I have to come forward and help expose what's going on but he was part of the machine right he was part of all of this crazy yeah wow do you think there are other sites I mean pornhob was the big one that's the one everybody heard about but are there other sites that have the same kind of issue like does only fans have a similar issue do you know anything about that sure the free porn tube site so so there's PornHub and it's you know parent company my geek but then they have biggest competitors and so one of them would be ex hamster owned by hammy media they're a free porn tube site they operate the same way where they were not verifying agent consent to upload you have x videos and x and xx owned by wgcz and they similarly were not verifying agent consent so Nick Kristoff a few months after he did the expose on PornHub he actually did one on x videos because some of the same victims that were being exploited on PornHub were also being exploited on X Videos so then the question is okay clearly you know PornHub actually paved the way for all of this they kind of set the standard for the industry to do this but we have a bigger problem than just holding PornHub accountable and that's why the solution at scale to this problem is age and consent verification for every single person in every video and it has to be third party yeah like duh right like how is that not already the standard like that is the crazy part of all of this is that it's been a free-for-all for them to Just For Years be able to just have crime all over these mainstream sites not the dark web right this is mainstream porn that everybody goes to so solution at scale third party because I would never want anyone to ever give their ID to Pornhub or any of these sites so third party age and consent verification for every single person in every single video on a user generated porn site and not just governments that have to implement that because they do but credit card companies they should have to implement that to solve this problem at scale um because they're International because these companies compan are highly motivated by profit so if Visa says we won't do business with any user generated porn site that doesn't verify agent consent then immediately they will all comply so okay I mean that all seems more than reasonable so how come like anyone who's a survivor of this or who was trying to be a whistleblower why isn't as it as simple as sending like why why can't they just take content down why can't you just send a cease and desist and say hey here's the video This is me or this is somebody I know and then why doesn't the law get involved and take it down why is it taking so long and actually a an act a law that's trying to be passed right now called take it down act uh that does yeah address this of you know within a certain amount of hours you know 24 hours or 48 hours can't remember what it was if a victim reports a video it should be able to be taken down there's various laws being proposed to that end but I guess this is just so new that there were there wasn't a legal infrastructure for online content I don't get it there is and by the way like there there are laws that we have that are being use currently to address this issue but we can improve them for sure but I mean it's illegal to distribute child sexual abuse material yeah okay I mean it's illegal to distribute it to possess it to all of that like that's already illegal and victims are suing and trying to hold the company accountable for that um already you know knowingly benefiting from a trafficking Venture but we also have USC 2257 which is a law in the US where you know it started with the brick and mortar porn companies in porn Valley and the studio produced porn where they understood everybody with a brain understands if you don't verify age and consent and porn it's going to get a wash with illegal content so they adopted this law and it's a crime in the United States not to verify ID for those who are in studio produced porn it applies to Pornhub although they thought that it didn't because they were actually transferring content too so it like they had a download button on every single video so that millions of people had the opportunity not just like YouTube when you can save it for later but actually possess it and then upload it again and again but wow but that just our laws have to evolve with the internet you know that so that it's understood that's not just for Studio brick and mortar porn companies that have to comply but if you're an internet porn company you have to comply as well so we need to see that happen for sure here yeah I can't believe that that hasn't you always assume I feel like as a kid that everything's kind of taken care of in the world I mean depending on your childhood but like things are organized and then you grow up and you're like no one has any idea what they're doing and nothing is organized at the layer you need it organized at like you would you would assume oh verification okay easy yep that's or like laws to protect you people are shocked that that's not you know just across the board the case with all online porn but it hasn't hasn't been that way but to the take it down point you really one minute is too long on one of these por sites you know 170 million visits per day on PornHub when a video is uploaded even if they took off the download button which they had to do they still could screen record I mean there's a million different ways you can save that video can also stop screen recording you that as theany you can't screen record like you can't screen record on Netflix and all this yes they can Implement that they're not doing that but they should they should be forced to that's a really good point that should be part of the Law to force them not to be able to screen record on these sites because obviously one minute's too long because once it's uploaded and that's the immortalization of the trauma that victims are so you know just traumatized by because they could try to heal they could go to therapy they could try to get beyond that rape but when that video keeps coming up again and again and again across the internet this you know I call a sadistic game of whack-a-mole where it's like that that scab that just gets peeled off and peeled off and it can never heal and so that's why obviously we have to prevent it from ever being uploaded in the first place right and then yes they should take it down after it's been identified but if we could if we could prevent it from ever getting on those sides like that's the big biggest win in the situation yeah CRA to happen so did you wild it's it's shocking how evil people can be it still shocks me it's gross you said you started out before you got into this like pornhab debacle in trafficking like researching trafficking trying to put an end to trafficking so how did that happen what's that beginning like yeah well I credit my dad my dad passed away in 2014 but he was a hugee influence on me from when I was very young and he um was somebody that had a heart for justice issues for human rights issues he grew up in the Middle East um a mid war Civil War in Aman Jordan and then he came to the US to to become a surgeon so he was a general surgeon and he dedicated his own life to saving lives like he could have done a lot of different things in his um medical profession but he wanted to really make a difference so you know even though he had to be up at all hours of the day and night running to the emergency room he was actually saving people's lives um and he was sacrificing to do that and he wanted to do that and as we were growing up like you know we had moments where we bonded most talking about issues of Human Rights war and genocide and slavery and watching documentaries together and watching the news and all of that so from a very young age I kind of had that instilled in me from my my dad and then one day in 200 I think it was in 2005 he was watching a documentary and he it was about child sex trafficking in Kolkata India and he called me into the living room to watch that with him and I was I'd never seen anything about trafficking or modern slavery before so it was all very shocking to me to see that and it was that moment that kind of inspired me to research more and then get involved in the fight against sex trafficking specifically and so i' been doing that for years really focusing on prevention like my heart is for prevention implementing laws raising awareness you know it's important to rescue people or to help them Escape or help them support them in their Journey um out of those situations of exploitation you know and and I'm so grateful for the people that do that in this field but I always um gravitated towards you know how can we prevent this from happening in the first place and so you know that was my focus was on laws to prevent trafficking for many years that was what what I focused on that makes sense yeah sounds like you had a good dad I had a good dad you have a good dad have a good dad I I've told you before I I I appreciate just seeing kind of your public relationship that you have with your dad and the way that you support each other and it's really beautiful I think it's cool to be able to teach kids that they can do something good beond Beyond you know themselves and not like not like activism in a negative way but like you you basically I think I I got taught from the time I was a child that like you have to do everything right and always make the right decision that's like aiming upward because people can go dark I didn't realize until I got older how evil people can be and like this is on another level of evil but you can raise kids in a way that they're hopefully not naive and able to make the right decisions um talking about prevention do you have tips for parents or friends or anybody who's around people who might be in a situation where they're getting coerced or trafficked and like what to look out for how to avoid it I I think one of the fears of having a kid too and I'm not a very paranoid person although I'm a little bit more paranoid now to be honest but it's like how do you warn kids to not fall prey to these people yeah and today it's not even even sending nudes today it's like I've got a seven-year-old she's going to be a teenager and it's like like and that's you know that's the kind of stuff that also was ending up on PornHub is self they call it self-generated seesam so self-generated child sexual abuse material yeah that they could have sent to a boyfriend right and then it gets out of hand it gets uploaded um other ways that children are being prayed upon today it's called sextortion it's so common and what what happens is that um young Twins and teens or really anybody that has access to a device and uh there's predators that are lurking you know trying to connect with children chat rooms or different apps or and they pretend to be another minor so they pretend that let's say say it's a girl right it's a like a 15-year-old girl and then so he'll pretend to be a 15-year-old boy and then they'll start talking and then uh you know there'll be some grooming going on and you know and then finally you know send me a nude image of yourself and then it's so common they do it so Thorne actually released a a report that said that I think it was one in seven children who was I think it was between 9 and 12 had sent a nude image of themselves 9 and 12 between 9 and 12 1 and seven and this was they had done a survey I think it was over a thousand kids um so it's very common today for that to happen right um and so then they'll say send it me a video then what they do is they say okay they they kind of reveal who they really are they say well we have the name we know you're who your parents are we know your teachers your classmates and if you don't do X Y and Z we're going to send these images of you or these videos that you made and the kids are terrified because they're so ashamed and they'll do what this criminal tells them to do whether it's to send more videos or to give them money and then sometimes they're so desperate in that moment moment that they try to commit suicide so really it's a life and death issue but to your point of like what do parents do I think one of the most important things to do besides just gosh in this day and age it's so hard to protect your kids from the online world it's so hard to be monitoring them all the time do your best right um in that regard but have a trusted relationship let your kid at least have one adult relationship whether it's an auntie or a teacher or you where it they it's like this shame free zone and they know that they could go and share anything and if they were in an emergency situation like that they know there is somebody that they can trust that they can go right to for help without shame and I think that is Lifesaver um for kids in in this day and age yeah I think that's really important I had that conversation actually with my daughter recently which was I've done like a parenting a little bit differently I think than how I was raised not that I'm complaining about how I was raised I was like I remember and I was quite depressed and sick as a teenager but I remember when I started to lie about going out or drinking or things um it was because I I was like hammered into me to tell the truth tell the truth tell the truth but I didn't really understand I guess on a spiritual level why to do that and I knew that if I said bad things I did I'd get grounded or punished and so I was like well I'm in this weird predicament of like I'm doing some things I shouldn't do but I don't have anybody to talk to necessarily without getting in trouble so I was like you I agree with raising a kid being like look I'm I'm going to instruct you in the right way to go but I'll never be mad at you for telling me the truth like I'll never be mad at you for telling me the truth even if you feel shame and guilt and it's something bad you've done tell me the truth and I'll help you figure it out and I won't be mad at you yeah that's kind of a hard balance right because you don't want to free go ahead and do whatever you want it's okay and but then there's the I I I I relate to that because my dad was you know I understood that he really wanted us to you know not do all those things that I ended up doing yeah and I didn't he didn't know he had no idea I was going out drinking drugs you know all the things that I did I know how do you stop that or it just depends if you have a wild card as a child I don't know I'm I'm going the route where I'm like K I'm not going to be mad at you it's not like I don't discipline yeah her either when she needs it I was like as a teenager what would I do to a teenager that was like yeah I've been you know drinking at my friend's house with people I don't know like ah yeah definitely don't do that I agree it's better though that if they could share it with you at least tell you so you know feel like they're not going to be punished for sharing the truth and that they can trust you to to guide them out of it I mean I think that's the key I didn't really have that either growing up because I didn't want to share it was going to get in trouble I think that's totally normal and you should like it's not like you should be encouraged to do those things and you shouldn't get in trouble at all but I was like maybe if me as a teenager maybe if I felt like I wasn't going to get punished I already there was still part of my underdeveloped brain that was like this is bad for me and I shouldn't be doing it yeah and so I'm thinking I don't even know if it'll work but I was like maybe if I didn't get in trouble then MH someone could talk to me and be like these are the reasons it's unsafe for you like at least that like this is why it's not safe for you other than the fact it's not good for you this is why it isn't safe and maybe that would have clicked it's just hard with like anybody young cuz they just these days with the pornography exposure and the Predators online and all of that for sure having that open line of communic they call it shame free zone for you to be able to communicate with your kids about that and because they do feel a lot of Shame involved in because K kids are when they and also like the grooming aspect of being exposed to porn at a very young age these days is having a really detrimental effect on kids oh yeah let's talk about that yeah do you so do you have numbers around that like what age are kids generally cuz I know you'll go to school and then some kid will show it to you too so what what age are kids usually exposed to porn I guess yeah I think it's now the stats and they have lots of different stats but you know 75% of kids by the time they're 15 are being exposed to online porn I get contacted all the time by young men especially who say I was eight I was nine I just got contacted a Week Ago by somebody who said they were six when they got exposed to the free online porn sites like PornHub and got comp you know they call it addicted like compulsive porn you starting when they were children like 6 8 9 10 years old and that continues and it's not just it's not Playboy like this is not you know the centerold of old like this is Hardcore you know this is violent but it's also criminal like what we know is things that I would never wish upon my worst enemy these kids could be witnessing as an 8-year-old child to develop their sexual template to have this as their sex education they could be watching oh yeah that's brutal the real rape or coercion all of these different things that are happening on the free porn tube sites and it's it's it's not just a free-for-all on the side of uploading like they're not verifying the ages of those who are accessing the free porn sites either so oh my gosh another level yeah yeah so so like kids kids are so I say kids are being exploited in front of the screen and they're being exploited in in back of the screen it is a form of secondhand sexual abuse for children to have um to witness this content um even just you know whatever if you would call it the vanilla pornography like kids should not they're not they're not ready to watch that but but that's not all that this is It's you know there's so much violence there's so much you know incest themes you know teen as one of the most popular um categories on these sites incest is so common incest themes and a lot of this is you know people who are consenting adults who are over 18 um and they're just pretending to do these things but a lot of this is actually real right we know that for a fact that a lot of this is actually real abuse of of children and and others and so there's a movement in the United States right now I'm grateful for it to enact age verification for those who are viewing these free user Genera porn sites so 17 states have adopted these are things that I just assumed kind of existed in this realm all they do not so like and there wasn't there wasn't even an ru18 clickthrough button that any 5-year-old could just click button there wasn't even that like now I think on mobile devices they finally have but just like are you 18 and then you just click it there's no actual verification that that's true but in these states across us where they're enacting this law PornHub is shutting itself down in protest of verifying that children are not accessing their site ew because they don't want to pay for it they don't want to pay the third party to have to verify those users because their business model depends on unlimited amounts of content to be I'm sorry unlimited amounts of traffic to be dist to to go to those sites without friction without any friction so they can sell those billions of advertising Impressions every year so they don't want to do it like pure evil what people who are anti- capitalist think evil corporations are like oh that capitalist Corporation oh 100% profit over the protection of children every single time and they've gone so far as to sue the state of Texas so Texas enacted age verification to protect protect the children of Texas from exposure to the PornHub crime scene and the other free user generated porn sites like it and pornnhub and its Partners sued the state of Texas they lost they appealed now it's at the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court currently is trying to decide whether states have the um right to implement age verification for these sites so we're going to know by June we're going to know what's going to happen with that I don't understand what the other side of the argument is the other side well for the porn sites they don't want to pay for it it's expensive right for so they're doing this all under the facade of free speech under privacy so they're saying it's so ridiculous that they're saying the angle they're going they're saying we care about privacy we do not want our users privacy at the same time they're they have a class action lawsuit against them for exploiting user data they don't you know having non-consensual content all over the site right I mean uh but yet they have the uh you know they go out and say this is about privacy we don't want people to have to hand over their ID but they don't have to hand over their ID to Pornhub they and they don't actually have to hand their ID over to anybody they have now technology where they can do in one second a facial scan using pixels and using um uh numbers and pixels AI That's trained on thousands if not millions of faces and in one second they can determine with almost let's say 99% accuracy how old that person is that is trying to access the site and they don't store that picture they just verify it and then they can create a token that could be used on multiple different porn sites so it's actually based on a misconception that that that's you know now if you're under 21 it the accuracy goes down right so if you're under 21 you would probably need to couple that with an ID for that third party to verify but you know these are which seems like a good idea right if you're looking at a you're over 21 it takes one second to look at that face and then determine whether you're an adult and then it's easy wow but they want to pretend it's hard they want to scare people to think that they're going to have to hand their ID to Pornhub yeah okay I was just wondering what their angle was but yeah that that yep that makes sense um okay you talked a little bit about or let's get into this aspect the more like psychological repercussions of watching porn uh do you know what happens to a developing brain or even an adult brain if you get addicted to porn is the porn addiction thing real so there's so much debate around this some people want to kind of split hairs over whether they can call it addiction or whether they have to call it you know compulsive or sexual compulsivity and you know there there's people all over the world who are you know by the thousands young men in forums saying that they can't control their porn use and that they want help right um and so whether you call it addiction or sexual compulsion you know I I think these people do need help if they can't control that and it's having a detrimental effect on their life um I'm not an expert in the brain science of porn addiction so that's you know I focus on you know the actual criminal content that's being all that but there is a really good book called your brain on porn there's a organization called the reward Foundation um there's lots of neuroscientists who are looking at this and um trying to understand the implications of it but you know there's people who are saying it's causing depression anxiety um uh you know they they're also you know saying that they have an issue where you know they may start out with one type of porn and they never imagined that they would kind of go down this where it's I think it's called habituation or um desens desensitization where they don't just need more porn to get that same dopamine hit where they need different kinds of porn so they need more novelty and then they end up going you know more violent maybe younger and they end up even sometimes uh as consumers of seesam child sexual abuse material when they didn't actually start out as a p a pedophile like they then went down that road because of you know the teen categories and then kind of going more and more extreme younger more violent things like that which is super detrimental I used to think that sounded crazy not that I was ever an expert in this at all but I was like there's no way like a porn addiction is an addiction like a drug addiction like that doesn't make sense but then over the last I guess it'd be maybe three or four years once I found out about PornHub and and all this cuz I knew a little bit about it um I've been talking to more and more people my age but like men in mostly who were like yeah I had a hard time dropping it and yeah I was desensitized and yeah I did make relationships harder all this which I don't know if it I don't know enough about the stats I'll have to have somebody on the podcast to talk about it because I was like I don't think I've heard from as many women that it does that to women but I can understand if you're getting this dopamine Spike constantly that it could be addictive yeah and there are a lot of people who are saying that I'm I mean just anecdotally I get messages all the time from especially young men but also women who say that they cannot stop they want to stop and they can't and sometimes they they're messaging me because they're saying well finally for the first time I feel like maybe I have the ammunition knowing that there's a victim on the other side of the screen to stop me from doing what I don't want to do and thank you for that like I needed that ammunition to give me the you know the fortitude to actually stop but they're telling me all the time like I can't I want to and I can't and so if you want to do something and you can't and you feel like it's bad for you whatever whatever we call it like let them get help and I think one of the horrible things is that there are people out there that are trying to give people help and they're being attacked all the time they're being um you know just there's it's hard it's really hard because there is so much financial interest from the porn industry to make sure that you know this doesn't seem like it could be a problem for people um MH yeah and that's probably I came from I don't know what your background is but like growing up in Toronto super liberal super liberal and so we my view until more recently was like kind of control yourself it's fine let people do whatever they want maybe which like I still kind of I don't even know what I think right now I'm gonna have to sit on that and and think about it um but a vanilla example I suppose would be I stopped watching horror movies I was obsessed with horror movies as a kid then this is like I said a vanilla example but I got completely desensitized to horror movies and I was like I got to a point I think it was at probably after I had a baby where I was like I don't really want to see that anymore or it was after I stopped taking anti-depressants probably I was like I don't want to watch horror movies anymore and I stopped and the first time I saw a horror movie which was like four years after I stopped watching them I was like oh my gosh blood like Gore this is cra crazy and so I think you can probably desensitize yourself as a human to content uh cuz when you stop watching certain content it's shocking and I can see that easily happening well that's the neuroplasticity because just like you know the brain Pathways you know they can connect in certain ways right it's kind of like they call it's like plastic right it's bendable but it goes both ways so if you make those negative Pathways or the desensitization and all of that stuff that happens habitually situation and TR I'm not a neuroscientist but I have read enough about this to understand that there you know Donald Hilton Dr Donald Hilton he's a um he's actually a a brain surgeon he's been investigating porn addiction for a long time and he talks about neuroplasticity but he says if you um actually stop right then you can actually retrain your brain Pathways to you know undo the damage that has been done so that's really encouraging I think to a lot of people to know that you know so probably when you stopped watching the horror movies for a long time and then when you saw them again it was shocking to you because you had kind of maybe un un undone some of that and desensitization in your brain I was surprised cuz I used to watch them with absolutely no like emotional response really now I was on anti-depressant so it's hard to say like what that was doing as well but I was surprised the first time I saw the beginning of a cuz I didn't watch it I was like nope that's too much for me so I thought I mean I'm sure it's easy to desensitize yourself yeah oh wild yeah and that does happen and I I mean I think there was just a a research paper out of um the University of New South Wales I just read Dr Michael Stalter so he investigates child sexual abuse material he's a professor and he puts out studies and what it was it was summarizing what they had looked at and they saw that there is some connections between um people who have who are daily porn consumers who have a hypersexuality that are viewing these kinds of categories like teen like incest like the very violent content and actual um you know they're they're showing a correlation between that and people acting out upon actual children and actually consuming also consuming real child sexual abuse material so like there is a concern here um for people who were viewing especially these problematic kinds of pornographic content um definitely yikes yeah not that everybody does it I mean no you know there's people who can watch that content and never act out right but there's also a concern that it can lead certain people down that path act out I mean that makes sense to be careful with your brain it's a very plastic entity like you like you said uh Laya where can people find you online obviously they can check out your book yes so take down book.com all proceeds author royalty proceeds from the sale of the book go to the Justice defense fund to help victims in their pursuit of Justice um and to implement these preventive policies people can sign the petition so we want more people to sign the petition trafficking Hub petition.com um and then they can follow me on social media I'm posting about this all the time you know I am not going to stop until we accomplish the goals of this movement um to see Justice fully served so they can follow me at lla melight um online wow okay I will link all those links Below in the description for anybody listening or watching good for you thank you so much for coming out here that is quite a monster to try and take on but good for you that needs to go well thank you for sharing this and using your platform to shine a light on it and I feel like these conversations are so crucial um because still so many people have no idea that this ever happened that's a problem so this is all part of it so thank you for for doing this [Music]

Who Is Laila Mickelwait?

The Story That Changed Laila’s Life Forever

How Easy It Was to Upload Crime to P*rnhub

Launching the #TraffickingHub Movement

The Global Petition and Media Firestorm

Credit Card Companies Cut Ties with P*rnhub

91% of P*rnhub Content Deleted

Why Verifying Uploaders Doesn’t Fix the Problem

Victims and Consequences

Inside MindGeek and How the System Enabled Abuse

What Allowed This to Go On for So Long

Shocking Content That Was Monetized and Ignored

The Need for Age and Consent Verification

How Laws Are Finally Catching Up

The Long-Term Trauma for Victims

Laila’s Origin Story

Parenting, Prevention, and Shame-Free Communication

Early Exposure to Porn: The Stats and Impact

Age Verification Laws and Industry Pushback

Supreme Court Battle: States vs. P*rnhub

P*rn Addiction and Its Neurological Effects

Why This Fight Is Far from Over