New book describes one woman’s fight to bring down Pornhub

An activist fighting to shut down a porn website – after finding dozens of examples of rape, torture and child abuse – has documented her Erin Brockovich-style fight in a new book.

Laila Mickelwait’s book, “Takedown: Inside the Fight to Shut Down Pornhub for Child Abuse, Rape and Sex Trafficking,” comes out this week and documents her five-year campaign to put the Canadian porn website out of business.

Anti-trafficker Mickelwait, who grew up in Southern California, first became aware of the possibility of content being uploaded to the site without control in 2020 after reading in 2019 about a missing 15-year-old who was found after being discovered in content on the site.

Mickelwait, 41, was working for a nonprofit foundation fighting sexual exploitation at the time and decided to test how easy it was to upload videos. She discovered that everything she posted – even empty videos – went online without any control from the adult video site, which has 5.8 billion monthly visitors.

She launched a one-woman campaign under the hashtag Traffickinghub, which many believe is similar to Erin Brockovich’s approach. She tried to force Pornhub to shut down, collecting evidence and posting about her campaign on social media.

On X, she wrote: “It’s time to shut down the super predator site Pornhub and hold the executives behind it accountable.”

In a video promoting her new book this week, the founder and executive director of the Justice Defense Fund described her initial shock at how easy it was to upload potentially criminal content. She said she would not stop her campaign until “Pornhub is held accountable for what they did.”

She described the upload system as follows: “In less than ten minutes, with just an email address, I was able to upload content that went live on the site.”

“They didn’t ask for identification. They didn’t ask for a consent form to make sure this wasn’t a victim of rape or human trafficking.”

The mother says the site is “infested with real sex crimes.”

Several whistleblowers confirmed the veracity of her findings and even the former owner of the site contacted her and told her that he wanted to help.

In her book she writes: “I was sent links from victims all over the world. It was like a tsunami. Pornhub was not just a website, it was a crime scene.”

It asked Visa and Mastercard to cut off their business relationships with the brand. They initially refused, but then did so.

Since then, numerous civil lawsuits have been filed against Pornhub. The activist said these lawsuits have been attacks by the company on both her and the Victims say: “They don’t want to stop, they make a lot of money.”

Finally, she said Pornhub deleted 80 percent of its content, destroying 10 million videos, after removing videos from people who refused to be verified.

In the video trailer for her book about her investigation, she breaks down in tears and says the victims were “so happy and relieved because their rape videos were no longer on Pornhub for the first time in years.”

So far, Pornhub has made some efforts to improve the site’s moderation by using AI and more moderators, and in September it will introduce an age verification process for uploaded videos.

But Mickelwait, who has been researching and fighting the injustice of sex trafficking for over 15 years, says she won’t stop until she gets answers from Pornhub about how such content was allowed to be uploaded, and she wants the company’s owners and executives to finally be brought to justice through criminal prosecution.

Takedown: Inside the fight to shut down Pornhub over child abuse, rape and sex trafficking will be published by Penguin Random House on July 23