A lawsuit filed by more victims of the sex trafficking operation claims that Pornhub’s moderation staff ignored reports of their abuse videos.
Sixty-one additional women are suing Pornhub’s parent company, claiming that the company failed to take down videos of their abuse as part of the sex trafficking operation Girls Do Porn. They’re suing the company and its sites for sex trafficking, racketeering, conspiracy to commit racketeering, and human trafficking.
The complaint, filed on Tuesday, includes what it claims are internal emails obtained by the plaintiffs, represented by Holm Law Group, between Pornhub moderation staff. The emails allegedly show that Pornhub had only one moderator to review 700,000 potentially abusive videos, and that the company intentionally ignored repeated reports from victims in those videos.
The damages and restitution they seek amounts to more than $311,100,000. They demand a jury trial, and seek damages of $5 million per plaintiff, as well as restitution for all the money Aylo, the new name for Pornhub’s parent company, earned “marketing, selling and exploiting Plaintiffs’ videos in an amount that exceeds one hundred thousand dollars for each plaintiff.”
The plaintiffs are 61 more unnamed “Jane Doe” victims of Girls Do Porn, adding to the 60 that sued Pornhub in 2020 for similar claims.
Girls Do Porn was a federally-convicted sex trafficking ring that coerced young women into filming pornographic videos under the pretense of “modeling” gigs. In some cases, the women were violently abused. The operators told them that the videos would never appear online, so that their home communities wouldn’t find out, but they uploaded the footage to sites like Pornhub, where the videos went viral—and in many instances, destroyed their lives. Girls Do Porn was an official Pornhub content partner, with its videos frequently appearing on the front page, where they gathered millions of views.
read more: https://www.404media.co/girls-do-porn-victims-sue-pornhub-for-300-million/
It’s a difficult area to research because it is impossible to know the direction of the causal arrow; predators may seek out the most violent porn, or sexual violence might be normalised by viewing it, and quite likely a bit of both. But you can’t just say that the production didn’t involve real people therefore no one is harmed.
This is from an anti-porn site so clearly not neutral: Is There a Connection Between Violent Crime and Watching Porn?
Very little of the evidence they cite tries to distinguish between violent porn and any porn but there are some snippets worth taking seriously [numbers in brackets are the references]:
I don’t have the answer. I am not against porn in general. I am obviously against porn where performers have been coerced or mistreated (most of it, tbf) and I do think it is healthier to seek out porn which is explicitly consensual.
Men who are interested in having real, consensual sex could probably do themselves a lot of favours by seeking out female porn directors who are making woman-friendly porn. And, given the link between watching sexual violence and doing sexual violence, whatever the direction of the causal arrow, if you don’t want to be that guy avoiding violent porn is probably a good idea.