One of the things I love most about my job is the inspiring people I get to know.
One of those people is Laila Mickelwait, the founder and CEO of the Justice Defense Fund.
Mickelwait had fought against sex trafficking for years when in early 2020 she took on her biggest foe yet: Pornhub. And it all started one night on her laptop.
At that time, Pornhub was one of the most popular websites in the world, attracting billions of visits each month. It has faced a reckoning since.
While Mickelwait says she has no problem with legal pornography, she has zero tolerance for those who illegally profit from sex trafficking and child rape – and that’s what she found on Pornhub.
Mickelwait’s new book, “Takedown: Inside the Fight to Shut Down Pornhub for Child Abuse, Rape, and Sex Trafficking,” was released Tuesday.
I spoke with her last week about her book. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
I was hoping you could start off by talking about your past experience and how that connects with the work you’ve done for victims of Pornhub.
I’ve been involved in the fight against sex trafficking for 18 years. So the fight to hold Pornhub accountable was in context of a history of already for years being in this fight to stop sex trafficking and child sexual abuse. And what I began to notice as I was looking at the trends with this global crime is that it wasn’t just happening offline. It was being recorded, and it was being distributed and monetized online.
And so, as I began to continue to investigate that, I was trying to dig in to understand this intersection between the pornography industry and sex trafficking and these crimes and other harms.
I was paying attention when I was hearing news articles about pornography or the porn industry, and there were particular articles at the end of 2019 that caught my attention. And I talk about those in the book, and I can describe one of those instances that was of particular concern to me at that time, and it was about a 15-year-old girl who was missing for an entire year, and she was finally found after a Pornhub user had tipped off her mother that she was on the site, and her mom found her in 58 videos being raped for profit on Pornhub. Around the same time, the London Sunday Times had done an investigation, and they found dozens of illegal videos on the site within minutes, even children as young as 3 years old.
So it was these stories that began to just kind of recirculate in my mind. I would come back to them, and it finally produced this question one night: Just how is this happening?
And this all started in 2020?
Feb. 1, 2020, in the dark hours before dawn.
You very quickly got a movement started to force Pornhub to take down videos that depicted child rape and abuse. You started the Traffickinghub hashtag and started a petition that has received several million signatures. What made your efforts so successful?
I think that it goes back to this word “activism,” right? And I think the important job of an activist is to activate people. And I think that’s exactly what happened by just sharing this truth of what I discovered that night that all it took to upload user-generated sex videos to the world’s largest porn site was an email address. That’s it.
It was shocking to me when you walked through just how easy it was to create an account on Pornhub to post something.
Yeah, and realizing that it was a crime scene infested with real sexual crime and just sounding the alarm. And just welcoming and trying to activate people from all walks of life. And it became this real team effort where we had whistleblowers who were coming forward, and survivors who were coming forward, and attorneys and journalists and lawmakers, and everybody kind of taking their place and doing their part. And I think that is what made this effort particularly effective over the last few years.
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What kind of blew this all up was the realization that alongside pretend videos of children being raped were real videos of children being raped, and many times you couldn’t tell the difference, because they’re not verifying age and consent.
What was it like for you personally to hear all these heartbreaking stories from victims?
It was hard. It was heart-shattering every time. I felt like I never got used to hearing, and every situation was unique as well. But just to hear the way that these victims had the worst moments of their lives filmed. It’s one thing to be raped. It’s another thing to have that rape filmed and then distributed all over the world for profit and pleasure on Pornhub, where 5 million users an hour could have the opportunity to actually download because they had a download button on every video. They (the victims) called it the immortalization of their trauma, where they understood that even after they’re dead, people will be getting profit and pleasure from the worst moments of their lives.
Without justice, there’s not healing, and there’s not closure, and they need justice, not only against the abusers who abused them, but against the executives who profited and globally distributed and immortalized their trauma.
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Where do things stand now with Pornhub? I know you write about how the company deleted 80% of its website overnight because those videos and photos weren’t verified.
A lot has happened in the last four years. Pornhub has faced a reckoning. That is detailed in the book, as we have triumphs and challenges.
Today, we’re still waiting for justice to be fully served. We’re still waiting for criminal prosecution, not only for the company, but for its individual owners. There’s 26 lawsuits currently, on behalf of victims across the U.S., Canada and the U.K., multiple class-action lawsuits on behalf of tens of thousands of child victims, and so we’re in this process of trying to fight for justice and accountability.
And also, I think what’s really important is to put in place policies to make sure it doesn’t happen again, because we need to hold Pornhub accountable. But we need to make sure that a copycat website doesn’t pop up in its place.
Can you talk more about the Justice Defense Fund, which you started and run, and the work that you’re doing to help these victims?
I started the Justice Defense Fund in an effort to assist victims in their pursuit of healing and justice. We have two kinds of major initiatives that we work on. One is public pressure initiatives where we’re trying to shine a light on injustice, specifically on corporate bad actors, like Pornhub, who are involved in the distribution of illegal and criminal content.
And then we assist victims and walk with them through that journey of pursuing civil justice. If we can help victims hit them (companies like Pornhub) where it hurts, then this can produce not only much needed justice and healing and restitution for them, which they deserve, but also can help transform the system and the way that these things operate.
I know this isn’t why you did this, but your book is such a compelling story. As I was reading, I just kept thinking that it would make an amazing documentary or movie. Has anyone approached you about doing something like that?
In the last few days, even just since the book release, I’ve been contacted by a few documentary companies, and I hope that it becomes not only a documentary but a film, because not everybody reads books these days. I just want to see this message and this story spread far and wide, so that we can actually do something about this and stop it from happening in the future.
Ingrid Jacques is a columnist at USA TODAY. Contact her at ijacques@usatoday.com or on X, formerly Twitter: @Ingrid_Jacques
