Pornhub Lawsuits: 300 Say Site Profited From Trafficking, Abuse

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Videographer Theodore Gyi was sentenced to four years in prison, while administrative assistant Valorie Moser awaits sentencing later this year. During the teen years, talk with your teen about expectations for digital management and help them to create habits around putting away their phone before bed, designing schedules for exercise and other offline time, and identifying focus settings for schoolwork to avoid multitasking with media. Friends become the predominant connection during adolescence, offering a safe space and emotional independence from parents, teachers, and other adults. Teens form more mature friendships and romantic relationships and they begin to feel a greater need to establish their own sexual identity. When Benson confronts the university’s president and accuses her of victim blaming, the president says that Evie is being expelled for making violent pornography videos, not for accusing Daniel and Matt of rape. Benson’s meeting at Hudson gets the attention of Dodds, who reprimands her for overstepping her bounds, but she asks Dodds if his concern has anything to do with Hudson University being the largest landlord of the city.

GirlsDoPorn owner charged with child porn for scene with 16-year-old

On January 2, 2020, after a 99-day bench trial, Judge Kevin A. Enright awarded the plaintiffs $13 million in compensatory and punitive damages. The defendants were ordered to remove all videos of plaintiffs from the Internet and cease all distribution of them. During the civil trial, Pratt, Garcia, Wolfe, and several other individuals were criminally indicted for sex trafficking. Most of the hours-long shoots happened in hotel rooms and at short-term rental units in San Diego, court records show.

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The 22 plaintiffs sought compensatory and punitive damages, alleged intentional misrepresentation, fraudulent concealment, misappropriation of name and likeness, and deceptive business practices, among other civil grounds. In writing about this case, Samantha Cole described the genre as “a fantasy that plays on coercion, and a real-life version of the ‘casting couch’ porn trope, which blurs the line between reality and fiction”—and sex trafficking, we may add. Of course, not every porn company tricks, forces, or coerces performers to have sex on camera.

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Through their lawyer, the women accused Pratt and his attorney of filing a bogus bankruptcy case purely to stall the civil trial. In March of 2019, a federal bankruptcy judge ruled that the civil case could proceed despite Pratt’s bankruptcy case, and Pratt voluntarily dismissed the bankruptcy case. After the girls agreed, they were flown to San Diego, but instead of modeling gigs, they were told the job was actually to appear in an adult film. The women were reassured that their videos would only be released on DVD to collectors in Australia and New Zealand, not online. Victims said in lawsuit filings that GirlsDoPorn and GirlsDoToys lured them into conversations by posing as a modeling agency in Craigslist ads, with links to fake sites, offering modeling gigs in cities throughout the U.S. and Canada. They eventually offered thousands of dollars to make adult videos and connected potential victims with fake performers who convinced them that they’d enjoyed the experience, according to the suit.

• The videos were heavily monetized and globally distributed on Pornhub, the world’s largest and most popular porn site.
• “As of December 12, 2020, MindGeek still hosts victims’ videos on its websites, including Plaintiffs,” it said.
• More than a dozen of these lawsuits were filed in the past month alone, and many more may be on the way.
• The 22 plaintiffs sought compensatory and punitive damages, alleged intentional misrepresentation, fraudulent concealment, misappropriation of name and likeness, and deceptive business practices, among other civil grounds.
• Nearly two dozen videos uploaded to Pornhub showed a 12-year-old Alabama boy being repeatedly drugged and raped.

This is particularly true for LGBTQ+ teens, who may not be provided as much information in sexual education classes. Some teens are sexting, and while this is usually consensual, girls are more likely to report that they were pressured into sending images of themself, and similarly, boys were more likely to respond that they would ask for sexual pictures from a partner. 73% of teens are exposed to porn by the time they are 17, with over half of teens reporting the first time they saw porn online was before they were 13.

Talk with your teen on a regular basis about what they are seeing and hearing both online and in person. You can ask them questions such as, “Has anything happened online that made you upset? Research shows that instead of simply creating rules without your child’s input, having open discussions with them on how to safely navigate the internet may be protective against cyberbullying. With a greater focus on peer relationships and increased smartphone ownership comes increased opportunities for bullying and exclusionary behaviors like ostracism or shunning. Teens can be the victim (one who is bullied), the perpetrator (the one doing the bullying), the bystander (one watching and allowing the bullying to happen), or a combination of all three at different times, yet they often don’t share with their parents when they are being bullied.

Information about something like this may technically be accessible, but there can be a comfort in assuming our experiences are universal, especially those which are painful or difficult, which might prevent a person from seeking it out. She does not annotate the interviews, and one of her skills as an interviewer is that she does not moralize at her subjects and avoids steering their answers. But Porn has the quality of a good novel, in that while reading it you often notice small details or perspectives which make you think about the world, or your own life, differently, without having a lesson overtly spelled out to you. It struck me while reading the above conversations, for example, that theoretically open, progressive public discourse around porn can have almost the same silencing effect as no discourse at all. In the sense that, when a consensus emerges on the progressive perspective to hold on a certain aesthetic of porn, it will change the way we speak and what we admit to, but perhaps not how we feel. I found myself wondering too if this kind of progressive consensus can have negative outcomes as well as positive ones.

Around 1.7 million people saw a warning before leaving Pornhub or making other searches related to legal material. They typically remained on the site and looked for other stuff,” Findlater says. “The influence for the millions of people that actually did a dubious search and then stopped doing that dubious search is a big win.” Not everyone was deterred, however. In the most persistent cases, around 400 people made 10 searches that triggered the message.