An activist fighting to have a pornography website shut down (after finding dozens of examples of rape, torture and child abuse) has documented her Erin Brockovich-style battle in a new book.
Laila Mickelwait’s book, Takedown: Inside the Fight to Shut Down Pornhub for Child Abuse, Rape and Sex Trafficking, is out this week and documents her five-year campaign to force the Canadian pornography website to shut down.
Mickelwait, an anti-trafficking activist who grew up in Southern California, first became aware of how content could be uploaded to the site without scrutiny in 2020, after reading about a missing 15-year-old girl in 2019 who was found after being seen in the site’s content.
Mickelwait, 41, who at the time worked for a non-profit sexual exploitation charity, decided to test how easy it was to upload videos and found that everything she posted, including blank videos, were being published unchecked by the adult industry video site, which has 5.8 billion monthly visitors.
Anti-trafficking activist Laila Mickelwait’s book, Takedown: Inside the Fight to Shut Down Pornhub for Child Abuse, Rape and Sex Trafficking, is out this week and details her four-year fight to shut down the Canadian porn site.
Mickelwait discovered in 2020, while working for a nonprofit charity focused on sexual exploitation, that video content was not subject to verification on Pornhub, allowing criminals to post videos of child abuse, rape and torture.
Using the hashtag Traffickinghub, she launched a one-woman campaign, which many have said is similar to the approach taken by Erin Brockovich, to try to force Pornhub to shut down, gathering evidence and posting on social media about her campaign.
She wrote on X: ‘It’s time to shut down the super-predatory site Pornhub and hold the executives behind it accountable.’
In a video promoting her new book this week, the founder and CEO of the Justice Defense Fund described her initial shock at how easy it was to upload potentially criminal content and says she won’t stop campaigning until “Pornhub answers for what it’s done.”
Describing the upload system, he said: ‘In less than ten minutes, with just an email address, I was able to upload content that was published on the site.
“I was not asked for any identification or a consent form to ensure that I was not a victim of rape or human trafficking.”
The mother says the place had become “infested with real sexual crimes.”
Several whistleblowers have confirmed to her that what she found was true, and even the former owner of the site contacted her to say he wanted to help.
In her book, she writes: “I received links from victims all over the world. It was like a tsunami. Pornhub was not just a website, but a crime scene.”
He asked Visa and Mastercard to cut ties with the brand, a request they initially resisted but eventually complied with.
Since then, many civil cases have been filed against Pornhub, and the activist claims that those legal cases triggered attacks by the company against both her and the… victims, saying: “They don’t want to stop, they are making too much money.”
Mickelwait says she will stop at nothing to get answers from Pornhub, which she says has more than 300 victims around the world who have come forward saying they did not consent to content posted on the site.
Ultimately, Pornhub removed, it says, 80 percent of its content, deleting 10 million videos after removing the videos of those who refused to be verified.
In the video trailer for her book about her investigation, broken down, she says the victims were “very happy and relieved because for the first time in years, their rape videos were not on Pornhub.”
So far, Pornhub has made some efforts to improve site moderation, using artificial intelligence and more moderators. In September, an age verification process will be implemented for uploaded videos.
But Mickelwait, who has been investigating and fighting the injustice of sex trafficking for more than 15 years, says he won’t stop until he gets answers from Pornhub about how such content was allowed to be uploaded, and says he wants the company’s owners and executives to finally face justice through legal proceedings.
Takedown: Inside the Fight to Shut Down Pornhub for Child Abuse, Rape and Sex Trafficking is published July 23 by Penguin Random House
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