Accidentally Unsealed Court Docs Further Expose P*rnhub in Today's Bombshell
New York Times Article by Nicholas Kristof
Laila Mickelwait at Justice Defense Fund and Traffickinghub laila@lailamickelwait.org
The records from an Alabama class action lawsuit certified by the court on behalf of “tens of thousands” of child victims, show internal discussions where P*rnhub staff openly acknowledged the presence of child sexual abuse material (CSAM), laughed about it, ignored survivor pleas, and chose profit over protection.
“There is A LOT of very, very obvious and disturbing CSAM here,” wrote one employee.
Another joked: “I hope I never get in trouble for having those vids on my computer LOOOOL.”
The Revelations Are Staggering:
- 684 million monetized views of child rape: One internal memo revealed that videos depicting child r*pe had been viewed 684,000,000 times before they were removed.
- Backlog of 706,000 flagged videos: As of May 2020, P*rnhub had more than 700,000 videos flagged for sexual crime or other serious violations—many of which remained online because company policy delayed review until a video was flagged at least 16 times.
- 155,447 videos on P*rnhub used the keyword “12yo.” Other categories that the company tracked were “11yo,” “degraded teen,” “under 10” and “extreme choking.”
- An internal message from 2020 notes that a filter for “underage” turned up 183,301 videos on the site.
- One employee advises another not to copy a manager when they find sex videos with children. The other has the obvious response: “He doesn’t want to know how much C.P. we have ignored for the past five years?” C.P. is short for child p*rnography.
- Victim Serena Fleites, filmed at age 13, had her abuse video reach 2.7 million views on Pornhub.
- Victim Stephanie Stewart, raped at 15, found her video with over 1 million views, and her pleas for removal were ignored.
- In one internal note, a P*rnhub employee said a user who posted a child sex video shouldn’t be banned because “the user made money.”
- In another memo, P*rnhub managers proposed words to be banned from video descriptions — such as “infant” and “kiddy” — while recommending that the site continue to allow “brutal,” “childhood,” “force,” “snuffs,” “unwilling,” “minor” and “wasted.”
- In one set of messages, executives discuss whether to ban the use of the phrases “young girl,” “first anal crying” and “abused by daddy.” In the end, they decide that those terms are acceptable.
- In yet another message, staff members note that the P*rnhub algorithm offered as related searches “12 years old” and “little young girl.”
Deliberate Suppression & Search Optimization for Abuse
- P*rnhub intentionally reduced flagging by allowing only registered users to report abuse. One staff note said this “will greatly reduce overall flag volume.”
- Executives debated banning words like “young girl” and “abused by daddy” but decided to keep them to maintain traffic.
- Their SEO strategy was explicitly designed to direct search queries like “stop, it hurts porn video” and “gorgeous teen strips naked” to P*rnhub.
Background
The leaked documents came from lawsuits brought by victims of child sex trafficking and abuse whose videos were hosted on P*rnhub without consent. The discovery material reveals not just shocking content—but an entire corporate culture that systemically ignored criminal abuse in pursuit of market dominance.
Kristof’s piece builds on his 2020 article, “The Children of P*rnhub,” which triggered global backlash, Visa, Mastercard and Discover severing ties with the site, and the deletion of over 10 million videos and 30 million images in what Financial Times has called “probably the biggest takedown of content in internet history.” This new expose offers the most concrete and explosive evidence to date of P*rnhub’s corporate knowledge and willful complicity. Since 2020, 25 lawsuits have been filed by victims including multiple class actions on behalf of tens of thousands of child victims.
Justice Defense Fund (JDF) Calls for Immediate Action
“Illegal content is still proliferating on P*rnhub,” Mickelwait told me. “P*rnhub doesn’t seem to care.”
Yet Mickelwait also acknowledges the progress. “Once they realize the risk is greater than the benefit, they’re forced to change,” she said.
The Justice Defense Fund is calling on:
- The U.S. Department of Justice and Canadian authorities to bring full criminal prosecution against Pornhub and its executives. In Dec. 2023, the Eastern District of New York entered into a deferred prosecution agreement with Pornhub’s parent company—an agreement that represents a grave miscarriage of justice. This deal must be rescinded immediately, and the individuals responsible must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
- Congress to enact federal legislation like the PROTECT Act requiring age and consent verification on all platforms that distribute explicit content.
- Financial institutions to join Visa, Mastercard, Discover, and PayPal in permanently severing ties with Pornhub and its parent company, Aylo. JDF also calls on Visa, Mastercard, and Discover to immediately implement policies to disallow the use of their cards on any website distributing user-generated pornography that does not reliably verify the age and ID of every person in every video and image.
The question now isn’t whether they knew; the question is: Will there be justice? This was far beyond negligence. It was systemic criminal conduct—monetized sexual abuse on an industrial scale, driven by willful corporate decisions. These newly released documents confirm what survivors have long known: Pornhub executives knew they were distributing child rape—and they chose profits over children’s lives.
Why, in ten years, did Trudeau neither do nor say anything about this monstrous atrocity that was happening in the city he represents in parliament? But then, he never said, nor did a single thing about child sexual abuse in any of its myriad forms.
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