Shaun Newman Podcast - #696 - Laila Mickelwait

Episode Date: August 21, 2024

She is the Founder/CEO of the Justice Defense Fund, the Founder of Traffickinghub and Author of national bestseller Takedown: Inside the Fight to Shut Down P*rnhub for Child Abuse. Laila has emerged as a pivotal figure in the fight against sexual exploitation and trafficking, particularly through her campaign against Pornhub, which she accuses of enabling and profiting from such crimes. Clothing Link:⁠⁠⁠https://snp-8.creator-spring.com/listing/the-mashup-collection⁠⁠ Text Shaun 587-217-8500 Substack:https://open.substack.com/pub/shaunnewmanpodcast E-transfer here: [e-mail] Silver Gold Bull Links: Website: https://silvergoldbull.ca/ Email: [e-mail] Text Grahame: [phone]

This is Vance Crowe. This is Tom Longo. This is Drew Weatherhead. This is Marty Up North. This is JP Sears, and you're listening to the Sean Newman podcast. Welcome to the podcast, folks. Happy Wednesday, how's everybody doing today? Before we get to a few things, how about we start with Silver Gold Bull?

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reference the podcast. As I keep reiterating, they do pay attention to the analytics of that and what it means for, you know, sponsoring independent media in the future. And hopefully, Hopefully, well, we've already seen great things from all of you fine folks. I just keep pounding on it so that when you do go do make your purchases, tossing, yeah, something about listening or hearing them on the SMP really, really helps out, and I appreciate it. Of course, if you're in Canada or the United States, silvergoldbould.com for all your silver and gold gold needs. Caleb Taves Renegade Acres Caleb and he's going to be joining us for

He's going to be on a blue-collar roundtable The next Guardian plumbing and heating blue-collar roundtable is going to be coming up here very short-like So he's going to be on there And he created this spot on the podcast For different community things And right now I've been talking a lot about the SMP community That's all of you fine folks

And what is on top of the mind today Has been the cornerstone Forum 2025. We're in the, we're getting close to finalizing date and location. And one of the things I was just curious, before we finalize anything,

I was, you know, if you want to have your say, if you care, if it was in Calgary, does that make it any more like I wasn't going to come to Lloyd or I'll come wherever it is? I'm curious. I know there's lots of people who listen from across all of

Canada. There's growing population in the United States, would an international airport you fly into Calgary make your life easier to where it's more conducive to you coming to the next cornerstone forum? Or do you care and Lloyd Minster where it has been housed last year, well this past April and I've ran several events through Lloyd Minster? This is a discussion that's ongoing. We're exploring this and we're trying to finalize it here over the next like 10 days. That's the hope. And I'm just curious. I would love to hear from all of you. Does it matter? Calgary, Lloyd Minster, you know, send me a text, an email. We'd love to hear from any of you, all of you, your thoughts on it. I do appreciate

your feedback on, you know, different things like this when we're trying to move the needle forward and we're planning out the next Cornerstone Forum, hoping to have everything available and starting to announce speakers and all those different things in the near future. And like I say, right now we're just finalizing Calgary or Lloyd Minster. There's some details we've got to jump through first. And I just want to hear from you. You know, if it's a resounding, just leave it in Lloyd Minster. We can do that.

But also if you're like, man, I would totally come in an international airport so I could fly in or maybe there's some things with proximity to the mountains or you kind of get the point. Calgary is definitely different than Lloyd in lots of different respects and would love to hear from you. So shoot me a text or fire me an email. Would love to hear your thoughts. and steer butchery with the summer still in uh you know we're still rolling along we got september long coming up here and you need to have the barbecue rolling along you need to have it fired up and if you

need some barbecue uh cuts or some smoke something to fill the smoker with make sure you stop in and talk to umber the butcheress of the deer and steer give her a call 780 870 8700 that long weekend is coming up real fast and you want to make sure that uh you got things to uh toss on the old barbecue or or in maybe the smoker. Okay, I think that's pretty much what I got today. Let's get on to that tale of the tape. She is the founder and CEO of the Justice Defense Fund, the founder of Trafficking Hub and the author of the National Bestseller Takedown,

Inside the Fight to Shutdown Pornhub for Child Abuse. I'm talking about Lila Mickleweight. So buckle up, here we go. Welcome to the Sean Neumann podcast. Today I'm joined by Lila Micklewight. So, ma'am, thanks for hopping on. Yeah, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure. You know, one of the lovely things about X, I'm going to stop calling it Twitter here,

I swear, one of these days, is I keep stumbling into people that I'm like, normally you wouldn't, you know, like, it's a lovely thing about the internet these days. And certainly a little bit of free speech in getting to like open up some conversations that I don't think would be, you know, normally talked about around the water cooler. And that stumbled me into you. And I don't know how long I was talking about my with my brother before I stepped in the studio today. I don't know how long I've been trying to get you on. It feels like sometimes, so I'm happy to have you. But I, other than following you on Twitter and, and knowing you have a

book come out and other things, a few different things, I'm like, okay, we got to just start with, who are you? And how does this all come to be that, you know, you start into the world of sex trafficking and taking on of all things, or maybe that shouldn't even be the way I say it, porn hub, which has become, I don't know, a juggernaut of a site and the money there and everything else. I'm sure you can break it down way better than I ever could. But just, I don't know, Lila, tell me a little bit about yourself before we get into probably one of the darkest conversations this podcast is seen in quite some time. Yeah, sure. Happy to, you know, give you a little bit of background. I mean, I think now I'm at 18 years that I've been combating the injustice

of sex trafficking, so it's been a while. And, you know, really I owe it to my father's influence on me. He was a wonderful man, great influence in my life. He really cared about issues of injustice, human rights. He was the type of person that didn't spend much time watching entertainment, but instead was watching war documentaries and the news and always kind of very attuned to the plight of, you know, press groups around the world. And that's how I bonded with him most when I was young was over these kinds of deep and heavy conversations that were really meaningful. And I had my years of kind of going off and trying all different kinds of things to try to see what, you know, what was my, what I wanted my focus

to be for my life. But I ended up coming back around to this. And really, again, I owe it to my dad. It was him who introduced me to a documentary about child sex trafficking in Calcutta, India. and just shocked and horrified me and really set me on this path of learning, research, education, and ultimately engaging in this battle against sex trafficking. And I'm still doing it today. So that's kind of the trajectory of how I ended up doing this work. And a few years ago, well, not a few, I mean, now, gosh, it's been over 10 years ago, I began to investigate the intersection between the porn industry and sex trafficking and forms of

abuse. And so I understood that sex trafficking wasn't just happening offline. It was also being filmed and uploaded and monetized online. And I wanted to learn and all I could about how that was happening. And so I began to investigate, research, learn. And so my antenna was up and I was paying attention to the headlines. And it was late 2019 when I started seeing these really horrifying headlines about child victims that were ending up their rape videos and abuse videos on Pornhub. And it prompted a question of how in the world did this happen? And that's when the trafficking hub movement began was when I tested the upload system for Pornhub one night out of curiosity about some of these children who actually ended up on the site and realized that all it took,

was an email address to upload content to the site, the user, sorry, the YouTube of porn. And because of that, I started to connect the dots and understood that the site was actually infested with videos of real sexual crime. And that Porn Hub was not a porn site. It was actually a crime scene. You know, children, even as young as three, were ending up of being abused on this site, but not just children, adults, you know, non-consensual image-based abuse, revenge, porn, rape, trafficking, you name it. that crime was being uploaded to Pornhub. And that's how this kind of evolved was from that kind of unexpected moment,

where it started organically when I tested that upload system and realized what we were dealing with and felt compelled to sound the alarm on what was going on. Go back to the upload. Okay, you sit down, you're like, okay, I'm going to see how easy this is. You know, I'm just trying to think of anything in today's world. how many hoops you have to jump through in order to do nothing nefarious, just like, you know, almost sign up for an X account for Pete's sake, right? Like you've got to give more than just, hey, it's me, and I'm going to put this on,

and here's in a video that people can go watch. You know, and saying that I wonder about YouTube, but then I go, but you're not, it's not porn, right? I mean, like, they have whole, so many different stipulations. is like there was nothing I guess I'm no it was the only an email address anonymously in under 10 minutes anybody in the world could upload anybody can watch without an email address you know children could end up on porn hub in a few clicks by accident on their home page and witness a real crime scene as their sex education from a very young age any child with a tablet is in danger of that happening but from the upload side I mean all it took to upload was

literally an email address. You clicked a box with some legal jargon that nobody read and uploaded the video. And in moments, it went live. And because of that non-verification process, you have to understand that this is not professionally produced pornography that's on the world's most popular porn tube sites that dominate global distribution of pornography. These are user-generated, meaning YouTube of porn, literally anybody with an iPhone, a camera could film a sex act anywhere. and uploaded online. And so many of those were, you know, perhaps even recorded consensually to begin with, but uploaded non-consensually or blatantly child abuse, rape, trafficking,

even self-generated child pornography because in a digital age, so many children end up sexting and distributing these kinds of images between themselves, but then they were getting uploaded to Pornhub and monetized. You know, that's a really important part of all this. You know, some people ask, well, you know, why are you going after Pornhub? They're a platform where these people are uploading and they don't really have control over what's happening. And nothing could be further from the truth. And, you know, what we explore in my book, Takedown is the onion, you know, we kind of peel back the

onion layers of deep complicity of Pornhub and its owners in the decisions that they made that enabled and the global distribution of this content and the monetization of it, because it's free porn, but it's not free. I mean, it exists for a very commercial purpose, and that's to make hundreds of millions of dollars off of this free porn for Porn Hub and its parent company Mindgeek. And they do this primarily by selling advertisements, but also they do pay to download content and premium subscriptions,

but primarily it's advertising that is the main way that they're making this month, and they're selling 4.6 billion ad impressions on Pornhub every day to advertisers. And these ads that were being sold, they're around the videos in the middle. You know, if you press pause in the middle of a child abuse video, an ad would pop up. And that's how they were monetizing this illegal content across the site. And the reason why, you know, I say that there's this deep knowing complicity of the owners in what was going on, and the executives who were making the decisions was we have examples of things that were uncovered in this trafficking hub movement as it gained viral traction and whistleblowers and

insiders from the company are coming forward and then I begin talking to victims and just learning more and more and what I found out was they only had 30 moderators in a small moderating office in Cyprus that were in charge of reviewing the millions of videos that were uploaded to Pornhub and all the other big porn tube sites that Mind Geek owns. So Mind Geek's the parent company of Porn Hub. They own most of the world's most popular porn sites and brands, including most of the world's most popular tube sites. So you have Pornhub, UPo, Tube 8, Red Tube, Gay Tube, X Tube, Extreme Tube.

So many of these tubes. And Pornhub alone had 6.8 million videos being uploaded every year. That would take you 169 years to watch. if you put those videos back to back. That's just the videos. That's not counting the millions of images that were being uploaded every year. And so these 30 moderators worked 10 per shift per eight-hour shift.

Think about bathroom breaks, if they have cigarette breaks, eight hours. And they were watching between 1,000 and up to 2,000 user-generated porn videos per shift. They were clicking through them mostly with the sound off. and at the same time not verifying age or consent. And that's how the site became awash with illegal videos. And to kind of give context to that, Facebook has, you know, 15,000 of these moderators. Pornhub and all of Mind Geeks porn tube sites put together had 10 working per shift.

I'll give you just one more example. They had one person. So this is a company that had 1,800 employees in Montreal at their headquarters. They are a multinational corporation making hundreds of millions of dollars a year. 1,800 employees. They had one person working five days a week that was tasked to review videos flagged by users as violating terms of service, including child abuse, rape, and sex trafficking. And they had a backlog of 7,6,000 flagged videos.

They had a policy where a video had to be flagged 15 times, over 15 times before it would even be put in Q for review. And so that means a victim could flag their video on the site 15 times it wouldn't even have been put in line for review. Those are the kind of policies that they had in place to ensure that this illegal content could stay on the site, raking in money for them. and it's just unconscionable the way that they have operated all these years since 2007. I would push listeners to go to your website because I read the article with the emails. Some of the stats you're thrown out of the backlog of over 706,000 flag videos. The fact they only had one, you know, the fact that it was a policy only in a review after 15 flags. And I'm reiterating what you're saying because when I first started reading that, I'm like,

oh boy this is um this is something but i what sticks out more to me and maybe this is because i sit north of the border from you you said something about canada in there and i was trying to catch the other part and i just want to make sure i heard that correct the headquarters was in montreal did i hear that right or you heard that right yeah that's where they had so not only so not only is this awful lila it's awful on epic proportions and canada is complicit in it 100% and i'll tell you another thing that, you know, there's mandatory reporting laws in Canada where a company and its owners are required by law. It's a criminal offense that warrants up to five years in prison if they know about child sexual abuse material and don't report it. And we have evidence and

testimony and depositions that show that porn have went over 13 years not reporting any known child sexual abuse that they knew about. Now, the implications of that are horrific because they knew about child sexual abuse that was on that site for sure. There's no question. Victims were begging and pleading. I saw the begging emails from victims underage victims saying, you know, please get my videos down. And then when they would get them down after they were hassled to prove that they were underage sometimes or, you know, prove that they were a victim, if they were any answer at all, the videos would just get reuploaded again and again and again. And the head of the Canadian Child Protection Organization,

the clearinghouse in Canada, where those videos would need to be reported, as well as the clearinghouse in the United States, the heads of those organizations testified before Canadian Parliament that they had gone 13 years without a single report from Pornhub or its parent company about child sex police they knew about. That is a direct violation of Canadian law, not to mention the hosting and the possession of, you know, countless videos of underage child sexual abuse material,

which it's an offense to just possess that content. But they also had a download button on every single video. And this is a download button, not like you see on YouTube where you kind of can save it for later when you're off the internet. It was a possession of the video. So it went from their servers and then it would be on the device of each user, who could download and possess that child sexual abuse video and upload it again and again to Pornhub or across the internet.

That's another crime to actually distribute it. Then there were instances that we know about that have been documented where they actually had featured child sexual abuse videos on the home page. So tags in those videos would be like not 18 CP standing for child pornography, you know, uploaded by a user with, the name ua sex which stands for underage sex and commenters were saying they know the child in the

video and they are under age and those would be featured videos where porn hubs system would choose the video put it on the home page so they have 47 billion visits to the site every year so that it could get more clicks more views more advertising impressions again it's illegal to advertise child sexual abuse material. So it's unbelievable. That's in addition to so many other things, like the Privacy Commissioner doing a multi-year study of Pornhub and speaking to victims and understanding its system

and saying that they did violate Canadian privacy laws as well by distributing non-consensual content. And there's been no criminal prosecution. There's been no criminal penalties in Canada yet. And it's just unconscionable because if we do not hold abuser is accountable when we have this kind of evidence of their wrongdoing, how are we ever going to prevent this from happening in the future? Because these companies will just think this is the cost of doing business. And in order to actually stop this from happening in the future, we have to

end impunity. And we have to have serious consequences or there's no way we're going to be a deterrent to future abusers. So it's so important to hold them accountable. Well, I'll tell you this about Canada. know, we got a lot of problems. So, I don't know, maybe people, maybe my audience already knew this was happening. That is one piece of the detail I did not realize. So that is, that's interesting, because, like, you know, I assume you're working with people up here in the north, correct? I mean, there's allies everywhere. So we've had 600 organizations that have joined this effort to hold Pornhub accountable, you know, 2.3 million people sign the petition. Sure. I just look at it. I go, so it's in my country, right? And I sit here and I go, so obviously there's some things,

ramifications here from a Canadian standpoint that is going to hit some years when this airs. And, you know, there's certain people I'm like, I wonder what they're going to say about this, because I guess I just, I had no idea. So I'll put that in the back of my brain somewhere for a future date when we'll see what the audience thinks and different people, just on this side. If the headquarters is going to be here, more people need to know that, like, immediately, which they will. You know, when you go back to uploading and realizing how, like, ridiculously easy and scary that is to get on this site to upload things, I'm sitting there and I'm going, like, you know, this isn't like even a million dollar company. This is like, I actually don't know. I don't know. You probably know the number.

I don't know. How rich is porn up? Like I, yeah, I mean, they've got different valuations, a multi-billion dollar valuation. Right. So this is like- Company has plummeted since 2020 because they, you know, through all of this, we did pressure the credit card companies. They lost Visa MasterCard and Discover payment processing, which was their worst nightmare for that to happen because the credit card companies were enabling and profiting themselves from a cut of every sale of every advertising. What did, what did, did you ever get an opportunity to chat with? Visa or MasterCard. Oh, yeah.

So in my book, I have chapters of verbatim dialogue that, you know, was documented from the beginning of 2020 all the way through 2022. We had this fight with the executives of Visa and MasterCard to get them to finally, at the end of, well, in the summer of 2022, finally cut off Pornhub once and for all. And that's a huge battle. I mean, that was part of the best. battle was not just holding Pornhub accountable, but holding its enablers accountable, mainly the credit card companies. And so that's an important part of the story that's told

and takedown is this back and forth with the executives. You kind of go behind the scenes and you hear those conversations that were happening or read them. So apologies for hopping in. You brought up multiple times and I'll make sure I put a link into it. But if people are listening and they're like, well, where do I find said book? The, the first place I'd push everybody would be your Twitter and to go follow you there. But please, for the audience, you know, like where can they buy a copy? Yeah, it's published in Canada. So Penguin Random House published it in the United States.

They've also published it in Canada. So you could just search Lylel McElwake-Takedown. The book is called Take Down Inside the Fight to Shut Down Pornhub for Child Abuse, Rape and Sex Trafficking. And it's available in audiobook and e-book and physical, you know, hardcover as well. and so they can actually, you know, and it's the most comprehensive indictment. Not only is it a story, I mean, it's told in first person, present tense, where you start that night that I described in 2020 and you go on this journey of discovery with me to meet the executives, to meet the owners, to go inside the Montreal headquarters because I spent dozens of hours

in conversation with company insiders, family insiders from the executives who had hid themselves from the public for so many years. I mean, the majority shareholder of PornHub was completely unknown to the public until after 2020, when all of this began. And thanks to the help of many people, you know, we were finally able to find him, to name him. And now he's personally being sued by child victims in dozens of lawsuits in the United States. Who was he? His name's Bern Bergmehr. So he, well, and that was until 2023 when the porn.

When Pornhub was sold, you know, they actually, Mind Geek, the company that was the parent company, Pornhub doesn't exist anymore. They renamed it to ILO. And the company, the CEO and the CIO were forced to resign. And the company was sold to a hastily concocted private equity firm. It's Canadian. And they named themselves, ironically, ethical capital partners. and they are currently trying to whitewash, rebrand, and save Horn Hub.

Forgive me. You got me, I don't know, not flat-footed, but that's kind of how I feel. I'm like, this Canadian part of it is really, you know, I don't know, how much do you, you know, like once again, I follow you, and I don't know if I've ever picked up on the Canadian piece of it, which is, you know, I've probably just blind or it goes in one of your out there other some days. and I don't think that's you know it's just a flaw I guess but you know when you talk about

it rebranding here in Canada why is it Canada and not and whether you know the answer to this why isn't it the United States why isn't it Mexico why isn't it Europe why Canada what is it that Canada laws allow because you've already pointed out that it doesn't

they don't allow it right we don't allow it yet yet I'm laughing in my head a little bit because I'm like I'm looking around the room and some of the things that you know we've been a part of on this show in the last five years. It's like, we don't allow a lot of things.

But the Canadian government and some of the judicial system have been corrupted to the point where something like this gets to permeate when it shouldn't. But I go back to, so they're rebranding, and instead of fleeing and going, I have no idea where. They're staying right here. That should infuriate every Canadian. But they're based here.

I mean, they're a multinational, corporations so they have you know offices in the united states in the uk in romania and cyprus and the british virgin islands they have registrations i mean they have hunt you know over 200 sister corporations related corporations all over the world um but their main headquarters and base of operations is out of canada and the rebranding uh you know those who are behind this new company ethical capital partners that was formed to purchase porn hub and whitewash it and try to rebrand and save it is based out of Canada 100%. And so, yeah, there's a special responsibility of Canada and all of this in the government.

I mean, things really blew up in 2020. So kind of fast forward from the moment I discovered this, we start, I start a petition thanks to the idea of followers on Twitter. We start the trafficking Hub hashtag, the petition goes viral. Today we have 2.3 million signatures from every country in the world. Thousands of media articles have been written about this. But particularly all of this noise got the attention of New York Times

journalist Nicholas Christoph, who did a multi-month investigation connected with many, many victims, and released a groundbreaking article at the end of 2020 called Children of Pornhub. And after that, Justin Trudeau, I mean, there was so much pressure because in the article he calls on

the primary and he says, you know, you say that you're a feminist and you're for, you know, all for women's rights and all this, but you, why are you allowing a corporation in Canada to be exporting rape videos to the world? And Justin Trudeau himself felt the pressure and he made a statement on camera about the article about Pornhub itself and said, you know, how concerned he was about this and that they're going to ensure that, you know, there's child safety measures put in place, blah, blah, blah. Fast forward to today. And although there's been a parliamentary committee investigation, I mean, this was a pretty serious, I guess I wouldn't call it an investigation,

but they had hearings, right? The ethics committee. And inquiry? And the privacy commissioner produced this report saying they broke the law. And all of this has happened. Eight parties came together, 70 MPs in Canada from eight parties came together and sent a letter demanding a criminal investigation of Pornhub based on all of the evidence that came forward of their criminal complicity. And nothing's happened. So what's going on? You know, that is the big question. Because when there's, again, when there's not accountability, then we enable this to continue and we enable others to do the same. And it's not just holding Pornhub accountable.

It's also putting laws in place that would make sure it doesn't happen in the future. So there's a wonderful law that's been introduced in Canada called the Stop Internet Sexual Exploitation Act. It was introduced by Arnold Viersen MP. And it demands age and consent verification for every individual in every user-generated porn video that's uploaded online. a very reasonable common sense piece of legislation, but we're still waiting for that to be enacted. Yeah, it's concerning to me sitting here. And yet, you know, once again, you bring up Trudeau and I chuckle because, you know, he says he's a venomous. He says he's a lot of things, right?

He's not a great world leader. And I think the world is seeing that more and more. and well this is just interesting isn't the right word because like this is a dark subject this isn't like you know talking about the NHL or something you know like this is this is you know I can just imagine all the the groundwork that had to be put into this and all the testimony that has to be heard and how those are not easy stories to hear and the fact that it ties back to Canada just is unnerving to me and the fact that you know you talk about well they did in my word I would say an inquiry. They looked into it and I'm like, I, wow. You know, like that's the cheap

government way up here of saying they're going to do something and then nothing happens for it. It disappears. They, you know, Pornhub disappears. They, they get bought out and it becomes something different. And did I hear ethical in there? What was the name again? Well, they rebranded themselves to name themselves to purchase Pornhub ethical capital partners is the name of the private equity firm that purchased. There's a whole lot of ethical going in on that. Like, you know, like, do you know who the group is or that's just there? Yeah, I do.

I mean, they actually have put their pictures online and, you know, the kind of face of of this company now is a man named Solomon Friedman and he is a criminal defense attorney in Canada. And, you know, among other crimes that he's defended is the crime of the possession and distribution of child pornography and advertises on his law firm's website that they do represent that particular type of offense and, you know, has even lectured in, you know, panels about his history and his experience defending these kinds of abusers in court. And I was particularly disturbed. I've pointed this out in a recent Newsweek op-ed that I published a couple of weeks ago called

you know, it's basically saying porn hub is still a crime scene. So after all of this that's happened, they're still a crime scene because they still have videos on the site that were not verified for the age and consent of those who are in them. And therefore, they have illegal content currently on the site, even though they're possessed by a company called Ethical Capital Partners that's trying to whitewash the brand. And I point this out in the article, but I do, you know, make a point to say that this, I found out that this person, Solomon Friedman, had actually congratulated, twice congratulated another criminal defense attorney for getting a man off the hook on a technicality of a massive

child pornography case in Canada, where the police had found over 7,000 images of child sexual abuse on this individual's devices, including over 2,000 images of infants that were being raped by grown men. And he congratulated the other attorney for basically sinking the case. And it made me wondering, is that the plan here for Pornhub is to try to get them off the hook on some kind of a technicality? I don't know. But I do know that victims won't allow it because they are, they need justice to be served in order to have closure, in order to have healing for what's happened to them. because I think it's important for listeners to understand that this is not just pixels on a screen. You know, the trauma is so deep and so difficult for these victims where, you know, they say it's

one thing to be raped, but when that's filmed, when that's uploaded online for profit and for pleasure and globally distributed to five million users on Pornhub Alone per hour with a download button to ensure that that worst moment of their life will live on after they're dead. They call it the immortalization of my trauma. One victim said, you know, my rapist put me in a mental prison, but porn have gave me a life sentence. And this rate of suicidal ideation for these victims is almost to 50%. Many of them try to commit suicide. Some of them, you know, that does happen.

This is a life and death situation. And I can give one example of a girl named Serena. She was the feature of the New York Times piece I mentioned earlier. She's also an impart and poor of the story that's told and take down of how we met and what she's doing to hold this company accountable. And I can talk to you about that. But Serena was an innocent 14-year-old girl in Bakersfield, California. And she was a straight-A student.

She'd never kissed a boy before. And she had a crush on a boy older than her. And he convinced her to send him some nude images and videos of herself. And to impress him, she did it. And he shared it with classmates. It got uploaded to Pornhub millions of views again and again. As soon as she would get it down, it would get re-uploited again. She was bullied and shamed in school. She ended up dropping out of school because of the shame.

She ended up getting addicted to drugs to numb the pain. She ended up living homeless out of her car and trying to kill herself multiple times. So that was the trajectory of what happened because of the global distribution. of her abuse on Pornhub. And that's the story of so many victims. And there's a spectrum of abuse all the way from, you know, child rape, all the way to revenge porn, right, in non-consensual distribution. You know, when I was talking to Jenna about having you on or trying to get, you know,

this lined up, she'd asked, you know, like, you know, what do you want to talk about? And I'm like, one of the things I've been wrestling with among many is, you know, know, like, what does evil look like? Or, you know, how does it manifest itself in society? And like, the long as you talk, I mean, you know, like, I, you know, you have this, I don't know, this is, you've been fighting this. So it's, it's, you know, I just platoon in or I parachute into this conversation and, and I allow people to hear it in hopes that, you know, like, hearing this story will, you know, open more people's eyes to what is going on. It isn't the first time I've talked about human trafficking on here. But certainly, like, there's certain things

in life that just really make my skin crawl. I don't know how better to spit it out. But one of the things I told Jenna is, I'm like, you know, I'd really like to understand. Like, you know, I feel like you're witnessing, you're all good. I feel like you're witnessing, like, I don't know, true evil in a sense coming out and for some odd reason I know who the name Solomon Friedman but I hadn't connected you know like how you know it's funny to me like sometimes you just can't put the pieces together unless you stare at the problem or have yourself on to connect it for you right know who that guy is or at least I you know I've heard his name in passing on different things and probably the listeners are you know here in Canada are going to send me a bunch and that's

going to put more together. But the fact that evil is sitting in Canada perpetuating it, I guess is really shocking and not shocking all at the same time. And I go back to why I originally wanted to talk to you. It was like, I feel like you've witnessed it and seen it. And I guess I'm just curious, you know, for you to expand on that. Or maybe there's positives coming out of dealing with attacking evil head on head, you know, like head on. Yeah, I mean, I can say I've seen and witnessed, and I like that use the term, because it was important as all of this was unfolding and, you know, victims were coming forward and they were sharing links to their videos. And, you know, I was actually seeing this.

And it's, you know, things like unconscious rape of women, completely unconscious, where the rapist who has a mask over his face is opening their eyelids and touching their eyeballs to prove to the viewer in this homemade video that she is completely unconscious and tickling her feet. And you see the drug needle there that was used to attack her. And, you know, on this site, there's been 12-year-old boys clearly prepubescent children tied up sadistically. right. I'm saying that I have seen the worst things that you can imagine on this site. But at the same time, it was important to be a witness to it, to say, you know, this did happen and victims deserve justice. And we need to see this end. And I have an incredible amount of hope. I mean, when I started

this in the beginning of 2020, after, you know, over a decade of fighting the crime, of human trafficking, not feeling like I was seeing very much significant progress in holding abusers accountable at scale and bringing justice to victims. And it just seemed like you're almost spinning our wheels. And I felt very discouraged and disillusioned at that point. But everything that I've seen happen over the last four years, today I have an extreme amount of hope that we really can take on and take down abusers this big and hold them accountable, bring justice and prevent it from happening in the future. I really believe that we can because we've come so far. And I really owe a lot of that. And, you know, it's not one woman's battle against

porn hub. Like this has been a beautiful display of unity between so many people with different skills from, you know, heavy hitting attorneys to amazing journalists from the right and from the left. people from who were atheists joining together with Christians. People in the porn industry have been some of my most important allies in this. They have helped, you know, talk about employees of pornhood who I would consider friends today because of the dozens of hours of conversations that we had where their conscience was pricked. And they wanted to help expose the company because they knew what was going on was wrong. and you know porn performers and producers who were you know scouring porn hub tube sites for hours a day

trying to get their own stolen pirated content off the site and seeing blatantly illegal content sending it my way so it could get reported and so I mean it's just I I've seen the power of people coming together on a single issue we all agree on and making tremendous progress and so I do feel encouraged in the midst of having faced kind of the most horrific evil like you said that you can imagine um i feel hopeful i knew coming into this i was going to be uncomfortable and you know and um i i don't mean it in the sense that you speak to it with ease in the sense that you make it light it's just that uh you can tell you've been around this world for some time i had to um and i mean that in the best possible way uh it's just this this you know i got young kids and so i i hear

you talk about certain things and I'm like, I just, there's no place in hell for, low enough in hell for some things that go on in this world. And I'd had Paul Brandt, he's a Canadian musician on a while back and he has a human trafficking group. Yeah, I know, Paul.

He's supported trafficking hub and yeah, he's been... He's a wonderful guy and he taught me a thing early on when he first went, overseas and saw some things that he didn't like. And I forget how he said it. And maybe, well, people, they'll get the gist, but, you know, like, they don't want to be seen. They want to sit in the dark.

And all you have to do is shine a light on it. And they don't stay there. They run and hide. So I didn't realize what I was getting myself into today, you know, like certainly I following on Twitter and that it really sparked some interest because I was, you know, like, here's this woman saying things that I don't see anyone else saying. It's not that people aren't in the. trafficking world but to tie trafficking to porn website and then to be like taking it head on

and and and really I don't know making a difference I think right I mean hearing your story I'm like like think about what you've done over the course of and others I know you're not alone right over the course of four years is pretty incredible and then for it to retreat to Canada just really bothers me on some level like that that is really I don't even know why it's shocking, but it just feels like it's shocking, folks, of that it's hiding in our country. Like, it's just, like, why, you know? So I'm curious to see if there's anyone here in Canada that can just, you know, put the spotlight right on their headquarters and say, get out. Like, I guess I just don't understand it.

You know, before. I mean, the site needs to be, honestly, so there was a child trafficking site called backpage.com in the United States that, you know, it was kind of a classified site, and they were selling used cars and they were also selling children on that site and enough evidence was uncovered to be able to hold that company accountable to the point where the Department of Justice actually seized the site where you go to Pornhub.com, I mean, not Pornhub, backpage.com today and the site is seized by the Department of Justice. And I mean, I don't see any reason why it shouldn't be the same thing in the United States for Pornhub and also in Kansas.

for PornHub because of the evidence of what we know has happened and the fact that there's headquarters in Canada and I you think of money is allowed them to stay operating for a very long time is my guess right like I assume that the amount of money that's come in through there is allowed them to I don't know not buy their way out of problems but certainly influence their way to a point where they seem to be as you're pointing out I think very eloquently they seem to be on the run, but they're trying to hide so they can kind of disappear for a bit and come back as a different entity. And yet, like, you think, well, what has allowed them to do that? Why aren't they sitting in jail rotting away when you point out breaking laws?

The fact there's been, you know, an investigation here in Canada, and yet nothing seems to go any further than that. That seems odd to me. Like, you know, and I sit on the western side of Canada, which, you know, is a long way from Montreal. all. You know, it'd be like being on the opposite ends of the United States. Like, you know, very similar. And I'm trying to think, like, my listeners will tell, like, maybe I'm going to get this long email of all these things and I'm just, I got my head in the sand, but I don't remember hearing anything about this, which really surprises me. It's interesting because it's like, from my point of view, because I'm just in this day in

and day out, I feel like there's been so many headlines that I can't believe that everybody doesn't know about it. But then when I'm going to out there talking to people and so many people have no idea that it has happened. And so, you know, without knowledge, they can't put the necessary pressure on those in power to do what they should do to hold this company accountable and make sure it doesn't happen again on other websites. And I guess that's my hope, right? When I was writing take down. I mean, it is the probably most comprehensive indictment against Pornhub and its owners yet to be. And my hope is that it inspires people, not only to get many more people to even know that this is a problem and to understand it deeply, because you go through the journey of discovery with me

to meet victims, to understand the inner workings of this company and this website and what's happened. And all of the evidence, you know, is laid out clearly as you go through this journey so that at the end of it, you could feel as passionately about it as I do and want to take action. And so I'm hoping to get, you know, I've gotten the book into the hands of every single member of Congress and Attorney General in the United States. I want to get the book in the hands of every MP. and, you know, those in Canada in places of government that actually can take action to do something about this. So, you know, that is my hope with the book. But on the other side, so, you know, there's things that are out of our control, which is criminal prosecution, government action. That's really out of the hands of victims. What is in the hands of victims is civil accountability

and lawsuits. And they are going after Pornhub. They are suing the literal. hell out of Pornhub in 25 lawsuits, nearly 300 victims are suing in the United States, Canada, and the UK. And that also includes multiple class action lawsuits. There's two class actions in Canada. There's two class actions in the United States. These represent tens of thousands of child victims who are abused on the site. And so, you know, that is something that is in their control that they are doing and they're pursuing courageously, not only suing Pornhub, but also it's individual owners by name and the visa who enabled them. So they're suing visa in many and dozens of these lawsuits. They're suing visa and the hedge funds. Redwood Capital and Colbock Capital that

funded Pornhub and Mind Geek that enabled them to exist. They are also being sued in these lawsuits. So hats off to these courageous victims who are doing what they can that's in their power to do to get justice. I appreciate you coming on. on today and uh um hitting us uh i don't know square between the eyes it feels like today it's been um information by fire hose and uh anytime you you get uh the opportunity to get truly out of your comfort zone um you never know what uh what information is going to you know direct the next steps forward and the fact that it's in canada the fact there's class actions my brain just goes well i just got to talk to a few people and we'll start to dig a little deeper deeper into this

with the Canadian side because I'm like well that seems you know it just I don't know why it's flooring me so much Lila I don't know you know obviously you know I was expecting it to be I was expecting it to be somewhere else I guess just other than Canada but the fact they're in Canada

the fact it's staying in Canada the fact there's a whole bunch of stuff but no answers it's like oh interesting well who knows let's see if we can't shake up the hornet's nest all over again hey folks either way Lila, thanks for coming on and doing this and continuing to do what you do.

We'll post a link for people for your book. And that way, you know, if they're inclined, they can go grab a copy and go along for the ride and see what you've been working on. Either way, keep up what you're doing. Thank you. And if you're ever up in Canada, you make sure you let us know. And we'll make sure people know you're coming across as part of the country. Thank you for having me.

It was just wonderful to be able to speak with you and hope your listeners can feel not just horrified, but by what's happened, but inspired and activated to help do something about it.