A lawsuit filed by more victims of the sex trafficking operation claims that Pornhub’s moderation staff ignored reports of their abuse videos.
Sixty-one additional women are suing Pornhub’s parent company, claiming that the company failed to take down videos of their abuse as part of the sex trafficking operation Girls Do Porn. They’re suing the company and its sites for sex trafficking, racketeering, conspiracy to commit racketeering, and human trafficking.
The complaint, filed on Tuesday, includes what it claims are internal emails obtained by the plaintiffs, represented by Holm Law Group, between Pornhub moderation staff. The emails allegedly show that Pornhub had only one moderator to review 700,000 potentially abusive videos, and that the company intentionally ignored repeated reports from victims in those videos.
The damages and restitution they seek amounts to more than $311,100,000. They demand a jury trial, and seek damages of $5 million per plaintiff, as well as restitution for all the money Aylo, the new name for Pornhub’s parent company, earned “marketing, selling and exploiting Plaintiffs’ videos in an amount that exceeds one hundred thousand dollars for each plaintiff.”
The plaintiffs are 61 more unnamed “Jane Doe” victims of Girls Do Porn, adding to the 60 that sued Pornhub in 2020 for similar claims.
Girls Do Porn was a federally-convicted sex trafficking ring that coerced young women into filming pornographic videos under the pretense of “modeling” gigs. In some cases, the women were violently abused. The operators told them that the videos would never appear online, so that their home communities wouldn’t find out, but they uploaded the footage to sites like Pornhub, where the videos went viral—and in many instances, destroyed their lives. Girls Do Porn was an official Pornhub content partner, with its videos frequently appearing on the front page, where they gathered millions of views.
read more: https://www.404media.co/girls-do-porn-victims-sue-pornhub-for-300-million/
The real question is: can consent be bought?
Do you go to a job you hate every morning? Then, yes, consent can be bought.
It’s messed up when people go to sex work out of desperation, but way too often recognizing this is used as an excuse to ban sex work, when it should be a reason to provide everyone with basic living conditions.
Banning sex work often makes the situation of those people even worse because they are driven into shadier environments rather than having any amount of protections.
The people who run said shadier environments usually support banning sex work so they can get cheaper labour force :). Capitalism runs even behind the scenes.
Yeah, as someone who has done survival sex work, the illegality is a plus for the Johns’s. “Officer, the man that was supposed to pay me for a sex act changed his mind afterwords!” Or removed the condom mid act, or “oops, wrong hole!” Or the fact that if you get murdered it’s not really a big deal - are you going to ever talk to cops?
I think sex work is a hell that no one should have to go through. Maybe you can run an OF or sell feet pics without trauma, but I don’t have nightmares about working fast food or retail like I do the sex work. The illegality makes the hell worse though.
That’s exactly the point.
How much of our lives can money buy?
What if I wanted to sell my whole remaining time for the benefit of the ones I love, in the form of organs?
Should we allow money to buy anything? Or should we actually make people less desperate so that they are not willing to sacrifice all they have for peanuts?
I’m glad you brought this up, because yeah we’re all selling our bodies and time. I wouldn’t say this means we consent, though. We don’t need to change what consent means to make capitalism sound better than it is.
If you’re “incentivized” (e.g will be starved and punished otherwise) by a system to do something you hate, you can’t call that consent.
If you had a system where women were raised and then presented with the option of either having sex with you & being allowed to participate in modern society, or being discarded in the wilderness, not being allowed to even build anywhere/make it on your own because all the land is owned by either private individuals or the government, then those women aren’t free.
As we agree, just by changing the demand from “have sex” to “do manual labor” or “rent out your mind so someone else can own the product of your thoughts (IP)” doesn’t change whether or not it’s consensual.