A Crucial Court Case Exposes the Darkness of America’s Worst Industry

Remember the name Serena Fleites—a survivor who has become a hero.

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Let me begin with a warning. This newsletter will contain terrible content. It describes a court case that features truly dreadful facts about the porn industry. But it’s important to share. It’s important to understand the reality. And it’s important to understand the character of some of the industry players who stream pornography onto the smart phones and computer screens of tens of millions of Americans—damaging minds, breaking hearts, and destroying lives.

The case is called Serena Fleites v. MindGeek, and on Friday a federal district court judge named Cormac Carney wrote an opinion that should send a shudder throughout the entire pornography industry. Fleites sued MindGeek, the company that owns Pornhub.com, one of the world’s most-visited websites (3.5 billion visits a month in 2019), and she sued Visa, the company that enables Pornhub to monetize its content. 

Fleites’s story is horrifying. As recounted by the court, when she was 13 years old, her boyfriend pressured her into making a nude video. Without her knowledge or consent, he uploaded it to Pornhub, where it was posted under the title, “13-Year Old Brunette Shows off For the Camera.” 

MindGeek not only hosted the video, it transferred that same video to other websites it owned. As often happens with pornographic videos, it was downloaded and re-uploaded multiple times, and one of the re-uploads garnered 2.7 million views. 

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  1. Laura Hartigan Giles

    Thank you David. You are a source of calm reasoning in the storm of insanity consuming our culture.

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  2. Jim Hahn

    To be fair, this is not just an American problem…….

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  3. Roger Chylla

    The porn industry is indeed an awful industry but the moniker "worst industry in America" raises the comparison to the abortion industry.

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  4. Frank Rhoad

    How do you argue with someone who says they are not contributing to the problem because they do not pay for porn? I can make the case about the damage they’re doing to themselves and I can make the Christian case regarding sexual morality. I’m talking about the specific charge of them helping the porn industry. You said they make money in three ways: selling ads, selling data, and revenue from paid sites. The only advertisements on porn sites are for other porn sites and for sexual paraphernalia. If someone does not pay for porn then the ad revenue and the paid sites are irrelevant. That only leaves the data. Do they sell it to non-porn sites? If not, how does a porn user who does not pay contribute to the problem of the porn industry?

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    Sad Trombone

    Maybe you could explain why PornHub/MindGeek hides out in Toronto under Canadian law - Mexico sends us fentanyl and Canada sends us child porn.

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  6. BPM

    Going after Visa for allowing adults to choose is not an idea I can get behind. Honestly I didn't think folks at dispatch would either. Go after criminals for criminal activity, go after end-users if you think you can prove it, but leave the rest alone. Shall we sue the internet providers for allowing access, the router makers who make it hard to block sites? Businesses shouldn't be arbiters of morality. Or enforcers of some else's criminality.

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    Joel.Vandixhorn

    Lots of great content David.

    My progressive friend LOVED your Atlantic article about Nancy offering grace. Your writing in general makes a big impact in my little politics and current events "reading club".

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  8. Mathew A

    Obviously these companies should be doing a much better job of screening. If nothing else any video that uses those types of key words should be flagged for removal.

    I would go further and say the lack of meaningful safeguards sounds exactly like the type of thing that should remove section 230 protection.


    I think the VISA thing is on shakier ground. There's a big push to get banks to not work with the gun industry. I think this is in the same vein.

    I don't want the financial service industry to be able to debank certain sectors they don't like but that are legal.

    If/when someone does something illegal, why that's what we have law enforcement for. I don't want VISA to be the enforcer

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    Dan

    By all means, prosecute and punish MindGeek. But as the latest Pushkin podcast series "Hot Money" shows, Visa and Mastercard control porn because no one else wants to. Would you have govemment regulate porn, David? Because in American society at least, there's a binary answer to that: either ban all of it, or have pro-sex work politicians run for office to legalize and then moderate at a state or Federal level what we are allowed to pleasure ourselves in private. At that point, you're giving our government a pass to monitor how we conduct ourselves in our bedrooms.
    Would you have it ban *all* porn? If so, would you be okay with banning LGBTQ porn too, and denying queer and homosexual people a safe outlet for sexual urges? Would you tell them then that they do not get any more porn and therefore must restrict sexual expression to in-person, along with straight people?
    And speaking of straight people--exactly how are you going to force repressed Evangelical men from getting porn? The highest consumptions of porn are in Utah, Idaho, and Iowa. And the deep south isn't much better. Are you going to police the sexual preferences of women too? Do they no longer get a say over how they get to enjoy sex? After all, we're now removing their bodily right to autonomy.

    Your horror over child prostitution and pornography is righteous and I'm all the way behind you on burning MindGeek to the ground. But understand that your righteous crusade puts you at risk of being another Savonarola, or encouraging other Savonarolas. Trying to ban porn ultimately means the Government gets to determine what we do and do not do in our bedrooms, and thus regulates sex. Porn is a necessary evil for the functioning of society--trying to ban it or eradicate it leads to far worse horrors every single time.

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    W James Anderson

    So disturbing. The access to porn these days is definitely different than when I was a kid finding my Dad’s stash of mags. You for sure need to be intentional to avoid it these days. 😎

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