Pornhub parent company, MindGeek, being sued for $500M in landmark class-action suit over consent
A Canadian woman has brought a $500 million class-action lawsuit against MindGeek, the parent company of Pornhub, claiming she was featured in pornographic content uploaded on the website without her consent.
Diamond & Diamond Lawyers, the law firm representing Ontario resident Christine Wing, announced last Thursday, April 14, that it had filed class-action litigation against the company after their client said three videos of a sexual nature were posted to Pornhub in May 2020 without her knowledge or consent. The lawsuit is reportedly open to any Canadian who may have been depicted in sexually explicit content on Pornhub, including sexual abuse material, child sexual abuse, and all other non-consensual intimate media.
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According to the law firm, the website still contains such material despite repeated requests to take them down. Speaking to the Christian Post, Peter Gentala, legal counsel for the Washington-based National Center on Sexual Exploitation, said the lawsuit was a "natural result" of what was revealed about the website during inquiries by the Canadian parliament.
The new class-action lawsuit filed against Pornhub is another reason why this exploitive and abusive tube site needs to be formally investigated. https://t.co/BrBxVAfFFB
— National Center on Sexual Exploitation (@ncose) April 22, 2022
Last February, victims testified before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Information, Privacy, and Ethics about how images of their abuse were distributed online. Their attorney Michael Bowe told the committee that his investigation had unearthed hundreds of sexual abuse and trafficking videos hosted on MindGeek sites, including one depicting the rape of a 15-year-old girl. “This class action is just another place where you see the survivors of sexual abuse on Pornhub are stepping forward and looking for justice after what has happened to them,” Gentala said. “It's a large, massive internet presence, and it was built on this concept that people from around the world can send their sex videos in, and we'll put them up and make money off of them. That was the idea behind it.”
According to him, the problem with Pornhub's business model is that there was “little thought or intentionality” put behind it, thus leading to “rampant” child sex abuse and other illegal content hosted on the website. However, Gentala hopes that the Ontario lawsuit will finally bring "justice" to victims considering the "scale of the horror." The NCOSE attorney explained, "We're not talking about hundreds of thousands of videos; we're talking about millions of them. And we're talking about a massive impact, and we may also be talking about survivors who may not even understand at this point yet that they have been victimized using Pornhub as a platform. Or, they may not understand how deeply harmful or extensive that harm was."
MindGeek was slapped with another class-action lawsuit in Alabama last July brought on by two child sex abuse survivors, who alleged that the company distributed videos of their rape without attempting to verify their ages or if they consented to the videos being published online. MindGeek tried to dismiss the lawsuit, saying it was protected under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which grants considerable immunity to online platforms that publish materials posted by a third party. However, US District Judge L. Scott Coogler of the Northern District of Alabama, Western Division, rejected the request.
“Pornhub was trying to hide behind the Communications Decency Act, which right there sounds like a non sequitur,” Gentala told the Post. “A business that's based on sexual exploitation, trying to use something called the Communications Decency Act to prevent civil accountability. That's not what Congress had in mind, but that's what Pornhub was trying to accomplish by bringing that forward." The company ultimately vowed to make changes to its standards, subsequently taking down millions of videos and admitting they found at least 118 instances of child sex abuse material after a review.