Who is Priscila Bergmair? Pornhub boss Bernard Bergemar's wife wants him to quit company amid child abuse claims
The wife of the billionaire owner of Pornhub’s parent company wants her husband to cut ties with the adult platform after claims of child abuse on the site. Brazilian fashion blogger Priscila Bergmair told the Sunday Times that her husband Bernard Bergemar, 52, who is the majority owner of MindGeek “wishes he was not in this”. She said that she hopes for him to separate himself from the porn website.
Bergmair, a secretive tycoon, has been accused of profiting from illegal content on Pornhub, a website that is more popular than Netflix and Amazon. Bergmair avoided scrutiny for a long time by keeping his identity under wraps. But recently, a search for his name on Google gave just three results and an old picture of him from a university alumni magazine.
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MindGeek was hit with a federal class-action lawsuit in February 2021 alleging that the company hosted multiple rape videos of teen sex trafficking victims. The suit states that the company has made major profits from the alleged videos and took no step to verify the ages or consent of those depicted in the video. Now around 50 women are preparing to sue MindGeek, alleging that it is a criminal enterprise. One of the defendants in the case will be Bernd Bergmair. The firm, based in Canada, is thought to be worth £1.2billion that is $14,61,954M, according to Sunday Times.
Pornhub, which attracted more than 42B views in 2019, states that it doesn't knowingly allow images of sexual abuse of children.
Priscila, while speaking from her multimillion-pound West London home, insisted that her husband didn't know anything about the alleged wrongdoing on the site. However, the model told The Sunday Times: "Everyone wants the best to be done. Because people have children. I have children now. So I don’t want children, you know... none of us want that. We all want things to be right." Priscila, a mother-of-three, has previously opened up about her own experiences of being a model. Writing in a blog, she said a photographer once pushed her to pose for sexual photographs when she wasn't really comfortable doing so. The images left her feeling ashamed and she asked for her name to be taken off from the photographer's website. But the photos had already been shared widely online.
She said: "Because he (the photographer) was doing a free shoot, he kept pushing me to do more and more sexy poses and trying to get me topless. In the end, the pictures were great, but I was ashamed of them because they were so sexy. I asked the photographer to remove my name from his website, even though they are some of the best pictures I have ever done. It was useless because by the time he removed my name, the pictures went viral and it’s very easy to find them everywhere."
Sharing her experience she said in her blog, "I have worked as a model for many years. It was very different from the supermodel lifestyle you see on TV. There are a handful of supermodels that become celebrities and live a life that is far from the reality that most models experience." She continued: "One of the worst things for me is being compared with prostitutes, or being called stupid. That’s really common."
Pornhub was forced to remove more than 10M unverified videos following a report by The New York Times. Credit card companies Visa, Mastercard and Discover have since blocked their customers from making purchases on Pornhub.