New lawsuit against Pornhub alleges improvements to the site don't go far enough

The Pornhub website is shown on a computer screen in Toronto on Wednesday, Dec. 16, 2020. THE CANADIAN PRESS

MONTREAL — Montreal-based Pornhub is facing its third lawsuit filed in the last two months, this time in a U.S. federal court in Alabama, where two young women allege the website facilitates child sex trafficking – and they say the company’s update to Canadian legislators last week wasn’t very encouraging.

"In 2018, when Jane Doe #1 was just sixteen years old, she was drugged and raped by a man in Tuscaloosa, Alabama," alleges the statement of complaint filed for the proposed class-action lawsuit.

The man allegedly filmed the attack and then entered a commercial agreement with MindGeek, Pornhub's parent company, where "MindGeek and [he] agreed to share profits from views and downloads" from the video, the suit claims.

The lawsuit zeroes in on Pornhub's system around verifying users' identities, and not just historically.

Filed only a week after MindGeek executives testified before a Canadian parliamentary committee, it critiqued their claims that the system is being deeply overhauled.

A New York Times investigation in December drew new attention to allegations that the site hosted videos showing children, teens, unconscious people and others being sexually assaulted, as well as videos of people who simply hadn't agreed to have their videos made public.

"In February 2021, MindGeek wrote to the Canadian Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics… admitting that non-consensual material continues to make its way to the PornHub site," says the statement of complaint in the Alabama lawsuit.

The company told Canadian parliament that "non-consensual" material of all kinds "will be disabled, fingerprinted so it cannot be uploaded again," and that the user who uploaded it would be banned, the lawsuit says.

"However," the statement of suit claims "without adequate account holder verification measures in place when opening accounts or uploading material, banned users and banned material can and do find its way back onto the site."

Pornhub didn't respond to CTV News requests for comment on the Alabama lawsuit.

Pornhub has had two streams: unpaid, user-generated videos, where the person submitting the video didn't need his or her identity verified, and the "Modelhub" profit-sharing program, which was handled slightly more formally, but where the plaintiff Jane Doe #1 alleged her video was used.

"MindGeek reviewed, categorized, tagged, and disseminated the images and videos depicting the rape and sexual exploitation of sixteen year old Jane Doe #1," the suit claims.

"At no time did MindGeek or Pornhub attempt to verify Jane Doe #1’s identity, age, inquire about her status as a victim of trafficking."

While the company has made improvements, they don't go far enough yet, the suit says.

"MindGeek’s 'verification' or 'validation' process has been updated but remains woefully inadequate and essentially boils down to reliance on an untrained layperson attempting to match a government ID photo against a pornographic video," it claims.

It also said the company "makes no effort" to verify the identity of co-performers in the video, along with the person uploading it, asking only that an agreement be kept with any other people appearing in the video "in case MindGeek decides to check for the consent of co-performers in the future."

It also offers an option “if you forget to identify yourself in the upload process," the statement of complaint says -- to just email the company.

The lawsuit also alleges that, despite the difficulty of guessing people's ages in Modelhub videos, MindGeek has left this a guessing game, meaning teenagers may not be filtered out.

"Essentially, 'moderators' hired by MindGeek eyeball the performers in the video to see if they look young. If the performer is a child under the age of 12, it may be more likely that a moderator would flag that video or image," the lawsuit says.

"However, if the performer is 15, 16, 17, the moderator may be less likely, and less inclined, to flag that video or image."

The second woman acting as lead plaintiff, Jane Doe #2, alleged that she was trafficked beginning at age 14, and that a sex trafficker "forced [her] to participate in the creation of sexually explicit videos that included adults engaging in sex acts with her."

Four of these videos were later found on Pornhub, the lawsuit claims.

The plaintiffs are suing MindGeek for allegedly financially benefiting from their abuse. The two other recent lawsuits, were filed in December and January, respectively, by 40 women in California and by an Ontario woman suing in Quebec court.