1143: Laila Mickelwait | Exposing Pornhub’s Dark Trafficking Empire

1143: Laila Mickelwait | Exposing Pornhub's Dark Trafficking Empire

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[00:00:00] Jordan Harbinger: Jordan here. This episode contains adult themes. No kids in the car for this one. Coming up next on The Jordan Harbinger Show.

[00:00:07] Laila Mickelwait: People are uncomfortable, they're afraid to talk about it. It's one of those things that it's affecting everybody in some way. We're all in contact with this free user-generated porn industry, but nobody wants to talk about it.

[00:00:24] Jordan Harbinger: Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On The Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers, even the occasional arms dealer, drug trafficker, rocket scientist, or Russian chess Grand Master.

If you're new to the show or you're looking for a handy way to tell your friends about the show, and I appreciate it when you do that. I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes on topics like persuasion and negotiation, psychology, geopolitics, disinformation, China, North Korea, crime and Cults and more.

That'll help new listeners get a taste of all the things that we do here on this show. Just visit Jordan harbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started, my guest today is just fearless Layla Mica, wait. Helped expose, if you'll, pardon the pun, the flagrant out of control sex trafficking on PornHub.

I didn't really ever think about this before, but a lot of the people there are not up there consensually and they're not getting paid unfortunately a lot of the time. I mean, it's just, it's, it's, it's worse than not getting paid. I, I don't even know how to summarize this. You'll get it here on the show.

She also helped hold some of the owners and controlling managers of the site and the company to account this story is wild. It is very satisfying points. We really clicked. I'm a big fan of her and her cause, and I think you'll really gain some insight from this episode insight that might make some of us, myself included, quite uncomfortable.

This is an important episode with a really great guest. Here we go with Layla Mical Weight,

by the way, I read the book. I enjoyed it. That's a weird thing to say, but I did enjoy it. It was well written and good. The payoffs are satisfying.

[00:02:11] Laila Mickelwait: Thank you. Yeah.

[00:02:12] Jordan Harbinger: Let's start from the beginning. So you're on a, A mission to take down PornHub. That's a heavy lift. What sparked this?

[00:02:18] Laila Mickelwait: Yeah. I mean, it wasn't something that 10 years ago I thought in 2025, this is what I'm gonna be doing, but at the same time had been preparing for it my whole life.

So in the context of over 15 years in the fight against sex trafficking, I was paying attention to the headlines and I was noticing that there was a trend, that it wasn't just happening offline, it was being filmed, it was being monetized online. And so there was this intersection between what I call the big porn industry and we could talk about that and child sexual abuse and trafficking.

And at the end of 2019, I started to notice some really concerning headlines. One story that I kind of credit to the launch of the Trafficking hub movement was a story about a 15-year-old girl from Broward County, Florida. And she had been missing for an entire year, and she was finally found when her distraught mother was tipped off by a PornHub user that he recognized her daughter on the site.

Oh gosh. And she was found in 58 videos being raped on PornHub. And police actually were able to locate her and they recognized the guy's face from the assaults in the video, and she was rescued from his apartment. She had been impregnated. It was like this horror story. She got

[00:03:25] Jordan Harbinger: kidnapped and then put in videos.

[00:03:27] Laila Mickelwait: No, she had been missing, so I think she might have ran away. Nobody could find her for a year. My God. And this is how she was found so that her. Mom was notified that her daughter was on PornHub and she was actually in videos that were being paid to download. So it was a profit sharing relationship with PornHub and they were splitting the profit from the sale of her rape videos.

So that was really concerning. I had read that story a few days after my second child was born.

[00:03:52] Jordan Harbinger: When your parent, it all hits so different, right? I was telling friends of mine about the book and some of the guys were like, oh yeah, that's gross. And I was like, no man. But then I was like, I have a daughter and a son.

So it's, there's just that layer of what if it were my kid? But guys especially who don't have kids, are like, yeah, that's really gross. And it's just like another horrible thing they've heard that week.

[00:04:10] Laila Mickelwait: Yeah, I cared about this for so many years, but then when I have my own children, emotionally it hits you in a different way to deeper place.

There's a door deeper open in my heart that deeper

[00:04:19] Jordan Harbinger: didn't exist when I was a dude thinking about the gym and my next pizza or whatever. You just

[00:04:23] Laila Mickelwait: can't. It is just this whole other level of emotional connection, empathy, and all of you can imagine yourself and the position of that mother, all of that.

[00:04:32] Jordan Harbinger: Oh gosh.

Yeah, that's true. Based on your research, what percentage of videos on mainstream platforms or on platforms like this might feature exploited minors?

[00:04:41] Laila Mickelwait: I would say so on PornHub, we have a percentage of them that we know 20% of the content was from people who considered themselves in the kind of professional model category, although we know that there was criminals infested in there as well, and 80% of that site was user generated, not verifying agent consent.

So I would say on these sites, the possibility that this could be illegal if there's a site that's not verifying agent consent is probably over 80%. Not to say that that is the percentage. The possibility is that now we actually have some concrete numbers to show that at one point PornHub was admitting in the height of all of this happening, they said 1%, they did like an audit of themselves and they said, we think that 1% of our content is child sexual abuse material.

And that would be confirmed, known hashed, previously uploaded child sexual abuse material. That means that it was one in a hundred videos, child sexual abuse,

[00:05:36] Jordan Harbinger: but that was when they investigated themselves

[00:05:38] Laila Mickelwait: themselves.

[00:05:40] Jordan Harbinger: Imagine. Imagine how much worse it actually was. Right? Geez.

[00:05:43] Laila Mickelwait: Think about that. People are browsing a lot of videos per session on those sites and yeah,

[00:05:48] Jordan Harbinger: geez, that's really something

[00:05:50] Laila Mickelwait: we know, like the stats of like child sexual abuse material online, but specific to the adult sites, we don't really have those numbers.

NCMEC has had over a hundred million reports of child sexual abuse, million in one year,

[00:06:05] Jordan Harbinger: the

[00:06:06] Laila Mickelwait: National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

[00:06:08] Jordan Harbinger: And you think, oh, some of them are false. There's even more unreported, I would imagine, than there are false reports. That's how it always goes.

[00:06:15] Laila Mickelwait: Yeah. So the London Sunday Times, which is a very credible investigative newspaper in London, they had done an investigation at that time and they had found dozens of illegal videos on PornHub within minutes, even children as young as three

[00:06:29] Jordan Harbinger: gross and creepy.

[00:06:30] Laila Mickelwait: It was shocking to read that and it, they were calling out particular advertisers in this investigation, London Sunday Times. They called them out, uh, for that immediately. They were shamed, they apologized, they pulled the ads, but it was a big deal, at least in the anti-trafficking space, we were paying attention to what was happening.

And there was a woman named Nicole Atando from New York. She had been abused by her partner. He had filmed the abuse and he was uploading the videos to PornHub and she killed him.

[00:07:01] Jordan Harbinger: Oh my God. She

[00:07:01] Laila Mickelwait: ended up getting sentenced to life in prison at the time. She had a legal team and they were able to reduce her sentence because I'm like to seven years.

I can

[00:07:08] Jordan Harbinger: relate a little. I mean, I get it.

[00:07:09] Laila Mickelwait: It was a very dramatic case, and the pictures of her, she had two young children and her being taken off to prison. It was just a horrific story. And then there was about a hundred victims in California and San Diego that were part of this trafficking operation called Girls Do Porn.

It was run by a guy named Michael Pratt, who ended up on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list. I saw it.

[00:07:30] Jordan Harbinger: Where is that guy now? I wonder. So he

[00:07:31] Laila Mickelwait: was found oh, two Christmas Eves ago. Oh man. In Spain. He had become a fugitive.

[00:07:37] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah,

[00:07:37] Laila Mickelwait: because he was wanted What a

[00:07:38] Jordan Harbinger: terrible life that has to be, although Spain, yeah. Nice place.

[00:07:42] Laila Mickelwait: Yeah. He was finally found and all his co-conspirators are in prison already. And now he's in the process of finally being held accountable. But he was running a partner channel on PornHub. That was one of their most popular partner channels on the site.

[00:07:58] Jordan Harbinger: Not while he was a fugitive though. No. Okay. This is before.

This was before. So the victim

[00:08:01] Laila Mickelwait: sued him, the FBI, the criminal accountability for Girls Do porn. But the way that they had distributed their content and made it very popular was through PornHub. So they had one of the most popular partner channels, I think it was over 600 million views and 800,000 subscribers.

And they're each paying

[00:08:19] Jordan Harbinger: like five bucks a month, but whatever.

[00:08:21] Laila Mickelwait: Well, so you subscribe to the channel. Okay. And then they give you clips and they advertise and then they drive you to pay for more content. Oh, I

[00:08:28] Jordan Harbinger: see. But even still multimillion dollar business. Yes.

[00:08:31] Laila Mickelwait: And they were splitting, again, this is a profit sharing relationship with PornHub and they were splitting the profits.

And PornHub was aware because victims were reaching out and begging them to take these videos down 'cause it was destroying their life.

[00:08:43] Jordan Harbinger: So they were tricked into doing the porn.

[00:08:45] Laila Mickelwait: Oh, they were trafficked. Okay. And so there's no question, and that's part of the definition of course of trafficking, is force fraud, coercion.

If you're under the age of 18 and you're used in a commercial sex act, so if you're making money. On that sex act that was induced by force or fraud or coercion, or if anybody's under the age of 18, you don't even need to prove any of that. Sure. It's just automatically trafficking. So anyway, they were held accountable, but this was in the news at the time as well.

And so all of this began to raise the question, how in the world was this happening on PornHub? Because at the time, PornHub was a cultural icon. It was all over the place. You get

[00:09:22] Jordan Harbinger: Christmas sweaters and stuff, and you're like, these are whimsical and fun. And now I'm like, I'm not getting one of those

[00:09:26] Laila Mickelwait: walking New York Fashion Week.

People are wearing their apparel jokes on Saturday Night Live, like faux commercials on Saturday night. All of that mainstream brand. Not to mention that at the time. So by the end of 2020, they had capitalized on Coronavirus and they had actually become the fifth most visited website across the entire internet.

Oh. All

[00:09:46] Jordan Harbinger: those people working at home were just like, eh, lemme take a quick break. I couldn't do in the parking lot at work. They made sore.

[00:09:53] Laila Mickelwait: They had also done some crazy PR stunts, like they offered PornHub premium for free to the entire world, so that instead of paying 9 99 for ad free PornHub. Oh. So you know, you could watch porn or you could watch Real Rape or child abuse ad free on PornHub.

Like they were just giving it for free. So their traffic was better than ever. They were making more money than ever. They had more visits than Netflix and Amazon. They had 170 million visits a day. 62 billion visits a year that year. Yes. And by the end of 2020, they had 56 million pieces of content on the site.

So every year they were having enough content uploaded. It would take 169 years to watch if you put those videos back to back. Oh my God.

[00:10:34] Jordan Harbinger: The scale is crazy. Yeah. In your opinion, how much responsibility do executives at companies like PornHub Bear for the child abuse happening on their platforms? 'cause I assume their argument is we didn't know about this.

[00:10:45] Laila Mickelwait: Oh, in the case of PornHub. We know They knew. Yeah. We know. We have evidence. We have conversations. We have email exchanges, we have documents. We have policies. We have so much evidence that this was something they knew about. They hid from authorities because of profit, because they wanted to maximize profit.

They allowed to continue for years since 2007, and so a hundred percent responsibility because they had the ability to stop it. They had the ability in 2007 to age verify, to make sure that somebody had to show an ID to show their face, two consent, verify before they could upload, and they chose not to.

[00:11:30] Jordan Harbinger: What are the common signs that video on a site like PornHub might involve exploitation or trafficking? Is it just the tags?

[00:11:37] Laila Mickelwait: There's some where it's obvious, right, that this is non-consensual. This is, could be prepubescent and you could see that, right? Mm-hmm. Or there's violence or tags, titles indicating young or pain, things like that.

However, sometimes these are videos that were consensually recorded and then non consensually uploaded, so then in that case you have no idea whether they consented to having that video on PornHub and victims of this kind of, they call it image-based sexual abuse. That's all the way from child abuse to what we used to call revenge porn, and they face serious amounts of trauma as well.

The suicide ideation rate for these victims is about 50%. And so the harm is from the revenge porn side all the way to the child, sexual. It's all serious. And when you're on a site that doesn't verify agent consent, not only of the uploader, but every single video and every single person in every single video, you have to be suspect of everything that you're watching.

[00:12:36] Jordan Harbinger: Well, it's interesting 'cause I first got this book and I was like, okay, she's gonna be some like super religious person who's against porn. And then we had our phone call and I was like, okay, that wasn't what I expected at all. Like a normal person who as a vendetta, rightfully so, against this horrific website.

And then I read the book and I was like, wow, this is an organized crime operation. This is not a sort of sex workers put their stuff up here. You watch a dumb A and you're done with your business. It's organized crime period. An international crime ring that just happens to be something that everybody knows about and a lot of people use once you read the book, it's like there's no difference between this and.

The Albanian Mafia, shipping cocaine or something across. At least there's fewer victims with people who are shipping drugs across the border, which is crazy to think about. And hiding in plain sight. Yeah, hiding in plain sight. That's the phrase I was looking for. Yes.

[00:13:27] Laila Mickelwait: Just under everybody's noses, millions of people a day.

A phrase my dad always used to say, like, he was just a very wise man, and he always used to say, assumption is the mother of all screw ups. And thinking about that, the idea that we're all assuming. That this is legal, vetted consensual material because that was their, of course, tagline. That was what they presented to the world and they spent millions of dollars on their PR campaigns to save the oceans.

And they had this whole arm of PornHub called PornHub Cares.

[00:13:59] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, so weird. Yeah.

[00:14:00] Laila Mickelwait: Save the Bees and all this stuff. And so I said, well, let me just test the upload system. I put the baby down after he went back to sleep, got the camera out, took the video of the keyboard and the rug, and then uploaded and found out what millions to the point of hidden in plain sight.

Millions of people already knew because they were uploading to PornHub every day that there was no requirement for ID or consent form. Anybody anonymously with A VPN in under 10 minutes using an email address, just a random email address, could upload a sex video to PornHub. And there you go. That's how the site became infested with videos of real sexual crime.

[00:14:41] Jordan Harbinger: I'm probably not alone. It makes you feel guilty for ever watching porn in your whole life. 'cause you're like, oh my gosh, have I contributed to the bottom line of this company? The answer's almost certainly yes. In some small way. Or have I consumed abuse material and just not known? 'cause the element of fraud in the crime of sex trafficking.

That's, that's important and interesting to me on a nerd level, just as an an attorney. Because what that means is essentially you could say to somebody. Hey, I'm gonna pay you to appear in a video, and then they leave and I just say, I'm not paying you. Or I trick you in some way saying, Hey, I've got a job for you.

You're gonna have to strip. And then it turns into a sex video. And that is illegal. That is sex trafficking. It's a little bit of a shade there. It's not like you don't have to grab somebody off the street and then force them. It's not taken with Liam Neeson. It's not some crazy thing like that. You can have somebody who thinks they're getting a job at a restaurant in another state or another country, and.dot dot.

They're sex trafficked because they don't have any money and they don't have a way to leave. And you're telling them, you'll let them go if they do this, and you're telling 'em it's not gonna be uploaded anywhere, but then it is. That is trafficking. So you could even have somebody who you say you're going to have sex on camera for money, and they say, okay, fine, but you don't tell them it's gonna be uploaded.

That's still sex trafficking. That's the important point here. I think

[00:15:56] Laila Mickelwait: they didn't even necessarily need to know that there was going to be money or not. They could have deceived, defrauded, coerced, and we're talking about adults because when they're under 18, it just doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what happened if they have a video on the site.

Now the monetization piece I think is really important when we're talking about the definition of trafficking. 'cause a lot of people don't realize. What constitutes trafficking? Is that commercialization when something of value is exchanged for the Coerced Sex Act or the underage sex. Mm-hmm. Now, with regard to the websites, we call it tech facilitated trafficking, because this might be free porn.

80% of the content on PornHub was free, but it was heavily monetized. So the ones that were benefiting from it are the executives of PornHub who are selling 4.6 billion ad impressions on PornHub every single day.

[00:16:45] Jordan Harbinger: Wait, per day, per, I thought you were gonna say Per year. Per day. The whole, my God, that's a lot of ads.

[00:16:51] Laila Mickelwait: Exactly. That was how they were making most of their money on free porn. So free porn is not free. Yes. It's heavily monetized. It has a high human cost, clearly, but 20% of that would be paid to download content where you could enter into this. Profit sharing relationship with PornHub, where you could put the content behind a paywall.

You have to like pay to download that content. And in one horrific case, there was a 12-year-old boy from Alabama and he was drugged and he was overpowered. Oh my God. And he was raped by a man named Rocky Shae Franklin, who had one of those profit sharing pay to download relationships with PornHub. And he filmed the assaults and he uploaded 23 of those videos to PornHub with titles indicating that they were abuse.

And this is important when we talk about complicity because PornHub and its defense made a huge mistake. We have

[00:17:39] Jordan Harbinger: content moderation.

[00:17:41] Laila Mickelwait: They had 10 people working per eight hour shift, but they do say, we had somebody viewing manually proving every single video before it went live on the site

[00:17:52] Crosstalk: close. That's not

[00:17:52] Laila Mickelwait: true.

But if it. That means that they were approving videos with a 12-year-old drug boy with titles such as Uncle Secret, Ugh, young Asses, best Things that would clearly say this is a child. And then once it was discovered, he was a verified uploader in this pay to download relationship. And then police found out, they reached out multiple times to PornHub demanding the videos come down.

They were ignored multiple times. It stayed up for seven months, getting hundreds of thousands of views,

[00:18:23] Jordan Harbinger: which all were all monetized, I assume, all

[00:18:25] Laila Mickelwait: monetized. So he was arrested and now he's sentenced to 40 years in prison and the boy is suing PornHub.

[00:18:31] Jordan Harbinger: Good for him. Good for him. What is he 20 now? It's been so, I mean, those they've never take forever.

Take he recently, he recently turned 18. Oh. But this poor kid and then

[00:18:38] Laila Mickelwait: he, well, originally he sued with his mom and then he became old enough to just do nothing. I was exaggerating.

[00:18:43] Jordan Harbinger: Right. And keep it light. But it really took six years in counting. And this stuff was up for months and months when he was a child.

This is terrible.

[00:18:50] Laila Mickelwait: When they say we viewed and approved, that means that complicity. Was even deeper. Yeah. If they're trying to say that, why would they say that we know it wasn't true? 'cause moderators through the course of this came forward to me and to investigators and to the attorneys and all of that, and produced documents and schedules showing that they had 10 or under moderators per shift working not only on PornHub, because PornHub was owned by parent company, mind Geek MindGeek, who had earned virtually a monopoly on the mainstream, most popular global porn sites and industry,

[00:19:22] Jordan Harbinger: they just buy everything.

Is that. So with the

[00:19:23] Laila Mickelwait: $362 million loan from Colbeck Capital, the previous owner of PornHub rolled up the industry buying most of the most popular porn sites and brands and pay sites and tube sites. PornHub was the flagship site, so it had PornHub and its sister sites, so it'd be U porn, tub Bay, gay Tube, extreme Tube, on and on.

And these moderators were not just moderating the millions of videos on PornHub, they were in charge of all. The porn tube set. So

[00:19:52] Jordan Harbinger: there's 10 people who have eight hours to go through 400,000 uploads a week or whatever it is. Exactly. Something like that. They were

[00:19:58] Laila Mickelwait: reprimanded if they were watching less than 700 per eight hour shift.

[00:20:02] Jordan Harbinger: Videos.

[00:20:02] Laila Mickelwait: Videos, just skipping through them. They were incentivized to be just, they put it this way. Our job was to allow as much content to go through as possible. Of course, because the free user generated business model porn relies on massive amounts of content to be picked up in the Google search results to drive massive amounts of traffic to the site to sell those 4.6 billion ad impressions.

Sure. They were incentivized to just get as much through. Some of them were watching, the more experienced ones were watching even up to 2000 videos per eight hour shift. Just clicking through.

[00:20:34] Jordan Harbinger: This is like psychological trauma for sure. It

[00:20:37] Laila Mickelwait: was. It really was. And one of the moderators, and he gave me permission to share this, was especially hard for him because he was sexually abused as a child himself.

[00:20:45] Crosstalk: Geez.

[00:20:46] Laila Mickelwait: And so it was especially traumatizing for him, and I think that was one of the reasons why, you know, when he heard the stories about what's happening, a porn head wanted to come forward and reveal what he knew.

[00:20:56] Jordan Harbinger: Oh my gosh. So the content moderation thing is just a joke. It's one of those, like we have to technically have this department because just say we have it.

So, yeah. Yeah.

[00:21:04] Laila Mickelwait: It was ridiculous because when I discovered all this, I started the hashtag trafficking hub. Just to reiterate what we just said about trafficking, the reason why I did that was because any underage victim and anyone forced fraud coercion on the site. Is a victim of trafficking per our statutes, because these are heavily monetized videos.

So they're using the trafficking statutes now to sue. They can be held criminally responsible for all of that. Some people might say, well, how is that trafficking? It's because it was monetized. It's monetized. Yes.

[00:21:36] Jordan Harbinger: Look, I'm a guy who went to college with internet, so like I've seen my fair share of porn, especially in the early days.

You see videos with drunk women who can barely move, and that's the point of the video and it's really gross. And that is, I would imagine also, no one can consent when they don't know where they are and they can't keep their eyes open. This is everywhere. You don't have to look very hard, I would imagine on a site like PornHub to find something bad.

My question is, Google's indexing all this, so if you're indexing something and it's 12-year-old boy gets raped. Your search engine is indexing this, which means it found this, and you're just gonna go, yeah. Okay. Well, we're just gonna surface that as the first result because it matches the best. How is there not a flag in Google that goes, we found a lot of these rape videos that are on a website.

Should we block that entire website or call the FBI or something? No, just put it on the list like a other search results. That's an unreasonable course of action.

[00:22:27] Laila Mickelwait: I agree with you, a thousand percent. One of the senior employees said, Google is where PornHub lives or dies. Of course,

[00:22:35] Jordan Harbinger: if they didn't index all these titles, they wouldn't need to create all these different videos.

[00:22:39] Laila Mickelwait: Exactly. Surface's. Google has the power to suppress, so they sure are just not innocent bystanders in all this because Nick Kristoff, when he did his article, children of Porn Hub. Yeah. He's the two time Pulitzer Prize winning journalist from the New York Times that took this. He heard about this, just to give people a recap of what happened.

So Trafficking hub campaign went viral. I started a petition. I wrote an op-ed about this. An essay got a lot of traction. The petition went viral. 2.3 million signatures today from every country in the world. Lots of media articles were written about this, and then Nick Christophe did this huge investigation.

One of the things that he pointed out was Google's power over all of this. And I look at this and I see there are enablers. There is the bad actors and then there enablers who allow them to do this, who help them, who in fact benefit from. Their business and doing so knowingly. Sure. So that would include the credit card companies?

Yeah. Yeah, the financial institutions and Google. And so I think Google, they don't let you surface results for how do you kill yourself?

[00:23:43] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, they don't.

[00:23:44] Laila Mickelwait: They took that ability away from people to search that. Okay. And find a result that would teach them that this is, what is he wrote in his article? I haven't actually tried it for myself.

[00:23:54] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I've never thought to Google that.

[00:23:56] Laila Mickelwait: But he said, likewise, they could suppress user-generated porn sites known to be infested in trafficking and not allow that traffic to go. And I have dozens of examples of Google search results that are confirmed. If that link was clicked on Google, it would go to a confirmed case of child abuse on PornHub.

And I've shown those to Google.

[00:24:19] Jordan Harbinger: That's a very interesting case, again, from a legal perspective, because I. Google is also monetizing things via ads and sponsored links, and it's okay. How much did the search results that you're indexing result in monetization for your company? Arguably, there's a nexus there, so you're also, in a way, of course, they got that section two 30 where they're like, Hey, we're not responsible for the things people put on the internet.

Okay. But you're creating another product by creating the index and the search results

[00:24:43] Laila Mickelwait: is exactly right. And right now, PornHub and MindGeek, they're losing their motions to dismiss based on Section two 30 because they helped. Curate. They help tag title surface. They created thumbnails. Yeah.

[00:24:58] Jordan Harbinger: The image search.

It's all there. Google creates that on their own servers. The lawyers are making the argument that I would also make, there's a nexus there because of that.

[00:25:04] Laila Mickelwait: Yeah. And then knowingly benefiting. Sure. So in the us, not only is it illegal to engage directly in trafficking, but knowingly benefiting from a trafficking venture where you knew, or you should have known that this was happening, you can be held liable for that.

So I think there should be a lawsuit against Google.

[00:25:22] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I would agree. And it's amazing how much power they have to stop something like this. They just aren't doing it because there's not enough noise. Well, you're working on that. Let's

[00:25:31] Laila Mickelwait: work on that next. Yeah. You're working on that.

[00:25:33] Jordan Harbinger: The thing that I didn't understand necessarily was if the uploaders are making money from uploading the videos, you have to know who they are because you have to know who to pay.

How are they getting paid? The uploaders. Yeah.

[00:25:44] Laila Mickelwait: So that was that 20%. So the 20% of content on PornHub where it was the pay to download content? Yeah, they would identify themselves. They have to, so Rocky Sha Franklin was one of those uploaders. Now the problem was they were identifying the uploader. They weren't identifying the individuals in the videos.

So we have numerous cases of victims who are currently suing PornHub, who were part of those paid to download. They called it the Model Hub program, where they were quote unquote PornHub models. Mm-hmm. That had these verified accounts where they would show an id, they would show where to get paid, but they wouldn't be verifying the individuals in the videos.

I see, okay. Yeah. But 80% of the content on PornHub or more. Was just the free content. It was anonymous.

[00:26:30] Jordan Harbinger: I see. That maybe points to another website where somebody can go. I'm trying to figure out why somebody would upload free.

[00:26:36] Laila Mickelwait: Okay. They upload free stuff. The same reason why they upload it to Facebook clout.

It's clicks, it's views, shares, comments.

[00:26:45] Jordan Harbinger: You're going to prison for 40 years, so you get the comments. They're not, because they're

[00:26:47] Laila Mickelwait: not going to prison because they could use a VPN to upload and use an anonymous email address.

[00:26:53] Jordan Harbinger: I see. So

[00:26:53] Laila Mickelwait: nobody could ever know. So the risk was

[00:26:55] Jordan Harbinger: nil basically.

[00:26:56] Laila Mickelwait: There was no risk whatsoever.

[00:26:58] Jordan Harbinger: Geez. Imagine abusing somebody like you're not even also getting paid for. It's like the height of sociopathy, right? It's like you're not even just a heartless bastard who will do anything for money. You're a heartless bastard who is just wasting your time on this just to get comments and you're ruining someone's life.

I can't wrap my mind around it. As a normal person who doesn't have massive psychological damage, I don't get it.

[00:27:19] Laila Mickelwait: The scary thing is that because of the scale of these sites and because they're not the dark web, right? Yeah. These are the mainstream sites and these are people that we're interacting with every day.

Yeah. I mean, because of the scale, it has to be. PornHub had intentionally put a download button on every single video, meaning, and this is important when you think about. Liability. Sure. Because if there's a child sexual abuse video that is illegal to distribute and distribute, possess dis, but they were allowing people from their servers to actually possess those videos on their devices all over the world and re-upload them again and again, a rape that might be uploaded.

So yes, that initial upload happened from that perpetrator, but then millions of people a day would have the opportunity to then download it and then they are the re-up uploader. So they then redistribute it again and again,

[00:28:09] Jordan Harbinger: I wonder why they allowed downloading and re-uploading. They must have wanted people to re-upload it with different titles so that they've indexed by, I asked that question

[00:28:16] Laila Mickelwait: exactly.

Right? Yeah. They wanted, because to them it didn't really matter. What was in the video, right? As long as it was inventory.

[00:28:24] Jordan Harbinger: You have a thousand of the same video on PornHub is a different title, Don. And they don't care

[00:28:27] Laila Mickelwait: care just as, as long as it has different tags, as long as it has a different title, it's more content.

And so it was incentivizing people. They wanted people to do compilations. They wanted people to download and re-upload. Oh, and

[00:28:39] Jordan Harbinger: edit stuff or whatever. Yeah, exactly.

[00:28:41] Laila Mickelwait: That is exactly why they had a download button. But at the same time, understanding that they had a site that was infested with videos of real sexual crime.

[00:28:54] Jordan Harbinger: Somewhere, a bunch of guys made a decision that said, Hey, if we do this, we're potentially liable for distributing child and illegal pornography, child sexual abuse material, rape videos, et cetera. But if we do allow it, we get more inventory. And they were like, we're never gonna get caught for the illegal thing, so just do the other thing that makes us more money.

I think

[00:29:11] Laila Mickelwait: that they had an arrogance like that. Yeah. Or there's just

[00:29:13] Jordan Harbinger: no lawyers anywhere near this place, which I don't believe, if you're making that point. No, they

[00:29:17] Laila Mickelwait: had a, I mean, they have a chief legal officer who was there from 10 years ago who's still there today.

[00:29:23] Jordan Harbinger: Wow. That's a dirty attorney right there.

And I mean that in the figurative sense. I'm not accusing this person of any crimes. I am accusing of being a disgusting scumbag, though

[00:29:32] Laila Mickelwait: there was an arrogance to all that was going on. I think that they thought they were just too popular. Maybe too big too. That's a question that I sometimes wonder. Yeah.

What were you thinking? You would never get caught. I wanna talk

[00:29:43] Jordan Harbinger: to the lawyer and go, what was your plan? For when this eventually came crashing down, it was just to make,

[00:29:48] Laila Mickelwait: this was the plan. It was how can we make as much money as we can, as fast as we can? This was the business model that they set up to the point where, in the discovery process with the litigation, now we've even discovered more than what's in my book.

So we recently found out things like the executives had emails and documents that they were sharing with each other. They would be recommended, we need to suppress on our red words, list words like childhood, minor, young, and they wouldn't, and that I see they were tracking to the dollar. How much money they were making every month on categories and titles that contained, oh, child sexual abuse material, like the teen categories, right?

Because those were some of the most popular categories on the site,

[00:30:35] Jordan Harbinger: right? So if we block this tag, we can do it, but it's gonna lose us $10 million a month. They knew. They knew, and they were like, man, let's not do that. Then

[00:30:41] Laila Mickelwait: they knew to the dollar, they were tracking how much money they were getting on these various categories.

Now obviously, all of the videos in those categories would not be illegal, right? In a teen or a very young or young, old, young, small tits, things like this. It's not all gonna be illegal. A lot of it is 18 year olds who look under age, but sure they're dressy up weird or whatever. A lot of it was actual teens, geez.

That were in these videos and tweens.

[00:31:06] Jordan Harbinger: How desensitized are you to stuff like this? Because you just said a bunch of stuff. I was not really necessarily expecting you to, to, to say it. There's a part of your brain that's just so deep in this, but then you like a normal person with a child also, it's gotta be kind of strange as lawyers do this too.

Right? You're in a defense attorney and you're looking at gory murder crime scene stuff, and then you have to go get a latte and maybe not think about that for 10 minutes.

[00:31:28] Laila Mickelwait: Yeah. I think that I have just been so immersed. Mm-hmm. And all of this, it just doesn't really, I don't wanna say it's like. That I'm detached or that it's like a comfortable thing.

It doesn't come across that

[00:31:38] Jordan Harbinger: way, but I just didn't expect you to say, well, there's the small tits category. I was like, geez. But see, this is the

[00:31:43] Laila Mickelwait: thing is that maybe at first it was uncomfortable for me to talk about it, but I forced myself. Because the thing is that I think people have to hear it. I don't wanna talk in vague terms too much.

Yeah, you right. And I was really trying to balance, because I under shared, you may feel like this is so graphic and descriptive. No, you could tell

[00:32:00] Jordan Harbinger: the publisher was probably like, do we need this page? Oh, they were, yeah. They were like, can we remove the chapter on the thing? Because that's really like, yeah, we wanna sell this in other areas, other countries.

When this comes out in another country, you're gonna find out what censorship is really like, you know, when the Russian edition comes out, we need all of the stuff that refers to sex removed from this book.

[00:32:20] Laila Mickelwait: Yeah, I, I just got a Ukrainian translation offer. Mm. So we'll see how that goes. Yeah. But I thought that it was.

Important not to be vague, to be specific, because I think that a lot of people want to just disregard this as you're just oversensitive about, this is really consensual content. You just don't understand. Yeah. It, you don't know consensual when you read the book.

[00:32:43] Jordan Harbinger: It is clearly not that. It's very clear.

What would you say to somebody who believes that the trafficking or the exploitation on these platforms? Oh, it's rare. She's exaggerating. I'm sure you've heard this before.

[00:32:53] Laila Mickelwait: Yeah. I would just say that, you know. One instance, like the 15-year-old girl from Florida who's missing for a year and found in 58 videos on the site, that would be too much.

But we know that the site was actually infested with videos of real sexual crime. That would be the spectrum of abuse. And this is not exaggerated, like most of the content on the site was legal and consensual, but too much of it was illegal and that they were profiting from all of it, and it was knowing.

And so I guess that's just what Aboutm too, because a lot of people say, what about this site and what about that site? And say, okay, well let's hold them accountable too. I'm focusing on this one predator. We don't do that with individuals like. When we see Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein, we don't say, we're not gonna hold Jeffrey Epstein accountable because Harvey Weinstein was doing it too.

Or Bill Cosby was also raping. No, it's like somebody getting getting murdered

[00:33:49] Jordan Harbinger: in New Jersey doesn't go look. People get murdered in New York too. It's like

[00:33:52] Laila Mickelwait: we hold them all accountable. Right. You all

[00:33:54] Jordan Harbinger: go to prison.

[00:33:55] Laila Mickelwait: That's the way the law works. That's the way it is in this case.

[00:33:58] Jordan Harbinger: It was interesting in the book that you mentioned that adult film stars, like the ones who work in legitimate vetted industrial, whatever, porn they are the ones who often report the videos.

'cause they're looking for their pirated stolen content, but then they come across something where they go, oh my God, this is a child. So they find it all the time. And it's funny 'cause you see somebody like Jenna Jamison being like, this is a cesspool that needs to be taken down. And you go, what an unlikely ally.

'cause people will say, and I'm sure that your critics say this, you're just a prude. That's against porn. That's your problem.

[00:34:29] Laila Mickelwait: I get that the time. All the time. Well, that was their kind of ammunition to try to quiet this, to try to de platform or discredit. Of course the most obvious is a religious moral crusade right wing to shut down all sex on the internet.

And at the same time you have porn performers who are some of my greatest allies in the fight. And sometimes they had to be quiet about it because of the MindGeek monopoly and they would get blacklisted. I see. If they would speak publicly because although they hated PornHub, because the free porn tube sites, to your point, what you just said was they destroyed the legal.

Mm-hmm. Studio produced porn industry by allowing, obviously they allowed the rape and the child abuse and all that, but they were just allowing pirated. Copyrighted content. Sure. All the time. So we had porn performers who were complaining just saying, shut this down, because I'm spending two hours a day scouring my geek's porn tube sites, trying to get my own stolen content off the site, right?

So they hated it.

[00:35:25] Jordan Harbinger: Now feast your perverted ears on the porno. Graphically good deals on the fine products and services that support this show. We'll be right back.

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[00:36:51] Jordan Harbinger: This episode is sponsored in part by Airbnb. I gotta give a shout out to Brian McDonald, who listened to the show and absolutely hooked me up in Vietnam. Recently, Brian runs a taste of Hanoi, and I had this layover in Hanoi, and he is like, I got you. Sets me up with one of his guides for a motorbike tour in Saigon.

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You can find the course@sixminutenetworking.com. Now, back to my conversation with Layla Michelate. When I was in my early twenties, a friend invited us to a porn shoot in, of course, the Valley, and we thought, oh, this would be funny to go and see. And it was gross, right? The girls were. Not in a good condition.

They were like probably partially intoxicated. But what was interesting was the guys who were shooting it, they were like, you gotta leave. You're not in a condition to work. And I remember thinking like, oh, this is a professional operation. They sent home the girls that were intoxicated or high that was not expecting that.

And it made me realize there's these different tiers, right? There's the horrific illegal growth stuff that we're talking about now. There's professional adult film shoots that happen where there's like catering and lighting people and stuff. And it's not necessarily my thing, but it's a thing that it's an industry.

And then there's also like the Playboy mansion, which is like adjacent to that. And it's not appropriate to mix all this into one snowball. Yeah. There's just these different layers and they get really seedy and gross as you go down.

[00:39:47] Laila Mickelwait: It is true. And there is this distinct difference between. The Porn Valley.

It almost feels historical now because everything has migrated to mostly the free user generated porn sites, but it still exists. Like the studio produced content where they have to abide by. This is really important. USC 2 2 5 7. This is a law that we've had since 1988 in the United States. That requires age and consent verification.

It came about when there was an underage victim, Tracy Lords, who was underage and she was being used in these porn videos. She's super

[00:40:22] Jordan Harbinger: famous, correct? I feel like I've heard that name. Yeah,

[00:40:23] Laila Mickelwait: like you would have heard her name. Any thinking person understands that if you don't verify for age and consent in porn, you're gonna have illegal content proliferating in the industry.

And this has been something that they accept. In the studio produced professional porn industry, and they abide by that for the most part. And if you don't abide by that, it's a criminal offense. The DOJ has the right to inspect those records at any time. And if you don't have them, you can go to prison.

[00:40:49] Crosstalk: Yeah.

[00:40:50] Laila Mickelwait: So they take it seriously. However, the problem is, it just didn't translate into the internet age. Sure. And that is one of the things that we're fighting hard for, is to create those standards. Those standards where you have a, you know, an intro and an outro in a lot of those videos where you say, hi, my name is dah, dah, dah, I'm here.

I consent to this. They do a, a post shoot interview as well. Like they can have those standards. Now you're not gonna get as much traffic, you're not gonna get as much content uploaded, but that's the price to pay to have a legal operating industry. I.

[00:41:26] Jordan Harbinger: There was a point at which you're applying enough pressure where you can see them swapping out and deleting videos and so essentially prove they knew that the problem was there the whole time.

'cause they had no problem finding all these videos they needed to delete once you applied enough pressure. What's interesting to me was in the comments under the videos, you mentioned this in the book, they censor words like rape and underaged. So if that's flagged and censored automatically, theoretically, if you see that pop up 15 times in the comments of one video, you could block that video and then have a manual review of that thinking, oh, maybe there's underaged rape, whatever in this video.

'cause people keep saying that there is. They just didn't do that. They just went, oh, let's just block the words out. It's really so clear. As you look at the way they handled this problem, and I put that in radio air quotes, they handled this is not just they were lazy or they were incompetent. This is clearly deliberate at a certain point.

[00:42:17] Laila Mickelwait: Yes. The devil's in the details of all of this. Exactly. The fact that, yeah, so they would have, this is rape, would be the comment and they would censor rape. And this would happen, and it was confirmed by the moderators. It's exactly what they were doing. I saw this enough times to say, what is going on here?

Yeah. They are censoring those words. And when they got in trouble for the stuff, like the unconscious, the drugged, so then they started to take out the word drugged from a title, but leave the video up. And so you could see the, the title, it would be like. You could tell that it would've said that, but just that one word would be taken out.

The video is still there. Right. Or they would swap it out, things like that, instead of actually acknowledging the inherent, deeply flawed business model that they set up, they had to do stuff like this. And it even goes down to things that we discovered, like the fact that they intentionally hired one person.

Out of 1800 employees, one person to work five days a week to review videos flagged by users as terms of service violations, including rape and trafficking. And what they did was they had a policy and their emails actually uncovered in discovery were the CEO is discussing with his VPs these policies and talking about them.

And he calls it good and reasonable. They had a policy where a video had to be flagged 15 times in order for it to be put in queue for review. So a victim could have their video on PornHub and then flag it 14 times. They could even flag it 15 times. 'cause it had to be over 15 times. Sure, sure. And they had a backlog of 706,000 videos.

And we have evidence now of specific cases of prepubescent children who had videos on the site for years with 13 flags, 14 Flags. Here you have the CEOs and the VPs discussing this policy saying it was fine.

[00:44:12] Jordan Harbinger: It's terrible. And PornHub staff out there. If you send me a take down request for this, I'm really backed up.

I've got 800,000 requests for taking down this podcast. It's gonna be a few years, but I'll get to it, I promise. Honest. I mean, this is

[00:44:23] Laila Mickelwait: publicly available information. Yeah, that is in court documents, of course. And we can see that.

[00:44:27] Jordan Harbinger: You can imagine somebody going, you need to take this down. You're defaming my corporation.

We're on it. I got somebody who works three hours a week and they are just slammed. It's a busy operation we got over here. So the private sharing on PornHub, which I didn't know existed, I guess this is like unlisted videos. Tons of pedophiles are using this because you, it's basically like YouTube, but you can put up sex videos.

You can put up private stuff that is essentially not even going to be found by anybody. 'cause you need a specific link. So they're hosting this content too, which is again, obviously illegal to even possess, distribute, monetized or not because it's child sexual abuse material. There's points at which this book is upsetting if you're a normal human who's even moderately well adjusted, there's gross depictions of rape and abuse.

You did a good job of towing the line of this where it's not gratuitous, but you did a good job of explaining just how bad it is without making it traumatizing, I think. And I just wanted to give you props for that 'cause it's not an easy topic to cover.

[00:45:24] Laila Mickelwait: I appreciate you saying that.

[00:45:25] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, you're welcome.

I,

[00:45:26] Laila Mickelwait: I kind of labored over that. I'm sure you did. And your editor was probably

[00:45:30] Jordan Harbinger: tearing her hair out. Just, oh, what can we leave in? And they did

[00:45:33] Laila Mickelwait: want me to, to tone it down and I did. I'm sure I did. But also I just said, look, at the same time, it has to bring true. I didn't wanna traumatize people, so I, I'm so glad that you said that.

I did want people to experience it the way that I experienced it. They could feel how I felt when I, you do get

[00:45:52] Jordan Harbinger: that pit in your stomach feeling without being like, I need to vomit out of my car window right now. I was listening to it while driving and it was just like, there's points where I was just like, this is pause.

Take a couple breaths, roll the window down and get some air. But I think people will enjoy this book because again, the payoffs are there and we're getting to those in a bit. The ownership of PornHub. My producer actually said, Hey, aren't they just in Montreal? Can't RCMP just go in there and be like, Hey, you guys are hosting child porn.

Child sexual abuse material. Get this outta here. They're in Montreal. What's going on? Isn't this Canadian owned, but not really. So tell us how the ownership is structured.

[00:46:28] Laila Mickelwait: It's a very complicated ownership structure that we still don't fully understand even today. But they were based in Luxembourg for tax purposes.

They had offices, their moderation offices in Cyprus. They had offices in Romania, in London, British Virgin Islands. They had their headquarters in Canada, so that's where they had most of their employees and they were operating. So that was their headquarters. They had offices in LA today, they have offices in Texas as well.

They were all over the world. And so in that way, they did that on purpose in a way to avoid. Responsibility in any one place.

[00:47:03] Jordan Harbinger: I used to do real estate finance, and you have these investors from like Saudi Arabia and you go, oh, that person's not investing in our US entity. They're investing in our Cypress entity, which whenever I hear Cyprus and British Virgin Islands, especially if you hear them all in one cluster, now you also hear like Dubai or UAE, of course.

Or you hear these, there's certain places where you go, where's Guernsey again? Oh, it's an island off the Isle of Man. It's like these are all places where you can basically hide money. Vladimir Putin's friend has an account there. That's the company you're in. That's kind of what they were doing. They were hiding and

[00:47:33] Laila Mickelwait: not only hiding money, they were hiding themselves.

[00:47:35] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm. Sure. They were

[00:47:36] Laila Mickelwait: hiding their own identities from the public for years.

[00:47:40] Jordan Harbinger: So this is like shell company owned, I'm guessing, or different shell companies, different things. Yeah. They had, I mean, over,

[00:47:45] Laila Mickelwait: it was like 200 sister companies related size, PO boxes, bank accounts, companies that would appear and then disappear and appear and disappear and interrelated, and it's just very complicated.

That was probably the part of all of this that I understood the least. That was the most difficult for me to wrap my head around.

[00:48:03] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. You basically need a lawyer to decipher this nonsense. Forensic accountants. Yes. Forensic accountants,

[00:48:08] Laila Mickelwait: lawyers who, and they did that. And the lawyers that are suing PornHub today, they took two years of jurisdictional discovery.

They went in and they've tried to understand all this, and in doing that, they actually were able to. Now rope in the hedge funds to the lawsuits, the victims are suing and they're not only suing PornHub and it's they suing it's individual owners. They're suing the hedge funds. Ooh. They're suing Visa and trying to hold everybody accountable.

Good for all of this. Oh, visa. Oh, they're not gonna

[00:48:34] Jordan Harbinger: like that. Are they? The payment processors? I assume PornHub takes credit cards for selling, what is it, premium stuff or whatever? No, it was

[00:48:42] Laila Mickelwait: for even the ads,

[00:48:43] Jordan Harbinger: for buying ads that makes sense. For buying the ads,

[00:48:45] Laila Mickelwait: for selling the premium memberships, for the pay to download content.

All of that was being monetized by the credit card companies and PayPal. PayPal actually disengaged with them. When that London Sunday Times story came out, I told you about, PayPal was like, we're out.

[00:48:58] Jordan Harbinger: Things are grim when PayPal is the upstanding citizen in this particular story, because. You think of credit card companies like, oh yeah, they're behind me.

That somebody charged me for something. They didn't charge me. You know, I called them right away. They did not immediately respond to your query and were horrified and unplugged the, uh, buying machine. Well, they said

[00:49:15] Laila Mickelwait: they were uhhuh, they said they were so concerned and we were against this kind of content.

But it was a lot of talk. It was really hard to get, they were so

[00:49:24] Jordan Harbinger: concerned until they saw how much money they were making from both health, and then they were less charging, less concern. Yeah. They were charging a lot.

[00:49:28] Laila Mickelwait: You know, because these are high risk transactions. Sure. So they get to charge more per transaction on porn transactions than normal transactions.

[00:49:35] Jordan Harbinger: I didn't even think about that. Yeah. So instead of 1%, they're like, Hey look, we gotta charge 3.8% or

[00:49:39] Laila Mickelwait: more.

[00:49:40] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I heard

[00:49:41] Laila Mickelwait: certain cards or different financial transactions are even more than that, huh? So significantly more. And what was interesting about all this, you know, at first we said, okay, looking at this, how do we move them?

How do we go after this? And yes, of course it was like public shaming, but one of the things that was early on we understood was it was the credit card companies. And we knew this because there was a site called backpage.com. Oh yeah. A number of years ago ago was a shady Craigslist. It was kind of like Craigslist, where they were selling kids.

And one of the things that was really effective was going after the credit card company. So we had that, but then the former owner of PornHub came forward, Fabian Tillman, the guy that had that $362 million loan to roll up the porn industry. And he's the one who put PornHub on the map. And he had sold the company, I think six or seven years before all this started.

And he came forward to me in the summer of 2020 to say he wanted to help. And one of the things that he said was, go after the credit card companies. The only thing they him in the wallet care about is the credit card. Companie. Huh? Good tip. That was a confirmation.

[00:50:40] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. But hitting 'em in the wallet, that's always a good, generally a good idea.

[00:50:44] Laila Mickelwait: Yeah. Especially if that's their motivating factor. That's all they care about. Yeah. That's the reason why we saw the payoffs that we did later on in the book. Yes. With them taking down content. And

[00:50:53] Jordan Harbinger: so tell me about this farro guy. First things first, he sounds like a dangerous psychopath. This is not a nice person.

He's gross by every metric that you can find. He just strikes me as a disgusting human.

[00:51:05] Laila Mickelwait: So I learned a lot about farro through dozens of hours of conversations with company insiders from the company, experiencing him as an employee, but also people who were close to the family. But I learned a lot about his personality and it was interesting.

I tried to be as detailed and honest as I could about him to describe his character, who he was. He was actually very dedicated to his family at the same time. Isn't that

[00:51:30] Crosstalk: weird?

[00:51:30] Laila Mickelwait: Willing to completely exploit other children. Yeah, sure.

[00:51:33] Jordan Harbinger: And

[00:51:33] Laila Mickelwait: other people. And

[00:51:34] Jordan Harbinger: it's also very mafia, the whole thing. The banking and shell companies just reeks of organized crime.

And then, yeah, you got the heads of this thing. I'm a family man. I have breakfast with my mom every day, but also I have child sexual abuse material on my website and if I don't do it, someone else is gonna do it. These sort of justifications that mobsters have.

[00:51:52] Laila Mickelwait: Yeah, I hope that people really do get to know as much as you can because they did hide themselves.

So one of the things I really wanted to do as much as humanly possible. Was let the world know who are these people, what are they like, and and truly expose them because at the same time that they were exposing for profit, the bodies of unwilling victims since 2007 and profiting from that, they were hiding themselves.

So they were using fake names like VP of PornHub, Corey Iman was using pseudonyms all the time in the hundreds of media articles. And the former majority shareholder of the company was completely unknown to the world. And he had hidden his identity for so many years. And actually, Fabian, the former owner, is the one who told me his name for the first time.

[00:52:36] Crosstalk: Interesting. And we were

[00:52:37] Laila Mickelwait: able to expose him, burned Bergmeyer, and he was the majority shareholder leaving part-time in Hong Kong and London. And he was from Austria. But these men tried to hide themselves. So one of the things was, let's actually show the world who they are and hold them accountable.

[00:52:52] Jordan Harbinger: It's interesting, right?

'cause if you're in Silicon Valley and you invested in Uber, you cannot shut up about your good investment in Uber. And if you've invested in Duolingo, you can't stop talking about it. You invest in PornHub, you got 13 shell companies, a fake name, another fake name, a fake house, a PO box, a fake car. Maybe you're doing something that you are not proud of at this point, right?

Yeah,

[00:53:14] Laila Mickelwait: exactly.

[00:53:14] Jordan Harbinger: It's very obvious. This is not a hedge fund that says, I've got thousands of investments. I don't look at every single one. Mine geek. What is that? No. You knew damn well that there was something wrong because you hid your identity from that investment and yet you're on Squawk Box talking about all your other investments.

Make it make sense, pal. Have you been threatened because you're dealing with a mafia like business and shady characters with zero scr bulls.

[00:53:37] Laila Mickelwait: Yeah, definitely. That has been part of the whole process. Yeah. I've, I've experienced a lot death threats, rape threats, family doxing hacking, being falsely reported for possession of child pornography, which never happened.

Of course.

[00:53:51] Jordan Harbinger: And that's kind of almost predictable, right? We're gonna accuse you of doing the thing that we're doing because it's so ambiguous now. It's an old play.

[00:53:58] Laila Mickelwait: Yeah. That's happened. And yeah, there's been a kind of a lot stress on my family through all of this as well. Sure. But it doesn't even compare to some of the stuff that the victims themselves have been attacked and, um, had happened to them and.

What they've had to go through and identifying themselves and speaking out has been so much worse.

[00:54:17] Jordan Harbinger: There was that strange? Possibly not a coincidence that happened where a couple of the victims came out speaking about this and then weren't they attacked somehow? Yeah,

[00:54:26] Laila Mickelwait: it was at the same time, within days of each other in different parts of the world, there were separate victims who had come forward publicly.

A lot of the victims were coming forward anonymously and being connected to attorneys. I mean, at the time I had victims coming forward as the petition was going viral and all the news stories and everything, almost on a daily basis, victims were coming forward, but some of them said, I'm gonna put my name out there, I'm gonna speak publicly about this.

And it was three of them, and they were in different parts of the world within days of each other. Each one of them was physically attacked and they were just roughed up. It was an intimidation thing. One of them sent pictures of notes that she was getting on her windshield after work. They were talking about her sexual abuse and things like that, and it was frightening.

[00:55:11] Jordan Harbinger: To just say like, it cannot be a coincidence. It's not like somebody got mugged in Spain and another person had a threat happen in Baltimore. It's like very specific.

[00:55:18] Laila Mickelwait: Yeah, and that's the thing. It's that you think that how could this happen? How could this be a coincidence? But at the same time, you can't prove that it wasn't a coincidence.

So you feel like in the sense, I felt like I was going crazy. What is happening here is, how could this be real? But it was like this was actually happening.

[00:55:35] Jordan Harbinger: Dealing with organized crime, though, that's the thing. I'm comfortable saying that because it's a company that engages in criminal activity knowingly or otherwise, depending on who you ask.

By the way, you've been a bit of a vigilante in the past as well. Yeah. There's the plumber who scammed your sister's car transmission. Tell me, tell me a little bit about that, because this is in your DNA, right? This is something you do. Yeah.

[00:55:55] Laila Mickelwait: I, you know, reflecting back on that, there are some stories people say like, why did you do this, and how did you stick with it?

And. Some of that I think back on my history and sometimes I think certain personality traits are just genetic. Like just in you. Yeah. I've had experiences over the years where a crooked plumber takes advantage of my husband, so he's a builder and, and he takes all the money for a job. He never does find out that he had actually done that to many other people looking on the internet, they're complaining about the same guy texting him saying, Hey, listen, you give that money back or you're gonna regret it.

He didn't listen. And I ended up connecting with the victims throughout the county who all shared the same story, connected with the police, actually connected with an ex-girlfriend of his I found on social media. Oh, that's

[00:56:42] Jordan Harbinger: always the key, isn't it?

[00:56:43] Laila Mickelwait: And she told me a lot of interesting details. I bet. And found out that he was gonna try to take off to Hawaii with all this money that he'd taken from all these victims and actually found out the airline, the flight, and I told the police.

He was arrested and he was sentenced and now he's paid everybody back with interest.

[00:57:00] Jordan Harbinger: Oh my gosh. Amazing. Yeah,

[00:57:02] Laila Mickelwait: that,

[00:57:03] Jordan Harbinger: I'm just imagining this, some bitch sitting at an airport sipping champagne like I've gotten away with it. This is amazing. And the police are like, there he is.

[00:57:09] Laila Mickelwait: Yeah.

[00:57:10] Jordan Harbinger: And then $400,000 plus interest later.

This guy's just sitting around lamenting. I just couldn't let it go. No, I just,

[00:57:17] Laila Mickelwait: it started with somebody that I care deeply for and then this was so wrong and I just had to go after it. And then a used car salesman has sold my sister a lemon of a junk yard engine and failing transmission and she drove it off the lot.

The check engine light goes on. She begs him to take it back. He won't I go over there. Listen, this is wrong. You sold your a lemon, give it back. He wouldn't. I just stood out there protesting. I got a permit, stood outside of his little car dealership for days in the rain protesting, telling every single person that they sold a lemon and he lost all his business.

And anyway, he finally did. Yeah, because the news

[00:57:51] Jordan Harbinger: covers it once and it's like. The owners, the news didn't cover it. Oh, they didn't? No. Oh. I thought they were gonna be like, oh. Oh, the news didn't

[00:57:58] Laila Mickelwait: cover that. There was no news. It was just me with a sign saying, turn around. He sold us a lemon failing engine, and day after day he came out, gun threats, yelling.

His partner quit. I just said, I'm not leaving until you give it back. And I was serious. And then he finally did.

[00:58:14] Jordan Harbinger: Wow. Yeah, he did the math finally

[00:58:16] Laila Mickelwait: hit him where it hurts, right? Yeah. Like he was losing his revenue. Sure. Nobody would buy a car from him.

[00:58:20] Jordan Harbinger: You'd have to be crazy to buy a car from a dealership with a protestor standing up front saying he sells lemons.

Jeez. I love being on your team. I also am a person who has trouble letting things like that go. Sometimes you have to, of course. But if you don't, if you're just wronged by somebody, I've got this personal policy where if a company screws me over, I wanna do at least 10, ideally a hundred x the financial damage.

So if I lose 50 bucks. Yes, I should let it go. But really I wanna do $500 in damage and often I overshoot because I've got a big platform. So if I say, this online company screwed me over, don't buy from them. Companies pay me a lot to advertise positive things on this show. So a negative impression, is it worth at least that much?

Yeah. So all I have to do is a minute and a half of a monologue about why this company sucks. And usually after a while you don't have to do that because you go to the live chat and they go, well, our policy is we're not gonna refund this. And I go, here's what happened in the last company that I, this.

You just explain it and you go, I'll save you the Google. Here's a link, here are the stats. I'm going to say what happened and I've got this chat logged. It's not gonna look good. And then it's give me 24 hours. And you get an email from a manager that says, we're refunding the entire year. Sorry for the billing mistake.

Good for you. I can't let it go. 'cause they're doing it on purpose. It is an item in their revenue. The amount we've been able to bill from people where they just don't check their statement for this particular charge. Yes. And they go, well refund 90 days. 'cause that's what you can dispute on your credit card.

No, you added this without my permission. I am not paying you for whatever international phone service for a year. Yeah. I would rather swap my cell phone over and cost you $25,000 in lost business. That's what I'd rather do.

[00:59:53] Laila Mickelwait: Well, good for you. I mean, you have the heart for justice. Yeah. Well, being an attorney also.

Yeah. In your past and knowing that they're doing it to other people.

[01:00:00] Jordan Harbinger: That's what really pisses me off. I can afford to lose 50 bucks. I can afford to lose 500 bucks. You know, who can't? Somebody who, that was their rent and now they're screwed. That really pisses me off. Yeah. So we have the same, we we share that.

We got that thing. Yeah. The threats you were getting were scary. They created escort ads with your name. Yeah. Which is. Creative a little bit? No. What do they do? They expect people to then call you, and then the people are trying to set you up. It was like

[01:00:22] Laila Mickelwait: in intimidation tactics, just it's dumb. Just kind of harassment.

So juvenile, right? Yeah. I currently have a situation right now, and it's not as nefarious as this, but just an AI thing, saying that I'm a porn star using an interview and describing this particular scene that I was in and whatnot. Yeah. All of these things that were happening, they were intimidation, harassment.

Some of them I can tie directly back to the company. Some of them are just people who are financially incentivized, who support the company, who don't wanna see revenue disturbed, are angry that this is happening. Some

[01:00:55] Jordan Harbinger: partners, whatever. Yeah.

[01:00:56] Laila Mickelwait: Random people doing this kind of thing. Yeah. But that was certainly happening.

But I always had this feeling of, this may be uncomfortable, this may be painful, but when you're going through, it's like when there's purpose to it, it's so much easier to go through when you're seeing progress. Fine. Go for it. We're making progress.

[01:01:14] Jordan Harbinger: You eventually got the credit card companies. How did you eventually convince these companies to drop what had to be a multimillion dollar line of business?

[01:01:21] Laila Mickelwait: That was hard. Yeah. We argued and I brought the evidence to the VPs of Visa and MasterCard. Yeah. It wasn't until Nick Christophe released his groundbreaking article called The Children of PornHub, he ends that article with these words. PornHub is Jeffrey Epstein Times a thousand, and he specifically called out the credit card companies in his article, why are you still doing business with a company that distributes rape videos to the world?

And at that point there was thousands of follow-on articles to that, and the pressure was on. There was journalists calling Visa and asked, why are you still doing it? Bill Ackman, who is a billionaire hedge fund manager, and he read the Children of PornHub. He was incensed. He has daughters of his own. And he reached out and I got connected with him and he learned the story.

And not only did he just go on Twitter to express his dismay and call out Visa MasterCard, he knew the CEO of MasterCard. Sure, yeah. From the tennis circuit. And he made a phone call. Of course he sent some texts. He said, this is trafficking going on. Are you gonna do the right thing? And Ajay bga, who was the CEO E of MasterCard at the time, said, I'm on it.

And he was on it interest. And he ing actually,

[01:02:30] Crosstalk: yeah,

[01:02:31] Laila Mickelwait: at that point, cut off the credit card companies and then Visa followed, discover followed. However, this was the time when they then in a panic. 'cause this was the worst thing that could happen to porn. Oh yeah. They took down 80% of the entire website overnight.

It was gone over 10 million videos, over 30 million images in what Financial Times called probably the biggest takedown of content in internet history. Huh. And that was 24 hours. All their unverified content was gone because they wanted to try to woo back the credit card companies, look, we

[01:03:00] Jordan Harbinger: solved the problem that we swore was technically impossible.

And we did it overnight.

[01:03:04] Laila Mickelwait: Right? Yeah. Although they actually didn't. Right. But however, so this all happened in made huge headlines, but I found out that two weeks later. The credit card companies quietly snuck back to the advertising arm of PornHub. So it was kind of behind the scenes because people don't see those transactions.

They're not, right.

[01:03:20] Jordan Harbinger: Look, it's a different entity called Traffic Junkie and not PornHub. Owned

[01:03:24] Laila Mickelwait: by PornHub, owned by MindGeek. And then it was round two, it was two more years of fighting. And it was only until Bill Ackman got involved again. We went on Squawk Box, calling out CEO Al Kelly, a Visa after Visa was not let out of their motion to dismiss in the case.

Oh wow. Where Serena, Serena was a, a young teen, she was exploited on the site. Her videos were uploaded again and again, millions of views. She would beg for the videos to come down. She'd be hassled. They would say, prove that you're underage in the video. Prove that you're a victim. She didn't have to prove that when it was being uploaded.

It sent her on a spiral of despair. She dropped out of school. She was a straight A student before all this happened. Never kissed a boy before. She dropped out of school from bullying. She got addicted to drugs to try to numb the pain. She tried to kill herself multiple times. So

[01:04:12] Crosstalk: terrible. She

[01:04:13] Laila Mickelwait: wound up homeless, living out of a car, but she sued PornHub and not only did she sue PornHub, she sued its individual owners, the hedge funds and Visa.

And Visa lost their motion to dismiss her case, and that is when everything imploded. Sure. And I

[01:04:28] Jordan Harbinger: assume they settled, right?

[01:04:29] Laila Mickelwait: It's still ongoing. Oh, it

[01:04:30] Jordan Harbinger: is? Yeah. God, the discovery involved in this is a nightmare for them,

[01:04:34] Laila Mickelwait: but they lost the motion and that was when the pressure was on. So then we publicly were calling out Al Kelly, her lawyer was on Squawk Box as well, and finally he made a personal statement.

He said, I'm a father and we're finally, you know, cutting off PornHub once and for all.

[01:04:48] Jordan Harbinger: I'm taking hell for this at the country club. That was the final straw for me now that I'm personally being embarrassed.

[01:04:53] Laila Mickelwait: Yeah, bill

[01:04:54] Jordan Harbinger: Ackman.

[01:04:55] Laila Mickelwait: Then it happened. Interesting. Got demonetized by the credit card companies, lost all mainstream advertisers.

All of that happened.

[01:05:02] Jordan Harbinger: Okay. Time to unzip and lube up for the barely legal deals and discounts on the fine products and services that support this show. Uh, yeah, I'm, I am getting canceled or at least going to hell for that one. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Audible. People always ask me how I managed to get through so much content, especially since I prep for every interview.

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How do they get paid now? Bank wire.

[01:09:05] Laila Mickelwait: Yeah. Today they have bank wires that they can pay in crypto. Oh, crypto is the way that they are monetizing the sites, but enablers is the key word. They're the bad actors and then they're the enablers. Those who allow them to continue the exploitation for profit and who benefit themselves from the exploitation, knowing that it's happening.

And so as much as it's important to hold what I call corporate traffickers, mega pimps, accountable for the exploitation, criminal exploitation happening, you also have to hold accountable their enablers. Mm-hmm. Judge Cormack Kearney in California in a case that is suing Visa and PornHub for monetizing child sexual abuse.

What he said, visa gave PornHub the very tool through which to complete the crime of knowingly benefiting from child trafficking. I think he said it very well

[01:09:58] Jordan Harbinger: when he rejected their motion Christmas. Yes, exactly. The lawyers must have got that and they're, you know what? Puckered up real tight because when, and it's just, no, I want to hear what the other side says.

That's bad enough. But when it's, no, I think you enabled this completely and you were crucial in that. That is he called them like, that's a bad weekend. What

[01:10:15] Laila Mickelwait: it was is co conspiracy.

[01:10:16] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[01:10:17] Laila Mickelwait: That's the key to this is holding the bad actors and their enablers. And the enablers have the power to stop this.

[01:10:24] Jordan Harbinger: They just have to make a tough call. We're gonna lose $25 million a year in fees. That's the price

[01:10:29] Laila Mickelwait: to pay. Yeah. But on the other hand, you're profiting

[01:10:31] Jordan Harbinger: from a criminal enterprise. It was good while it lasted. Turn off the faucet, it's the right thing to do. You mentioned that they buy user-generated content in bulk from developing countries that don't verify or moderate, so they might buy a million videos, I don't know, from a Vietnamese website or something, and you just have no way of knowing if any of that is legal in the United States or not.

There's a near certainty that at least some of it is not. To the categories as you described in the book. We won't do it on the show. They're so barfy. Examples are like runaways or like raped, homeless teens. The one that stuck with me was people being sealed into vacuum bags or tortured in ice and water boarding.

It makes you go, what sort of unhinged psychopaths are watching this? I get. The drive to watch people bang. Like I get that. The torture part, that's where you go, wow, this is really feeding some unhealthy stuff.

[01:11:24] Laila Mickelwait: Yeah. And they had hundreds of thousands, if not millions of views and had been on the site for years.

Yeah. These videos, one of the things that happens is this dark kind of spiral where I hear this a lot from people who come forward and say, Hey, I was addicted to this since I was eight years old, and 10 and 11. But obviously there's the psychopath and the people who are just instantly drawn to that kind of content.

But sometimes people go down a road, they don't even realize they're going down the

[01:11:52] Jordan Harbinger: rabbit hole thing. So

[01:11:53] Laila Mickelwait: with porn, the dopamine hit, you don't necessarily need more porn. You need different porn to get that same hit. And so what happens is you go more extreme and more extreme. Some people don't, but then it can lead to where you're watching things that you never would've imagined that you would've started with in the beginning.

[01:12:15] Jordan Harbinger: I would imagine there's also morbid curiosity that leads to. I don't know if they have an algorithm. Maybe they do.

[01:12:21] Laila Mickelwait: Oh, they do? Yeah. So that's how I ended up seeing so much of this illegal content. Oh yeah. Because people all over the world, when they would come in contact with an illegal video on PornHub, they would search around the internet and then they would send it to me.

So I would get the link. Oh. And if I clicked on the link, then the algorithm springs into action. So if you see one horrific rape video of an unconscious woman, then it thinks, okay, I'm gonna push more of that. Then you get more and more. Oh man. And so you go down that, I call it the hell hole of rape on PornHub.

[01:12:54] Jordan Harbinger: I wonder if Google and other companies are retargeting you. Do you get weird ads that pop up where you're like, oh, this has to be because of the PornHub clicks?

[01:13:00] Laila Mickelwait: Oh, that has definitely happened to me. Mm-hmm. But to the point of ads, one of the things that was. Horrific to me to realize, but not surprising, was I actually got to investigate Traffic Junkie, which was their ad arm.

Mm-hmm. And the way that they would target advertisements. So they would sell ads. First of all, they gather so much data about people. So people think they're going to a free tube site anonymously if you don't use a VPN IP address and income and all this stuff. But anyway, they would sell ads to advertisers targeting specific content.

So they would suggest things like you could find rape in Chinese or not 18 or very young teen or screaming teen, all of these different things. And then they could advertise on a particular video. To people who they understood would be interested in their product. So on a child sexual abuse video, I would see an ad that would say, delete your history after clicking here, and it was targeted to pedophiles so that they, oh, okay.

Let me click on that ad.

[01:14:03] Jordan Harbinger: Clever copy.

[01:14:04] Laila Mickelwait: Exactly.

[01:14:05] Jordan Harbinger: Oh my gosh. Disturbing. That's what I'm saying about like the rabbit hole, like the hell hole of your algorithm. Man, it really does show you how this can corrupt your mind. I'm not religious at all, but there's no way This kind of stuff is not horrible for you, just psychologically to consume.

You hear about it all the time with people who've been through things. There's no way, there's not like some sort of porn PTSD that you get from looking at this crap on the web over a certain period of time. Especially the horrible stuff.

[01:14:33] Laila Mickelwait: The scary thing too is that kids have free access to this site, right?

[01:14:37] Jordan Harbinger: Well, yeah.

[01:14:37] Laila Mickelwait: The worst things I would never wish on my worst enemy to see. Mm-hmm. That I have personally been traumatized by witnessing on PornHub. Any child. 10

[01:14:46] Jordan Harbinger: year olds now saying that

[01:14:47] Laila Mickelwait: somebody messaged me two days ago that said, I got addicted to the free porn tube sites when I was six, and it took me on a dark path.

And knowing that they're not only seeing. The hardcore content and the porn content, but actually they could be witnessing real sexual crime as their sex education, creating their sexual template, creating their sexual desires and what they understand about sex from such a young age. Oh,

[01:15:12] Jordan Harbinger: it's horrible.

Six years old. My son is five and a half. I have to help 'em build Lego sets for God's sake. It's just way too young. That's really disturbing. How do law enforcement and regulatory agencies fall short when it comes to addressing these crimes?

[01:15:25] Laila Mickelwait: So PornHub was criminally charged by the US government for knowingly profiting from the trafficking of over a hundred women in a particular sex trafficking operation in San Diego.

And instead of full prosecution, they were offered a deferred prosecution agreement. They were told to pay $1.8 million, which is nothing to a company like this and have a government monitor over their site for three years. And I think the way that they're failing in a situation like that is a slap on the wrist or nothing at all.

Sure. Or we don't see them putting the resources, the time and the attention necessary to actually create a big enough risk. For these kinds of abusers to face serious consequences.

[01:16:10] Jordan Harbinger: Sure. So this is just cost of doing business. At this point. It becomes exactly 2 million fine. All right. Whatever that

[01:16:14] Laila Mickelwait: is the cost of doing business, and that is not serious enough for them to actually stop engaging in that kind of conduct.

[01:16:21] Jordan Harbinger: It has to be a sort of catastrophic amount of money. That's why like the hot coffee case from McDonald's, right? If they just had to pay her $600, $6,000 medical expenses, they would've been like, we're not changing the temperature of the coffee. Once they had to pay whatever, $12 million, they're like, dang.

We need to change the temperature of this coffee. You gotta do something like that against these websites. So they're not gonna listen.

[01:16:41] Laila Mickelwait: And that's why I'm really hopeful with regard to the civil litigation side of things, because it doesn't rely on anybody with the will of the victims and their amazing attorneys.

And today, since 2020, we've had almost 300 victims sue in 25 lawsuits, including class actions on behalf of tens of thousands of child victims. Oh wow. And they're doing well. Those class actions are certified. They lost their motions for summary judgment. They're going to trial like they're doing well.

And so I see, I actually have more hope in the civil justice system to hit these companies where it hurts than even the criminal justice system to actually hold 'em accountable.

[01:17:17] Jordan Harbinger: That's actually often how it goes. The standard of proof is a little bit lower. Standards can be a little bit lower. It's just slow.

[01:17:23] Laila Mickelwait: Yeah, it is. The wheels of justice turn slowly. That is absolutely true.

[01:17:27] Jordan Harbinger: It is,

[01:17:27] Laila Mickelwait: yes. But they turn, I.

[01:17:29] Jordan Harbinger: I would love to talk about the impact in the payoffs from your investigations and your take down because the insurance and the lenders dropped the CEO and the executives tell us what happened here. Oh yeah.

This is the part where I was just like, oh, I need to go get a coffee and turn the volume up. Right. And I'm in my car. Yeah,

[01:17:46] Laila Mickelwait: that was pretty incredible what happened. So they deleted all of that content, but immediately they started getting phone calls. They were getting dropped on a personal level, right from their insurances for their many rental properties that they had.

Luxury rental properties. Mm-hmm. All over Quebec. And suddenly their lenders were dropping them, their insurances. Suddenly they couldn't drive their Lamborghinis and their Maseratis and all the kind of luxury cars they had 'cause they were being dropped from their car insurances. They were blacklisted in Canada as a moral risk.

[01:18:16] Jordan Harbinger: A moral risk. So it's strange, right? Because. Let's say I drive a Lamborghini and then I suddenly get caught doing blow at a club with Leonardo DiCaprio. Now my car insurance can say, Hey man, you're immoral. The drug use aside. We don't like what you do. I love that these guys got dropped, but it is a little scary that an insurance company can decide what's, I didn't know

[01:18:34] Laila Mickelwait: that that was even possible.

Appropriate behavior. Yeah. Yeah. It seems

[01:18:36] Jordan Harbinger: like, wait a minute, what am I missing?

[01:18:38] Laila Mickelwait: Yeah. But in their case, I was glad that they were getting payback. For us, it was just sick. He is a CEO and minority shareholder because they had been exposed and they were getting

[01:18:48] Jordan Harbinger: right,

[01:18:49] Laila Mickelwait: held accountable and just

[01:18:50] Jordan Harbinger: taking Uber everywhere.

Just

[01:18:53] Laila Mickelwait: Layla, this is your fault. I mean, that was happening. They were losing mainstream business partners. All the mainstream advertisers were canceling, and the CEO and the COO were finally forced to resign, and the company was sold as a distressed asset.

[01:19:06] Jordan Harbinger: Mike, tell me you didn't immediately crack open a bottle of wine and just feast on the deliciousness of that revenge.

That must have been so nice to see his personal life imploding, like couldn't happen to a better guy.

[01:19:17] Laila Mickelwait: One of the things that was just reward in that moment of the big takedown that happened was the fact that I was getting calls from so many victims. Mm-hmm. Who were just crying. Joy. Yeah. And relief that for the first time in years, their rate videos were finally off of PornHub and it was like they could finally breathe because they had been fighting for so long for these to come down, and finally they were gone.

And that was probably the most meaningful thing in all of this when that happened. But at the same time, we're still fighting. We still feel like justice hasn't been fully served, but we're glad for the things that have happened.

[01:19:58] Jordan Harbinger: It was so satisfying, and this is in the book as well. It's so satisfying to hear the Canadian Parliament tear apart.

The CEOs and the executives of PornHub over at MindGeek, they're not prepared for the questions. And you could just see the guy just sweating on TV and being like, oh my God, my life is over. Why did I agree to the, somebody help me and no one's coming to his age? It makes me wanna download the video of that and the hearing and upload it to PornHub with the title, CEO brutally on camera by Canadian parliament.

Hashtag gang bang. I know you have that on your computer for rainy days where you're just like, no, I'm having a bad one. I'm gonna watch for us. Get bent over by, there's been some good

[01:20:33] Laila Mickelwait: like compilations. Yeah. Everything that they say, the way they answer and it's, yeah. Very rewarding to finally see them being grilled and

[01:20:40] Jordan Harbinger: Right.

[01:20:41] Laila Mickelwait: Failing.

[01:20:41] Jordan Harbinger: You thought you were above the law. Here's you not being above the law and being embarrassed on TV internationally.

[01:20:47] Laila Mickelwait: Yes,

[01:20:48] Jordan Harbinger: of course. Later evidence shows they hid evidence from law enforcement. Shocking.

[01:20:51] Laila Mickelwait: 13 years.

[01:20:52] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[01:20:53] Laila Mickelwait: Hiding all of the child sexual abuse. So in that parliamentary hearing, the heads of the leading child protection agencies in the US and Canada, that they would have to report those videos, child sexual abuse.

To them, it was mandatory reporting in Canada, and they testified that they had not gotten a single report of child sexual abuse for 13 years. And the serious consequences that is, is I think. How many children could have been rescued from situations of abuse if they had been reporting and not hiding it from authorities?

[01:21:26] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Oh man. That's disturbing to think about. What about the employees? 1800 employees? Don't these people wake up and go, oh yeah. That New York Times article? Wow. I had a feeling we were up to no good. And surely people started to leave. Oh, they were

[01:21:39] Laila Mickelwait: just jumping ship.

[01:21:40] Jordan Harbinger: Like imagine LinkedIns of employees aren't, I mean, aren't you?

You work there. Yeah. Isn't that the thing for New York Times where you abuse kids and you're like, look, I'm just an accountant. Yeah. Leave me alone.

[01:21:47] Laila Mickelwait: They will take it off LinkedIn. They don't want Yeah. To have MindGeek on there at all.

[01:21:51] Jordan Harbinger: That's a hell of a resume gap. Yeah. If you've been to MindGeek for 10 years

[01:21:54] Laila Mickelwait: after the New York Times piece, so many employees were jumping chip.

Mm-hmm. Just quitting entire departments were gone, like the HR department was gone. My

[01:22:02] Jordan Harbinger: god. One little petty bit of satisfaction as well. For us, this new mansion that's being constructed, it mysteriously burns down. This is where people go, oh my God, that's terrible. But. Didn't it turn out to be his neighbors or do we not know?

[01:22:16] Laila Mickelwait: We don't know. I see who did it. Unfortunately, they were trying to kind of turn the fingers, you know, at me. Well, of course. And the trafficking hub movement for motivating X, Y, and Z. But clearly it was a professional job. It was done by somebody who knew exactly what they were doing. They raised that entire multi tens of millions dollars of a mansion to the ground without even touching the neighbors.

It was in hours. It was a huge fire. It was insane that happened. Thankfully, they actually weren't in the house. Right? Because they were building the house. They were at the last stage of construction. So as much as I hate anybody and want to see people face justice, don't, I don't to see them. Yeah. But that did happen.

And we don't know, even to this day. Was it somebody with an industry, was it an angry majority shareholder who was angry? They lived in this place called Mafia Row in Montreal.

[01:23:08] Crosstalk: Yeah.

[01:23:09] Laila Mickelwait: And there's hints that it could have been their neighbors. 'cause their neighbors were so mad.

[01:23:13] Crosstalk: Yeah.

[01:23:13] Laila Mickelwait: That they had reporters knocking on the doors.

Of the neighbor's houses. Oh, right. The cameras in the neighborhood all of the time. And then they found out that he had done all of this. They had been hurting children and before that they already hated him because he had cleared like hundreds of trees to build his monstrosity of a mansion. Right. His teddy without a permit and all of this.

And they, they were angry at him. Anyway, so

[01:23:37] Jordan Harbinger: that was the last straw. Tony Soprano, the neighbors, Montreal, the, yeah. Yeah. You were on the wrong side. When the mafia is, you're just too immoral. I can't live near you. These guys who've made their living embezzling and I don't know, extorting small business owners or whatever.

Good point. I draw the line at this. Did you ever think about quitting? I mean, people are threatening your family. They're threatening your kids, they're accusing you. You're getting calls from the sheriff that say you're being accused of having child sexual abuse material or whatever. I mean, there's gotta be days where you woke up and went like, I can't do this anymore.

[01:24:06] Laila Mickelwait: Oh yes. That definitely happened. And I wrote in a chapter called Before You Break, and it was because so much was piling on at once and my uncle, who I considered my brother, was dying of cancer and I was seeing him through the stages of death at the same time. All of this was so intense and I was so conflicted too, because I have two young kids and I'm spending so much time on this and it was just hard.

Yeah. There were times when I just, I don't wanna do this anymore, but I felt like it is an honor and a privilege of a lifetime to have the opportunity to be able to lead something like this. And, sorry, I'm getting emotional about it, but No, that's,

[01:24:47] Jordan Harbinger: that's great too. Yeah,

[01:24:48] Laila Mickelwait: I, um, I just couldn't, as much as I really wanted to, I really didn't want to.

Mm-hmm. Because I wanted to see this through to the end, and I wanted to see justice fully served, and I still do.

[01:25:00] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. PornHub is still online though, man. Yeah. Like what's next for you? Yeah, because it's not gone. Do you wanna get rid of the whole thing? What's the goal here? There's still work to do. So

[01:25:10] Laila Mickelwait: my dad taught me a lesson.

He was a man of integrity and growing up, if he said something, he meant it. You knew that he was going to. At least as much as he possibly could try to do what he said he was gonna do. And I feel that way. It wasn't a light thing when we started this to say, the petition is called Shut Down PornHub and Hold its Executives accountable.

And I still feel that Justice fully served in this case. Looks like PornHub does get shut down. We're 91% of the way there, so they have had to take down 91% of the entire website.

[01:25:44] Jordan Harbinger: 91%. Yeah. So

[01:25:46] Laila Mickelwait: since the book was written, more has come down and we found out that they have gone from 56 million pieces of content to 5.2 million today.

[01:25:53] Crosstalk: Wow.

[01:25:53] Laila Mickelwait: Yes. And so they're 91%. And the rest of the content that's on there, most of that was only verified uploaders. And we know the problem with that. The individuals in the videos were not verified.

[01:26:04] Jordan Harbinger: They're not the people who are in the video. Oh yeah. So they need to

[01:26:05] Laila Mickelwait: take down the rest of that content.

It's not important just to see justice served, to get vengeance for victims. And that's important. Sure's important for their healing because they can say. Yes. The wrong was recognized, right and paid for what happened. And that's an important journey on their healing process. However, it's also important to be a deterrent to future abusers.

Yes. Because this is a risk benefit calculation. And until we make the risk greater than the benefits that these companies get by maintaining the status quo, they will continue. And so we have to make an example out of PornHub to say, and we're seeing this already, like the other porn, two types are already trying to clean themselves up to get rid of illegal content, uhhuh to change their upload.

They don't wanna end up like PornHub

[01:26:49] Jordan Harbinger: made an example. Exactly.

[01:26:51] Laila Mickelwait: And that's why when we're fighting trafficking, we have to increase risk and we have to eliminate profitability, but we also wanna see policy put in place to make sure this doesn't happen again. So really the solution at scale. For this is to mandatory third party age and consent verification for every single person.

Third party is important in every video. You would never otherwise it just trust

[01:27:13] Jordan Harbinger: me, bro. Oh yeah. I would

[01:27:14] Laila Mickelwait: never want anybody to give their ID to porn of. Yeah. Not a million years.

[01:27:18] Jordan Harbinger: I can't imagine they have. This is all stored encrypted and we're not gonna misuse this at all. They're facing

[01:27:23] Laila Mickelwait: a class action right now for data exploitation.

Oh, really? As well? Yes. What that mean? User data exploitation. So they were without consent gathering user data and help monetizing it and whatnot with advertisers and Google and all of that. So they're facing that. So I would never want that. But there are reliable privacy respecting third party companies.

That can agent consent verify and that has to be done and it has to be done at scale. And so what I think is really key here is, yes, governments have to do this, but the credit card companies have to do this because when Visa says we do not do business with user-generated porn sites that don't verify agent consent immediately, quickly, internationally, all of these porn companies that are highly motivated by profit will quickly come fall in line.

They'll figure

[01:28:11] Jordan Harbinger: out a solution to this. They will

[01:28:12] Laila Mickelwait: immediately figure it out. Yeah.

[01:28:13] Jordan Harbinger: Because it creates an immediate market for that third party verification, and that overnight becomes the a hundred million dollar plus whatever business,

[01:28:20] Laila Mickelwait: the financial transactions, they will comply for

[01:28:23] Jordan Harbinger: sure. What I mean, even if you charged at scale 25, 20 cents per verification or 5 cents.

The scale is enormous. PornHub has more traffic than Netflix. Those millions of videos that, let's say it costs 25 cents to validate the models in each one, this just adds up so stinking fast.

[01:28:41] Laila Mickelwait: Yeah,

[01:28:42] Jordan Harbinger: it's crazy. And that's

[01:28:43] Laila Mickelwait: why they wanna resist it, right? Sure. Because they don't wanna pay, right? It's

[01:28:46] Jordan Harbinger: their money.

[01:28:47] Laila Mickelwait: They don't wanna pay. But that's why these things have to come by force. They have to come through continued public pressure, coupled with strategic civil litigation that puts enough pressure on the right pressure points, right? Financial and the public perception to force those changes. To get Visa, to do this, MasterCard, governments, and then I think we're gonna have a safer internet for our kids for generations to come,

[01:29:10] Jordan Harbinger: in part.

Thanks to you.

[01:29:11] Laila Mickelwait: Well, thanks to all the people. I have to pass that on. You go, there you go. Yeah. I had the honor of a lifetime leading this movement, but I'm an activist and I was able to help activate people. Sure. And it was this amazing team from journalists and lawyers and law enforcement and victims, most importantly, who came to together.

So those people are

[01:29:29] Jordan Harbinger: very brave. The victims are very brave. Because if I had a video of me being drugged and raped as a kid, I don't know if I'd be like, I'm gonna shout from the rooftops about how wrong this is. I might just be like, I just wanna go on with my life, man. This is humiliating.

[01:29:41] Laila Mickelwait: Yeah. Some victims like a hundred percent they, I get it.

Feel, justify. They feel like that. Yeah. Then there's others and maybe it's that DNA thing. Yeah, right. Maybe it's like it's in them. They have this fire, like they want to sound the alarm and they're really motivated too by, I don't want anyone else to have to go through what I went through.

[01:29:58] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Very admirable.

Why do you think the public remains largely unaware of this particular issue?

[01:30:05] Laila Mickelwait: It is shocking to me that after five years of this viral campaign, of all the thousands of media articles that have been written in the lawsuits, everything that's happened, most of the time, most people say, I had no idea that it's happening.

That's a problem. And I think it's just because we just haven't reached a saturation point. Mm-hmm. Where we've talked about it enough for it to be common knowledge. And so that's why I'm so grateful for conversations like this. And I think it's because people are uncomfortable. They're afraid to talk about it.

It's one of those things that it's affecting everybody in some way. We're all in contact with this free user-generated porn industry, but nobody wants to talk about it.

[01:30:45] Jordan Harbinger: That's true. Even my friends and my producer wife would like, oh, this is kind of an icky topic. Not like we shouldn't cover it.

[01:30:53] Laila Mickelwait: That is a thing.

It's even with the release of the book and there's whatever shows you can go on as an author when you release a book. And a lot of them that reach a huge audience are like, it's too heavy, it's too dark. We wanna like, yeah, good way in America

[01:31:05] Jordan Harbinger: might be like, but we wanna,

[01:31:06] Laila Mickelwait: you know, and so people want to a lot of times kinda shy away from these uncomfortable and dark topics.

[01:31:13] Jordan Harbinger: You know what though? Podcasts that will cover this. Yeah. We sell way more books than those morning shows. Yeah. As fun as they are.

[01:31:20] Laila Mickelwait: Yeah.

[01:31:21] Jordan Harbinger: The five minute segment on Morning Joe is just not gonna move as many copies of something like this. Anyways, I

[01:31:25] Laila Mickelwait: appreciate the fact that this obviously is not the first time you've been covering this issue of sex trafficking.

I know I've heard other episodes that you've had on this and you definitely don't shy away from the hard topics and No,

[01:31:36] Jordan Harbinger: if you're not gonna talk about things that matter,

[01:31:38] Laila Mickelwait: yeah,

[01:31:38] Jordan Harbinger: you might as well have a morning TV show on network tv. No thanks. Yeah. If you could speak directly to the executives at PornHub or the financial institutions, what would you say?

To them,

[01:31:49] Laila Mickelwait: I would just say you are knowingly benefiting. Mm-hmm. From the exploitation of countless victims. And you actually have the power to stop it now because the porn sites are highly motivated by the credit card companies, and they absolutely had the power to stop it. And we did say that, but they didn't want to until they were forced to.

Until

[01:32:12] Jordan Harbinger: they were forced to. Yeah. Holding their feet to the fire. You're a badass man. Maybe I'm just a former half-ass lawyer with a strong sense of justice, but it is so satisfying to see these people's feet held to the fire. The banks, the credit card companies, the abusers. The traffickers. I just, I gotta hand it to you.

I'm on team Takedown for sure. And I'm waiting for them to come after me for, oh, she was slandering us. It's, I don't shy away from a good fight. Scientology tried that too, and I was like, let's go to discovery where we dig in all of your records and then Good for you. Yeah, go ahead. And then they just suddenly don't care anymore because they were never actually gonna do it.

They love to intimidate. Scare you. Yeah. And then when it comes down to, no, I want you to pay your lawyer $30,000 retainers. Lets into dig, discovery. Get into your records too. They're just like suddenly. Well actually,

[01:32:52] Crosstalk: yeah,

[01:32:52] Jordan Harbinger: you're a small fry. We don't really care. Now you need to decide whether or not this fight is worth it for you.

Good for you. And I really like you. Likewise. Right back at ya. Layla, thank you very much for coming on the show.

[01:33:02] Laila Mickelwait: Thank you for having me.

[01:33:06] Jordan Harbinger: You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger show with Amanda Zi, who was raised in a cult and later sex and labor trafficked.

[01:33:14] JHS Clip: The women were trained to be insanely submissive.

Like you could never say no. To any man, and then the men were trained in a very military way. These people are well armed and well-trained, and it's a whole group that thinks that the world is evil and they need to repopulate the world with their people to bring the kingdom of God. When you turn 13 in that culture, you're an adult.

So to be 13 years old, being courted by men twice my age, three times my age to see if I would make a good wife, it was just kind of outrageous. So I moved to California to go to school and I start training MMA and my trafficker was there. He was actually one of my boxing coaches. Then he's like, you know, I like you, and so now we're dating.

So this is my first adult relationship. He's twice my age at this point. And then he would always take me up to his cabin on the mountain, which was really far away from everybody else. No phone service, isolation. And it was on a Native American reservation. So whatever they wanted to do to me, they could, oops, you accidentally got gang raped.

That was very common of going to go train. And then all of a sudden, now that you've fought 12 rounds, mm-hmm. Now you're going to be raped. A girl ran a red light and T-boned my truck. So I pull out my phone and I text my trafficker and I say, Hey, I almost just died in a car accident. And he said, is your face fucked up?

And I'm like, no. And he said, well, you're still fuckable then. Something isn't right here. This isn't who I want to be. This isn't what I want. And it was like I was coming outta water. I had this moment of clarity and I knew something wasn't right and I knew this wasn't what I wanted. And I knew I needed to act fast in order to get out of that situation.

'cause I knew it'd get sucked back in

[01:35:12] Jordan Harbinger: to hear how she escaped her dire situation, check out episode 631 of the Jordan Harbinger Show. Fantastic conversation, man. I really love this one. The gross irony here is that this video is almost certain to be demonetized on YouTube. Audio version, we have much more leeway, but on YouTube, they're gonna demonetize this almost certainly because of the subject matter that we are discussing.

But if we were, I don't know, say, raping underage kids and filming it, we could easily monetize that video with no problem whatsoever on sites like PornHub, and that is just insane to me. Horrifying. By the way, how satisfying was it when the dude had his unoccupied house and probably uninsured house burned to the ground by his neighbors?

His cars are uninsurable. Like they say on the classier parts of the internet that I frequent, the dildo of consequences rarely comes lubed, which is very apt for this episode and something I would normally never say, especially in public. But while we're here. Am I right folks? All things Laila Mickelwait will be on the show notes at jordanharbinger.com.

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