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FACTUAL BACKGROUND

A. MindGeek’s Racketeering Enterprise: “It’s Just Like the Sopranos.”

72. Appropriately dubbed, “The Monsanto of Porn,” MindGeek is a classic criminal enterprise carried out through wide-ranging criminal activities, including,but not limited to, human trafficking; child pornography; criminal copyright piracy;internet hacking, stalking, and doxing; blackmail and extortion; mail and wire fraud;embezzlement, bank and creditor fraud; tax evasion; and money laundering. The company’s top management and shadowy international financiers and their investors are the “bosses” of this Enterprise and, together with their “capos,” run its rackets and schemes.
73. The vehicles for these rackets and schemes are an internet pornography platform led by the flagship website “Pornhub” and an international network of ever-changing sham shell companies. Through these two elements, the Enterprise secures hundreds of millions of dollars in illicit monies each year, diverts them to the Enterprise members without paying any taxes, and masks the criminality under the guise of legitimate adult entertainment and an impenetrable corporate structure.
74. The Enterprise viciously defends its concealed criminal activities from exposure. When it senses a threat of exposure, the Enterprise responds like any lawless, rouge actor: it lies, attacks, smears, bribes, blackmails, extorts, and otherwise intimidates any perceived threat by any means necessary.
75. For example, MindGeek targeted long-time porn industry journalist Mike South because of revealing exposés he was publishing. Initially, MindGeek used promised advertising revenue and lucrative partnership opportunities to bribe South. When South rebuffed those offers, he began receiving threats. Ultimately, he found a box outside his front door containing matches, a fire truck, and fire extinguisher, and the blunt message, “I’m sorry your house burnt down.” He has since carried a gun at all times.
76. An anti-trafficking activist investigating MindGeek was subjected to such serious threats she told other activists doing the same, “I hope you have a saferoom.”The warning was prescient. Those activists,and their extendedfamilies, were also targeted with threats of physical violence and death, vandalism,public smears, invasions of privacy, doxing, hacking, and other illegal and extortive behaviors designed to discredit, intimidate, and silence.
77. Exploitation victims who dared to speak out or even demand relief from MindGeek were similarly targeted. After one victim retained counsel,she began receiving threatening messages, received intimidating visits at home and work, and had her tires slashed. She said she feared for her life. She then disappeared. After weeks of unsuccessful attempts to reach her, a mysterious text was received by her lawyer from an unidentified person who claimed to be her roommate and reported she had been in a car accident and was in a coma. Although this person promised to provide further information, no further contact was received. No such incident could be confirmed. The victim’s whereabouts and condition are still unknown.
78. According to one MindGeek insider, the executive “bosses” oversaw a”““very disturbing” misogynistic organization in which porn performers were referred”“to as “whores” and “product.”Repeated reports about sexual assault of performers”“on MindGeek productions or affiliated productions were not just ignored but joked”“about, and the victims who dared complain were blacklisted from further work and”“their content deplatformed or greatly diminished on MindGeek’s pornographic sites.”“Reported rapes of female staff in Montreal were likewise not only ignored, but”“retaliated against. Similarly, victims of rape, trafficking, or other non-consensual”“exploitation on MindGeek’s platform were ignored, shamed, and sometimes mocked”“when they asked MindGeek to remove videos of their abuse from its porn platform.”“Representative of MindGeek’s ethos toward exploitation, an official MindGeek”“social media representative posted about sex tapes(which constitute a material”“amount of the exploitive material on MindGeek’s platform), “don’t do a sex tape if”“you are not ok with it being leaked.”““
79. This was not a random aberration. Rather,it reflected an ethos the “bosses” instilled from the top; a culture of not merely indifference but of embracing and celebrating non-consensual,exploitive content. There is perhaps no better embodiment of what is called internally “the Bro Culture” ethos than the public comments of MindGeek’s long-time exclusive “Brand Ambassador,” Asa Akira, endorsing and defending sex with 13 year-olds and exhibiting disdain for the laws protecting minors and for “snitches” who dare object to such abuse: This 13-year-old? . . . His attitude was amazing. But, you”“know what? . . . if I were single and we were sitting in the jacuzzi and he was like, “Hey, you know, like, I’ve never”“fed a girl. (Asterisks added) Do you want to?” I think I’d say yes. No, that definitely… no one, no one would”“consider that rape . . . except maybe his mom.And that’s only if she’s, like, a total bitch. . . . Yeah and the”“law. Whatever. [David Choe-Are we being delusional? Is”“there anyone that has a problem with that?] No! Why”“would I go [to jail]? Who’s gonna tell? No snitching.”“Snitches get snitches, it would not ruin his life. It would”“only improve it. . . . He . . . for the rest of his life, he could”“tell this story. “I was such a cool kid that when I was 13, I”“fed a porn star.” (Asterisks added). [David Choe -”“We’re not talking about the law right now!] Jesus![David”“Choe – Fu- f* the law! (Asterisks added). What are you, a”“fing, like do-gooder or something] (Asterisks added).”“(AA) Snitch What nerd (laughs) . . . I think”“there are 13- year-old girls out there that might be ready to”“be fing, but not that many. (Asterisks added). Like, 15,”“yeah. There’s- . . . quite a few that are ready. I would”“not finger this 13-year-old’s asshole [David Choe- If you’re”“a young boy and a- an older woman f*s you and she’s fat”“and ugly, then it’s rape.] (Asterisks added). (AA) – It’s”“rape. (laughs).”“
80. These public comments while stunning to most, were neither a surprise nor a problem for MindGeek because it was a precise reflection of the lawless and exploitive culture and ethos instilled and demanded in the MindGeek Enterprise. Indeed, they selected Asa Akira as their sole “Brand Ambassador” precisely because she perfectly and loudly embodied this very lawless ethos in her own personal brand long before MindGeek asked her to embody them on its behalf. By way of exampleonly, before she was hired as MindGeek’s Brand Ambassador Akira had made the following widely publicized comments celebrating rape, pedophilia, incest, and anti-Semitism: (a) “Is GHB the rape drug. Asking for a friend” (9/8/2011); (b) “it’s notreally rape unless its anal rape, right?“what the f* is marital rape you can’trape the willing Shoutout to my pedophiles” (9/27/2011) (asterisks added).; (c)“If loving Japanese rape porn is wrong, then I don’t want to be right” (1/29/2011);(d) “Also, I’m pretty proud of myself for making it this far in life without having to register as a sex offender” (2/29/12); (e) “It only hurts if you resist” (1/23/13);(f) “Gay incest should be legal” (12/9/14); (g) “adulthood is knowing the difference between good rape and bad rape” (10/31/13); (h) “Why not f* a jew for Hitler’s birthday” (4/20/15) (asterisks added); and (i) “not one but TWO sightings of HassidisJews today.” (11/28/09.)
81. The embrace of non-consensual content by the Enterprise is reflected in the numerous news reports of widespread and easily found child pornography and other exploitive content on the MindGeek Platform.This includes the December 4,2020 bombshell New York Times report entitled, “The Children of Porn Hub,” theDr. Oz segment on January 27, 2021 referred to as “The Victims of Pornhub,” andthe December 9, 2020 New York Times follow up article “An Uplifting Update, onthe Terrible World of Pornhub.”
82. In 2021, the Canadian House of Commons opened up an inquiry into MindGeek’s exploitation and monetization of child pornography,rape,trafficked,and other non-consensual video and photographic content, and is reportedly considering perjury charges for false testimony by “bosses” and defendants Antoon,Tassillo, and Urman, who falsely testified to the House,among other things that MindGeek is a proud partner of and reports every instance of child sex abuse material (“CSAM”) to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children(“NCMEC”) as required by law (which was repudiated by subsequent testimony and report) when it becomes aware of it, removes such content from its platform (nottrue), and employs technology and other measures to ensure such content is never reuploaded to its platform or any other platform (not true).
83. MindGeek’s Basic Revenue Model
84. On its face, the MindGeek business model looks like other internet media business models like YouTube. MindGeek owns a group of “tubesites” that contain free, purportedly user populated, digital pornography. Users are drawn to the MindGeek tubesites by the ability to access free content, and to upload and exchange free content. MindGeek uses the traffic generated by that free content to (a) advertise additional pornographic sites that offer paid content that are either owned by MindGeek or by third-parties; (b) sell advertising for other products and services it or third-parties offer; and (c) harvest user data for its own business marketing and development purposes and to sell to third parties.
85. Within this model, MindGeek has various relationships with users/customers and third-party’s offering products or services. MindGeek has a relationship with those who use its tubesites for free to access and share content. These customers provide (a) content that helps populate the tubesites; (b) traffic andadvertising “impressions” which generate income from third-party advertisers; (c)“paid” conversions in which a free tubesite user purchases content, services, or other products; and (d) data MindGeek can use to create and improve its content business
    as well as package or sell raw to third-parties looking to do the same.
86. MindGeek also has a relationship with third-parties it allows to use itsinternet advertising platform to sell products and services. MindGeek owned affiliates themselves sell products and services to tubesite users. Third parties also can upload content and get paid a percentage of MindGeek’s revenue for advertising “impressions” and paid customer “conversions” on traffic to, and interactions with,their content and ads accompanying it. Third parties with their own pay websites,products, and services also pay to advertise on MindGeek’s platform based on the number of impressions those advertisements receive and conversions or purchases as a result of those impressions, and they also may share in revenue with MindGeek generated by impressions and conversions on their content.
87. For example, on MindGeek’s flagship tubesite Pornhub, any user could upload content without a formal relationship with MindGeek. MindGeek uses that content to attract more users and generate income.
88. Other users can also become so-called “verified” users and members of MindGeek’s “ModelHub” program and receive a share of the income associated with traffic to their content. This incentivizes users to post content and the additional content further attracted still more users. The ModelHub type arrangement allowsseemingly independent third-parties, including porn performers, to individually generate revenue streams by posting content they produce, acquire, or repackage.
89. Third-parties might also be “content partners” who created content,products, or services with their own distinct brand sold on and through MindGeek’s platform via that third-party’s tubesite “channel” and for which MindGeek and the third-party share revenue.
90. Third-parties with their own pay sites, products or services would also secure customers from MindGeek by simply advertising on MindGeek’s platform sometimes simply paying an advertising fee, sometimes some share of the revenue. These third-parties could be selling products and services entirely independent ofporn, like ketchup and clothes or other adult-themed products and services such as“dating” services or sex paraphernalia or purportedly enhancing substances. These third-parties would purchase such advertising through ad companies, like MindGeek owned affiliate TrafficJunky, which provides an interface through which third-parties can bid to purchase advertising space, filter and target its advertising, and create the advertising.
91. Third-parties also purchase the vast amounts of data mined from the billions of user interactions with MindGeek’s platform and the analytics MindGeek has performed on that data. This data can be used to refine the third-party’s ownwebservices or to simply secure potential customer information and details for solicitations.
92. Central to the economics of all these relationships is the traffic to the tubesites. The more traffic, the more attractive the tubesites are to advertisers and content partners, the more ad impressions and customer conversions generating revenue, the more data to optimize and increase traffic, impressions, and conversions, and the more content to attract more user traffic. This is a reinforcing dynamic. As traffic increases, content and product and service optimization increases, which, in turn, increases traffic even more.
93. The Gold Standard was to be at the top of the search results on search engines like Google. To do this, MindGeek is deeply focused on Search Engine Optimization or SEO. SEO is the science of optimizing a website’s ability to garner top search rankings and depends on many factors but most prominently the amount of content and how effectively it is described. Publicly, MindGeek does not even mention on its corporate website that it is involved in pornography. Rather,it describes itself exclusively as a technology company skilled in SEO and related services.
94. The “Bro-Club”
95. According to whistleblowers with first-hand knowledge, the MindGeek Criminal Enterprise is run exactly like an organized crime family:“It’s just like the Sopranos,” described one insider. At the head of that crime family is Feras Antoon,the CEO of the company. Feras Antoon and his select group of “made” men atMindGeek refer to themselves as the “Bro-Club.”Bro-Club membership comes with the opportunity to make substantial monies participating in the Enterprise’s criminal activities. Indeed, as one person close to members of the Bro-Club explained, “[t]he only thing that mattered was how much money can you bring into the enterprise. That was the only metric for your advancement. Similar to whatyou see in Sopranos.”
96. The Bro-Club is comprised of members of Antoon’s extended family from Canada, Lebanon, and Syria and a select few additional “made” members. “All top executives were members of the Bro-Club, and most Syrian or Lebanese relations of Antoon,” according to one whistleblower. These “made” members earned their “bones” not through bona fide skills or credentials,but because they had demonstrated an eagerness to participate in its criminal activities,a paramount appetite for money, and a willingness to participate without objection,inquiry, or disclosure of illicit activities to advance in the organization.
97. For example, Feras Antoon’s brother Mark was one of his right-hand men, with responsibility for some of the Enterprise’s most sensitive operations even though he had no bona fide credentials for doing so. As one insider who worked with him explained, he “knows nothing about running a company but runs stuff like kickbacks and similar side arrangements with third-party and affiliates companies. That is why he is in the company. This was discussed in meetings. Every single individual would try to impress him because he was a key player.”
98. Similarly, Edy Kaba was made the head of the organization’s European operations based out of Cyprus even though he had neither the credentials nor ability to understand, let alone manage, basic business functions. As one whistleblower described, “anyone with the most basic background in business administration or finance knew more than him.”Nevertheless, he received the position along with substantial money, lavish perks, and a luxurious lifestyle in Cyprus to run MindGeek’s international operation because, according to a whistleblower, “he was related to Antoon, was seen as loyal, willing to do illegal things, and remain silent about them.”
99. Even the seemingly critical position of Chief Technology Officer of this purportedly leading technology company was initially given to an Antoon relative,Karin Mouaffi, without the resume to rate the job. Experienced MindGeek programmers and developers consistently complained and were extremely frustrated with his inept leadership. But his loyalty to the Enterprise was beyond question and thus he was in charge of the technology central to so many of its criminal schemes.
100. The Bro-Club “capos” also included some who had previously formed successful tubesites or porn advertising companies that were sold to or otherwise partnered with MindGeek. Although teaming with MindGeek meant these individuals needed to share their revenues, they joined the Enterprise nevertheless “to cover your ass and be on safe ground” because, per an insider,
     it provided protection from overseas folks who are bad guys involved in bad stuff People were really scared about their lives because the groups providing content for their sites were real pimps. If you are running your own site and you know these pimps might do harm to you, you join Tony Soprano’s team. Make less money but no one will shoot you in the street.
101. The “pimps” being referred to were the known traffickers in Eastern Europe and Asia from whom the Enterprise and those who typically joined it bought substantial pornography.
102. This core group of “bosses” controlled all the elements of MindGeek’s business through which the Enterprise executed and masked its criminal schemes. In particular, they controlled its finances, technology, content acquisition, formattingmoderation, website operation and optimization, and the byzantine network of overseas international affiliates and partners through which the Bro-Club executed many of its schemes. They did so through “capos” and “soldiers” looking to enter the Bro-Club. These directors and vice-presidents were directly supporting the Enterprise’s illegal activities that ran off the MindGeek platform.
103. While doing so, they were groomed, tested, and weeded out depending on whether they embraced, avoided, or rejected questionable, unethical, and illegal activities. That grooming and testing process began immediately even for low level employees who were exposed to “pretty f**ed up sht,” (asterisks added) according to one former employee. The goal of the grooming was obvious the former employee explained: “that’s the thing, it is true that you do get very desensitized to certain things, after like months or a year, it[’]s true that you don’t see bodies anymore, you don’t even really care what’s going on, how many people are involved,what is the woman doing.”
104. This desensitization was reinforced by supervision that made clear management did not care about appropriateness, legality, or ethics. A former employee explained: “if someone finds something that shouldn’t be there, would the manager raise it as an issue, and say ‘hey, I just saw this and we should do something about it?’ Absolutely not.”
105. This structure provided the Bro-Club with, in Feras Antoon’s words,“plausible deniability”; revealed which employees should be promoted and separated; and chilled insiders with questions or objections. As one whistleblower explained, “illegal or risky things were pushed down to low level people to ensure‘plausible deniability,’” and, if they did them, “it showed you are devoted so much you are willing to do illegal or unethical stuff with comfort and silence.”One former insider explained, “they referred to directors and managers as ‘parachutes’ if this goes wrong. . . .They keep them in the dark, tell them to approve shady things like ads and partnerships and credit card transactions but never in writing. Then they would be able to say it was someone else’s decision if it went wrong.”
106. There was extreme secrecy and security attached to the Bro-Club’s deliberations, decision, actions, and activities. Due to fears of recording, phones were excluded from important meetings of senior Bro-Club members, especially when they met with the Enterprise’s financiers, and displaying a phone in any meeting was not done. The executive offices from which the Bro-Club operated were physically separated from regular employees and protected by strict security measures, including cameras and security personnel to ensure not even MindGeek personnel entered the floor.
107. Particularly guarded were the finance offices. Only certain personnel were allowed to even enter these offices; others were permitted only when certain other designated personnel were present; and doors were locked and shades drawn when unoccupied for any amount of time.
108. Moreover, employees were closely monitored, especially any who were suspected of harboring doubts or objections to any MindGeek practices. Employee emails and Skype messages are routinely reviewed. Company car GPS records were tracked and drivers questioned after trips beyond certain limits or to certain locations of concern.
109. The Enterprise’s paramount focus on secrecy was reflected in the Bro-Club’s obsession with suspected “snitches.”This ubiquitous Bro-Club term included not only those who they suspected of speaking outside the MindGeek organization, but also those who spoke up or objected internally. The latter were not just viewed as a risk of disclosure outside MindGeek, but also as a risk of fomenting and encouraging objections to practices inside MindGeek. As individuals were considered for promotion, the Bro-Club always discussed, “whether they could be trusted. Whether they were a snitch,” according to a whistleblower. Even a suspicion by a single Bro-Club member that an individual was a “snitch” would not merely block their advancement, but ultimately result in them being pushed out of the company entirely. Such individuals would either be frozen out and elect to leave, be set up to fail in stage assignments, or simply be told that there was a “consensus” that they should be let go without any explanation as to why or onwhose word.
110. For those who chose or were forced to leave MindGeek, their departure was often not the end of their experience. It was a core understanding internally that if you threatened the Enterprise, “it would come after you,” according to one whistleblower. This included investigating the personal lives of former employees and their extended families. Targeted individuals could expect to have their spouses, parents and siblings, neighbors, and community members, as well as their employers, co-workers, and business partners, receive anonymous post-cards, emails,in-person “visits,” and social media message smearing. These intimidation tactics would typically include revealing the individuals worked in porn or their sexual identity and hacking and distributing, or threatening to distribute, personal messages and photographs.
111. The Financiers
112. While the Bro-Club had daily operational control over MindGeek’s business,they were not the exclusive “bosses.”Also in control were the actual owners of MindGeek. The owners were comprised of a group of uber wealthy individuals, families, and groups represented by several former Goldman Sachs financiers. These financiers offer “special situations” investments in which uber wealthy investors can receive oversized returns and evade taxes Oversized returns are available because the business being funded was or very likely was engaged in illegality and other legal risk that established, legitimate, and responsible Wall Street financial firms would not finance. MindGeek was a poster child for such risk.
113. From its birth, the Enterprise now known as MindGeek was awash in criminality. That criminality manifested itself almost immediately in law enforcement investigations in Europe and the United States. In the late 2000’s, the United States was investigating MindGeek (then Mansef) for money laundering and arms dealing. In 2009, the Secret Service seized $6.4 million from the company’s bank accounts and those of its then nominal owners as a result.
114. To get out from under that public scandal, the company was putatively sold to German Fabian Thylman, who was funded by unknown investors from Eastern Europe. This syndicate of money invested over $350 million in the form of secured debt to acquire the distressed company.They did not do so directly, however, but through the boutique investment banking firm Colbeck Capital, run bytwo former Goldman Sachs investment bankers. The loan was secured by all ofMindGeek’s assets, including its intellectual property and provided substantialcontrol over management and the company’s operations. Despite it being a secured loan, the interest rate was a whopping 24%, reflecting the unwillingness of legitimate mainstream capital to invest in the company because of the innumerable red flags of illegality.
115. Thylman and his owner group appointed Antoon and the current leadership team and worked aggressively to grow the business and establish the Pornhub brand as mainstream. Nevertheless, the company continued to be dogged by investigations into money laundering, tax evasion, human trafficking, and child pornography. The byzantine, multi-national financial and corporate structure Grant Thornton, Thylman, and the current management created largely delayed and frustrated the investigations as intended. Nevertheless, in 2012, Thylman, was arrested and extradited from Belgium to Germany on charges he had used that byzantine corporate structure to evade taxes. But the other investigations continued, including into suspect child pornography.
116. With Thylman in jail, owners and the management scrambled to save the company, and sought again to ostensibly switch ownership. The management team and financiers scrambled to seemingly “clean wash” the company, cover its tracks, and claim a new regime was taking over. However, the existing loan’sonerous terms, as well as the Bro-Club’s syphoning off of all cash not used to pay the loan, left MindGeek no options for buying out Thylman, paying off the loan, and executing a transition that would be publicly credible.
117. Ultimately, the solution came in the form of shadowy financier Bernd Bergmair. Like the principals of Colbeck Capital before him, Bergmair was a former Goldman Sachs investment banker who had left to provide niche financing for legally dubious ventures Goldman Sachs and similar Wall Street firms would notfund. Representing one group of uber wealthy investors, he had purchased Pornhub competitor RedTube, in which he served as the titular CEO.
118. Bergmair took extreme steps to conceal not just his identity, but his very existence. He expended substantial sums scrubbing almost any references of himself from the internet and went by various alias, including Bernard Bergman. Indeed, when forced to put in an affidavit in a United States District Court litigation involving RedTube, he lied under oath that his name was Bernard Bergman. He took such extraordinary measures because he and his investors were fully aware of the legally dubious nature of the business they owned and ran, and some of these investors were themselves the subject of international legal scrutiny or associated with those who were. The investors were so uneasy being associated with this business, they were rabid about even their financier becoming known.
119. At the time investors and management were trying to save MindGeek (then Manwin) in 2012-13, RedTube, unlike Manwin/MindGeek had substantial cash reserves that Manwin/MindGeek could use to buy out Thylman, restructure the Colbeck Capital debt, and pay down liabilities necessary for an ostensible fresh start.
120. Ultimately, a transaction was consummated in which Colbeck Capital’s investor’s debt was restructured, RedTube and Manwin merged becoming MindGeek, and RedTube’s cash and further capital from Bergmair’s investors was invested in the form of similarly onerous secured debt and controlling stakes in critical subsidiaries. The capital was used to buy-out Thylman and pay off certain critical third-party liabilities. Some of those critical liabilities were to third-parties MindGeek’s business needed to survive, others were to third-parties that MindGeek’s executives believed needed to get paid for them personally to survive.
121. Despite their centrality to the transaction, and control of the company going forward, the identities of Bergmair’s investors, as well as Bergmair’s real identity remained unknown even to Feras Antoon. To the public, Antoon and other members of the Bro-Club were falsely reported to be the owners of the business. It was understood that the existence of other owners was never to be mentioned.
122. Although the Bro-Club led by Antoon remained in daily operational control of the restructured MindGeek, they now answered to Bergmair on behalf of the new owners. Bergmair and his owner group conducted extensive due diligence before proceeding with the transaction and were fully aware of the fraudulent international corporate structure through which MindGeek conducted its illicit business and on which it (and the new owners) depended. The transaction was falsely portrayed as a “clean wash” of the company. The “new” company was portrayed publicly and to European authorities as a technology company specializing in Search Engine Optimization and committed to the best practices and technology to ensure the business was free of illegal content and activities. In fact, nothing had changed except for Thylman’s exit and the new partnership between the Bro-Club and Bergmair’s owner group.
123. Like the Colbeck Capital financing before it, the Bergmair financing contained usurious interest rates, draconian rights to all MindGeek assets upon a default, and the right to control and remove management. Much more than Thylman, Bergmair exercised daily direct oversight and control over the strategic operations of MindGeek, closely managing financial operations, business plans, and even the technology that was critical to the internet porn company’s business. Indeed, his technology involvement was so extensive, programmers and developers complained incessantly about what they considered his uninformed meddling.
124. In exercising control for the Owner Group, Bergmair was in regular contact with and giving approvals to the Bro-Club on major MindGeek decisions. He received regular briefings on the financial performance of the Enterprise, was briefed on all activities designed to meet its financial commitments to the owners, and approved those initiatives material to that requirement.
125. As part of the “clean wash” of the organization, all European managers and directors were suddenly terminated and replaced with Bro-Club members related to Feras Antoon. Antoon’s relative Edy Kaba was placed in charge of all international operations despite his lack of business or financial management credentials and experience. Those operations were consolidated in Cyprus because it was viewed as posing the least law enforcement risk, and Kaba relocated to Cyprus from Montreal.
126. The Fake Pornhub Façade
127. After the rebranding, the Enterprise worked hard to depict MindGeek not as a company in the business of online pornography, but as one of the world’s leading technology companies providing cutting edge Search Engine Optimization (“SEO”) and online and marketing data services. Its corporate website mentionsnothing about the world’s largest pornography site Pornhub, which was MindGeek’s flagship tubesite, or its surrounding constellation of other pornographic sites, partner sites, and businesses.
128. And it worked even harder to portray its flagship tubesite, Pornhub, as well as its other tubesites as “wholesome,” legitimate, responsible, and mainstream. MindGeek expended substantial resources and effort ensuring that its tubesites had all the indicia of legitimate internet media websites, including a polished appearance,comprehensive terms of service, policies, and customer service functions, and multiple layers of interaction. As part of this effort, MindGeek aggressively promoted itself in mainstream mediums with substantial advertising and marketing as well as a swarm of high profile publicity stunts promoting various social or other topical causes. This effort included billboard ads in Times Square, ads on snowplows during blizzards, breast and testicular cancer campaigns, promotions for racial equality and voting rights, pop-up shops on Valentine’s day, and environmental campaigns like Save the Oceans, Save the Pandas, and Save the Bees.
129. It also attempted to publicly align itself with anti-exploitation entities despite embracing exploitation itself. For example, in 2020 MindGeek began making donations to the European anti-child porn exploitation network called InHope.
130. But these public images were a fraudulent front for a platform through which the Enterprise ran its rackets and schemes. MindGeek was not in the business of providing SEO services to anything other than primarily the Enterprise’s pornography platform and its partners and was exclusively devoted to running that business for the enrichment of its owners and Bro-Club members. To do that, the Enterprise had to generate enough cash to pay the substantial “nut” of principal and enormous interest owed to the owners, while at the same time siphoning off the remaining cash and value in innumerable schemes executed through the company’s impenetrable and ever shifting international network of sham shell companies.
131. The public image of its actual pornography business was a fraud also. The highly polished webpages of Pornhub and its other tubesites were falsely portrayed to look like mainstream, legitimate tubesites, albeit about pornography,with extensive terms of service, complaint and customer service functions, and misleading promotional content to portray Pornhub as mainstream, harmless, and legitimate. But all of this was window-dressing.
132. The extensive terms of service were never enforced or intended to be enforced. To the contrary, those stated terms, policies, and restrictions were anathema to the actual business model MindGeek was pursuing. According to those terms of service, content depicting racism, hate, incest, and children (even by ““ Page 34 of 179 Page ID #:34adults) were all banned but nevertheless omnipresent on the platform. Indeed,numerous versions of “underage,” “teen,” and “incest” were consistently among the most searched search terms and popular results in MindGeek’s algorithmic video and search term tubesite suggestions. Likewise, numerous versions of “drunk,” “drugged,” “passed out,” and others indicating incapacitation were also among search terms sought most often by users and suggested by MindGeek.
133. MindGeek was not only acutely aware of the popularity of these categories of search terms and the type of content they represented, its SEO aggressively solicited such content and instructed users to title, tag, and describe their content to include these very terms and upload this very type of content.
134. This process was an explicit and overt solicitation of all forms of users and partners to provide such content because MindGeek’s business plan was to provide supply for any pornography for which there was a demand. Likewise, there was no real complaint or customer service functions because actually enforcing the terms of service or accepting any restrictions on content was contrary to the actual business model MindGeek was implementing.
135. Also false was the image of Pornhub and its associated free tubesites as comprised primarily of user uploaded content. This was an important fraud for the Enterprise because it believed it provided legal protection under United States law,and it misdirected apparent responsibility for systemic illegality away from MindGeek.
136. In fact, however, vast amounts of the content on these sites, although appearing to be uploaded by individuals independent of MindGeek were produced,acquired, and uploaded by MindGeek, sometimes directly and sometimes through affiliates and partners. This content was not merely acquired for MindGeek, but it was formatted by MindGeek, which edited the scenes and length, provided the titles and tags, and uploaded it to appear as if it was posted by individuals.
137. In addition to MindGeek’s own production and uploading of apparently user-generated content, a substantial amount of the content it placed on its sites was from bulk uploads of pirated copyrighted materials that MindGeek or third-parties it commissions pirated. Indeed, whistleblowers reported personnel in MindGeek’s Montreal headquarters “ripping” content from DVD’s in a regular overnight operation and uploading that content to Pornhub and the other tubesites as independently uploaded content. This was just one of the many schemes MindGeek utilized to systemically pirate copyrighted materials and use them to support Pornhub and its other tubesites.
138. Even content that was actually user-generated was edited and published by MindGeek formatters before upload. These formatters based in Cyprus and Canada would provide or modify titles, descriptions, and tags, and edit videos in order to maximize SEO, ad impressions, and customer conversions. MindGeek has repeatedly maintained publicly that every video on its sites went through this process.
139. Another scheme was the reuploading of all materials that despite MindGeek’s best efforts had to be taken down because it had received a DMCA copyright violation notice or a directive from authorities or a victim’s lawyer to remove child pornography or other illegal content. Although MindGeek would begrudgingly comply with such legal requirements, as set forth more fully below, it would only disable the videos, not delete the webpage, title, tags, or comments. Nor would it delete the video, even of child pornography, from its server. MindGeek has repeatedly stated publicly that it kept every video ever uploaded on its servers even when they were disabled from its sites. It did this for a simple reason: content was king in MindGeek’s operations, and disabled content would be reuploaded to the system by MindGeek in a manner that appeared it had been uploaded by users and not MindGeek.
140. Moreover, MindGeek pushed all content posted on any of its tubesites,regardless of initial sourcing, to its other tubesites, which it again falsely portrayed as posted by a user other than MindGeek.
141. Finally, MindGeek’s intensive search engine optimization function scrutinized all content, particularly content that its analysis indicated was trending or otherwise effective in driving traffic, gaining ad impressions, generating “conversions.”This process was applied to all content, regardless of category or subject being portrayed, and content that was effective would be modified and often duplicated to optimize its SEO further. Moreover, where analytics indicated any content could be optimized better, it too would be modified to do so.
142. Thus, regardless of initial sourcing, vast amounts of the content on all of MindGeek’s tubesites was uploaded there by MindGeek, not users as it was engineered to appear; even content uploaded by users was reviewed, modified, and optimized by MindGeek; and all content regardless of where and by whom it was initially uploaded was then transferred by MindGeek on its other sites and sometimes third-party partner sites. That is, all the individual content on MindGeek’s tubesites, as well as the entire tubesite product itself, was a MindGeek production and product. MindGeek’s tubesites were user generated in a fictional sense only.
143. It was this fraudulently portrayed internet platform and MindGeek’s byzantine international network of sham shell companies through which the Enterprise: (a) paid for, populated the website with, and separately profited from content produced through human trafficking and slavery and pirated copyright materials; (b) permitted known criminal organizations to steal customer credit card and personal identifying information, commit credit card fraud, and blackmail customers; (c) defrauded MindGeek advertisers, marketers, and other third-parties; (d) evaded taxes and laundered monies by “bleeding” value out of the organization to the Bro-Club and other Enterprise members via sham investments and expenses; and (e) paid for and executed blackmail, extortion, harassment, defamation, and hacking against those the Enterprise viewed as a threats.

B. The Enterprise’s Criminal Rackets and Schemes

1. The Fraudulent Network of Sham Shell Companies
2. From its inception, MindGeek’s corporate structure was created and maintained to facilitate and mask criminal conduct and insulate the company and Enterprise from criminal and civil culpability. This structure consisted of hundreds of sham shell companies scattered throughout the world. While a handful of these shell companies had bona fide relationships to MindGeek’s business operations, the vast majority of them existed solely as vehicles through which to execute the Enterprise’s rackets and scams and evade taxes. There was no bona fide business reason for this putative SEO company or its pornographic internet business to utilize
3. Consequently, despite generating hundreds of millions in revenue annually, MindGeek pays effectively no taxes anywhere. Instead, by the time those revenues are funneled through the hundreds of international sham shell companies, the parent company records massive losses, not profits. And because these sham shell companies are so numerous, and so dispersed across so many jurisdictions, no one jurisdiction can easily investigate the evasion or even be incentivized to do so. The same is true about the numerous other criminal schemes similarly effectuated through this network.
4. Consistent with its illicit purpose, this network was in constant metamorphosis. MindGeek created, dissolved, and then replaced sham shell companies on a monthly and sometimes daily basis, often with virtually the same names. These sham shell companies had no bona fide business or substantive economic purpose, directors, officers, employees, or offices (let alone functional offices). There was, likewise, no bona fide business purpose for the network sheer complexity and opaqueness or its constantly quantum like dissolution and creation of entities. This shell game existed exclusively to implement and mask the Enterprise’s criminal schemes, evade taxes, launder money, and insulate Enterprise members from culpability.
5. As a whistleblower explained, “spreading the corporate structure out in hundreds of shells located in dozens of jurisdictions allowed spreading of transactions out such that they did not raise suspicion in any one country, and even if they did it was very difficult for that jurisdiction to investigate the suspicion when much of the information was in other jurisdictions.”
6. Often, the Bro-Club would appoint a single nominal director in these sham shell entities from among low-level Enterprise members or MindGeek employees (such as executive assistants). These purported “directors” knew nothing about the shell’s purpose, existence, or operations; exercised no control over its bank accounts or “operations”; were paid handsomely for the no-show job and the substantial legal risk associated with it; were pure proxies and agents from the Bro-Club members who appointed and directed them; were frequently questioned by authorities without having any information to provide because they were figureheads controlled by the Bro-Club leaders; and were replaced regularly according to an appointed schedule so as to further impede the ability of authorities to investigate.
7. As an insider explained,they created companies on a daily and monthly basis and used vendors to launder money and make payments. Had a schedule for switching directors so none were there too long and would pay them premium to assume the risk of not knowing what was going on. When investigations happen they delete everything from the system. They used these affiliates to launder and mask transactions with entities that had bank red flags, were banned, were business partners under investigations. They get paid but they launder the payments. Not through the corporate bank accounts. I know that it happened. I talked to the vendors and knew they got paid but could see it did not come out of the corporate accounts.
8. These sham shell companies would be used in various ways not just to mask criminal involvement, but also to “bleed” and launder cash out of the organization to criminal partners and Enterprise members (especially the Bro-Club). These transactions, typically in the form of loans, investments, or vendor payments to third-parties, would result in net operating losses to MindGeek. Indeed, over the last 3-5 years, MindGeek has accumulated substantial net operating losses despite hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue. Those “lost” monies, however, were transferred to third-parties in which Enterprise members had an interest or financial arrangement.
9. An insider explained the process as follows: An obscure affiliate in a low regulatory risk jurisdiction would transfer funds to middlemen/agents who commissioned and purchased cheap pornographic content from human traffickers. The MindGeek payments for this trafficked content would be “shadow payments” made from one of its obscure sham shell companies to a middleman without any invoice or paper trail. Rather, a price would simply be agreed upon orally and a payment made to the agent middlemen.
10. That trafficked content would be delivered to a different third-party for formatting and uploading. The third-parties who received, formatted, and uploaded the content were a mix of Enterprise affiliates, MindGeek partner channels, and a network of entities who would be paid to generate thousands of phony user uploads. That third-party typically would receive compensation for its service either via “ghost payments” laundered through their existing revenues stream for MindGeek partners or directly through a different sham shell company.
11. Thus, partner channels, many of whom ran their own network of shell companies, would be compensated for this work by higher monthly revenue share payments and one-time bonuses under their partner contracts to mask the payments. For non-MindGeek partners, payments would be laundered through MindGeek’s obscure sham shell companies or its corrupt payment processors holding its credit card payments (such as was done frequently with MindGeek payments processor Wirecard before it collapsed as a massive fraud). These banks and processors participated in the schemes because MindGeek would pay them exorbitant fees and, for some, permitted them to use MindGeek’s platform for their own credit card and identity theft schemes.
12. Enterprise members would receive their cut of that consideration from the third-party via revenue sharing or some other financial kickback. Regarding this scheme to acquire cheap trafficked content in bulk, one Enterprise member explained to an insider, “We can do this and we just pay more to launder the money.”
13. One whistleblower described the process of “bleeding” money out of the system to bogus “vendors” at inflated prices as follows:
    I remember one time we were talking about why the texts on PornHub were so awful. Like why was it written so poorly, and their translations from other countries were so bad. I remember one person who worked there over 10 years, he was like uh “yeah, they just like to keep doing them.”Like I guess they get fairly cheap translators, from the old times, like they always liked to have something to spend money on that was outside of the company. I mean, I’m not an expert, but no one spends money because they like to. So it’s a weird thing. According to this coworker there is a well, there is money they need to spend, its not a secret that Mansef already had issues with money laundering. And its not a secret that Fabian had issues with money laundering, I mean I am not surprised a lot of things never changed.
14. Some of these schemes directly benefited MindGeek and its operational affiliates, and indirectly the Bro-Club and its financiers via payments on the outstanding loans and compensation to executives. Many other schemes, however, benefited the Bro-Club, MindGeek’s financiers and owners, and their co-conspirators directly, and MindGeek merely provided the platform through which this was accomplished. In these schemes, Enterprise members or their associates and partners would use their control over MindGeek to cause it to transact with shell companies they owned, or (more often) companies owned by others from whom the Enterprise members would be paid. “This is where they make their money,” a whistleblower said about members of the Bro-Club.
15. In another scheme the Bro-Club would use its control over MindGeek to give favorable advertising placement to so-called affiliate channels or partners using the site as a feeder for their own paysites. In exchange, Enterprise members would receive a cut of that third-party’s profits as a kickback. This defrauded others who had bid and paid more for priority placement on the site by diverting traffic from their sites to the ones paying the Bro-Club. In other instances, the Bro-Club would simply place ads for these affiliates ahead of those of unrelated affiliates who had bid more for that placement.
16. Feras Antoon and other Enterprise members also had their own third-party shells with which to transact with MindGeek, and which they would favor. For example, Antoon had a shell company through which he would sign exclusive deals with unknown porn performers and then use their control over MindGeek to promote those performers and increase the value of their content.
17. The Bro-Club would also use control over MindGeek to permit known criminal organizations to use its sites to steal credit card information and personal identifying information and then receive a kickback or cut of the resulting illicit revenues. As one whistleblower explained:
    Often when we talked to the company top management and they would say that they were making money in other ways. Unlike a legitimate company, this company had no real capital management system. That permitted them to use capital to fund other businesses, including those that were not in porn. This included groups in the Ukrainian company accused by FBI of hacking. Why did they allow ads for bogus items like penis enlargement when you knowit is a fraud?Because those groups paid much more than market for those ads because it was really a way of searching for personal identifying information and using the data or selling the data to others. It would be used for blackmail It alerted them that the user had been on Pornhub and then they would blackmail them by saying they knew what they were watching. Of course, MindGeek knows the purpose for this stuff. You need to get approval for advertising and they do research on the ads and the companies. They knew the companies were not legitimate and the ads are fraudulent on their face. These and other side operations would have revenues sharing with the people running MindGeek, but not through MG. Executives would get paid to permit these the platform to be used for purposes other than maximizing the value of MindGeek. In conversations with members it was obvious the Bro-Club had other revenue streams around Pornhub. 100% sure of that. It was discussed. I would put my hand in fire on it. Everyone gets a cut.
18. Whistleblowers described one such scheme as follows:Enterprise members or those associated with them would create “partner” accounts on MindGeek and use stolen credit cards to pay for memberships and content from those partner accounts as well as manufacture false traffic, ad impressions, and membership conversions. Independent of these partner entities, MindGeek would also use its sham shell companies and third-party agents to pay enterprise members or associates to use fraudulent credit cards to generate advertising impressions and thereby secure advertising revenues from those fraudulent impressions.
19. Even though the bulk of these charges would likely be charged back eventually, MindGeek would pay the “partners” their share of the fraudulent notional revenue generated from the purchases as well as the actual revenue advertisers would pay MindGeek from the fraudulent ad impressions generated. Even though these transactions triggered numerous red flags with MindGeek’s finance department, the Bro-Club and its capos would nevertheless direct finance to ignore the red flags and approve the transactions and payments. Often, finance would be told to “not worry,we know those guys.”
20. As part of these schemes, various steps would be taken to circumvent banking laws and oversight. For example, the Bro-Club implemented $1 trial memberships and associated entities would use stolen credit cards to buy such memberships. The nominal transaction amount would not trip credit card company review and thus not be flagged as potentially fraudulent. Although the Bro-Club understood the fraudulent trial memberships would never translate into an actual paying membership, it had MindGeek nevertheless pay fees to the “partners” for generating a membership. As a result of these scams, MindGeek maintained a significant number of its large partner accounts that consistently broke even or lost money and which would have otherwise been terminated but for the fact they were part of the Enterprise.
21. More egregiously, MindGeek devoted substantial time and resources to engineering its credit card transaction flow to avoid tripping credit card flags. One such scheme was called “load balancing.”In “load balancing” MindGeek would work with the same payment processors it used to commit its various credit card schemes to mingle suspect transactions with “clean” transactions. This would cause the percentage of suspect transactions to remain below the percentage likely to trigger banking scrutiny, holds, and restrictions.
22. There are various criteria banks use in this formula including the types of content and memberships being purchased. As part of this scheme, MindGeek would enhance its ability to mask the fraudulent transactions by (a) paying its corrupt payment processors to fraudulently mix its payments with those of non-MindGeek entities; and (b) using credit cards MindGeek acquired (through, for example, pre-paid accounts) to generates its own clean transactions.
23. In sum, the Enterprise used MindGeek and its network of sham shell companies to perpetuate a long-running and elaborate pattern of illegal schemes through which the Enterprise members enriched themselves. In addition, the Enterprise used this network of sham shell companies to mask their illicit activities, launder money, and evade taxes by making it difficult for any one jurisdiction to see suspicious transactions of magnitude and effectively investigate isolated transactions let alone the overall operation of the Enterprise’s schemes. Finally, the Enterprise used the network of sham shell companies to defraud creditors and victims of their illicit activities by surreptitiously “bleeding” and laundering assets out of jurisdictions in which MindGeek is likely to be sued and out of the MindGeek corporate structure entirely so as to make it more difficult or impossible for victims and other creditors to get obligations paid.
24. The Enterprise’s Human Trafficking Venture

i. The Pre-Online Porn Industry

162. Prior to the explosion of online pornography, there was a relatively effective federal and state statutory framework policing child pornography, other non-consensual content, and copyright piracy in the porn industry.
163. First, federal law mandates that “producers” of pornographic material verify the age of all performers via government issued identification; maintain specified signed records of such verification for inspection; and mark all pornographic materials with disclosures certifying this verification had been completed and where the records could be inspected. It was a federal felony to fail to meet these requirements. The statute also makes it a federal crime “for any person” to “sell or transfer or offer for sale or transfer” any pornographic material that did not contain the required age verification disclosures. This imposed a compliance obligation on those through whom producers sold pornography.
164. Second, federal and state laws throughout the United States criminalize child pornography and impose near strict criminal liability for possessing or distributing such content.
165. Third, federal and state laws also criminalized, among other things, sex trafficking as well as benefiting from a sex trafficking venture, such as the commercialization of pornography produced with trafficked individuals. These anti-trafficking laws provided substantial criminal and civil sanctions for producing
     or monetizing non-consensual pornography.
166. Fourth, copyright laws likewise imposed substantial criminal and civil sanctions for the willful copyright piracy.
167. Collectively, these various legal regimes effectively policed child pornography, non-consensual content, and copyright infringement in the pre-online industry.

ii. MindGeek Embraces Illegal Content To Dominate Online Porn

168. The explosion of online porn devastated the established porn industry and disabled the existing mechanism to police pornography. MindGeek was central to this disruption and resulting lawlessness in porn. From inception, MindGeek embraced under-age, non-consensual, and pirated content in its business; solicited, patronized, paid for, and placed such illegal content on its internet pornography platform; and aggressively lied about and concealed these facts.
169. MindGeek’s motivation for its lawless business model was its singular priority of SEO:that is, its objective to be the top result in any internet search for pornography and thereby maximize its website traffic, advertising impressions, customer conversions, and data harvesting. Indeed, MindGeek publicly portrayed itself not as a porn company, but as a leading advertising, marketing, data, and SEO company.
170. Several factors dominate SEO, particularly relevant content volume, effective content description, and website traffic. Substantial content, effectively described, is the most important SEO factor. In addition, a website’s search engine prominence increases as more people visit it while searching for particular content.
171. The birth of pornographic websites launched an arms race for maximum content responsive to all likely search topics; detailed “long-tail” descriptions, titles,and tags for that content; and maximum traffic and data capture. As onewhistleblower explained,
     what happen[ed] with Pornhub . . . is the fight they have on Google results. And that’s where Pornhub lives or dies. . . . the fight they’ve had with sites like Xvideos, or XHamster, or XXX and XVideos . . . the fight they’ve had with rankings is just crazy. And that’s the thing, . . . it[’]s about the long searches, it[’]s about the long tail that are the few searches but enough to matter. And that’s where instead of you looking for one keyword, you’re looking for longer strings of words. And whoever is having more content and more diverse content, wins.
172. To “win,” MindGeek intentionally elected to put no restrictions on the content it would accept, offer, and commercialize. Like a soft-drink company selling different beverage types and flavors to capture all existing consumer tastes, MindGeek sought to service demand for all pornographic tastes, including tastes for child pornography, rape, extreme violence, racism and hate, and other illegal acts like bestiality. As one whistleblower explained, “there is a lot of f**ed up sht that is going on” (asterisks added) on MindGeek’s tubesites, and “it is not an accident . . . ownership and management are clearly complicit . . . 100%” because “[i]t’s just money” they care about.
173. MindGeek did this knowing that an unrestricted embrace of pornographic content would necessarily include enormous amounts of child pornography, non-consensual, and other illegal content on its sites. It was impossible not to know this. The pervasiveness of such content had necessitated the strict federal laws combating such content in the first place. And it was widely reported, and certainly known by those in the pornography industry, that this problem had grown exponentially with the explosion of the internet.
174. For example, NCMEC published a study in 2020 reporting that from 1998 to 2019 there was an “insatiable demand” for internet CSAM/child pornography, with millions of reported instances of such videos posted online, including 8.4 million in 2018, with a “trend toward more egregious sexual content in later years.”Equally well known was the explosion of human trafficking on the internet and in pornography particularly.
175. MindGeek saw these rapidly growing problems not as something to protect against, but as an opportunity. MindGeek embraced illegal content precisely because that content would significantly enhance its SEO, traffic, ad impressions, and customer conversions. Its legality or consequences were irrelevant, as an insider explained:
     They focus on how much money I can make today. Right? So they take risk because today it’s going to give you a dollar. If you have to change your practices next month, well we’ll get there. But right now this is making more money. Right, that’s the type of mentality that makes you take those decisions. What’s going to help me make more money. 100% they are all about the money, not safety, they just see numbers, let’s be honest.

iii. MindGeek Implements Its Embrace Of Illegal Content

176. MindGeek’s embrace of illegal content in its business and SEO plans was complete. It voraciously accepted, solicited, promoted, and normalized illegal content on its platform, and aggressively protected that exploitation by concealing it and attacking victims and others who put the use at risk.

a. MindGeek Purchased Trafficked Content In Bulk

177. Substantial portions of the purported “user” content on MindGeek’s tubesites was content produced by human traffickers that MindGeek itself commissioned or from whom it otherwise agreed to purchase. It did this to increase its content and SEO exponentially more than it could have had it relied entirely on actual user uploaded content. It also allowed it to secure particular content that its SEO analysis revealed was generating the greatest ad impressions and paying customer conversion. And it allowed it to do these things much more cheaply. MindGeek used different variations to secure such content.
178. First, monies necessary to pay for the production, middlemen, and uploading of the content were transferred from obscure and always different foreign subsidiaries to agents/middlemen without any paper trail as to what the payments were for. Those agents/middlemen would handle all interactions with producers in Eastern Europe and Asia who offered the best quality for the cheapest prices. This was dramatically cheaper than what such productions would cost in the United States, and MindGeek and the Bro-Club directing this scheme understood it was because the content was the product of trafficking. The finished content would then be transferred to the agent, who then transferred it for formatting to shell companies with whom the Bro-Club had financial interests or MindGeek partner channels who would do the formatting in exchange for favorable terms or monies disguised as partner channel payouts. The Enterprise was fastidious about avoiding any contact in the process with certain jurisdictions like Germany or the United Kingdom, which were viewed as the most rigorous in enforcing laws against trafficking.
179. Insiders familiar with this elaborate scheme left no doubt that the Bro-Club understood this was trafficked content:“100% they knowingly paid real pimps. They would discuss how this cheap content was coming from old school pimps. They found it exciting. They would explain, ‘we don’t need to pay studios in the US, low paid pimps come to us.’”
180. Once formatted, the content would be uploaded by these entities and/or a network of agents who were paid to create user identities and upload content. Sometimes such content would be uploaded by MindGeek directly, either in Canada or Cyprus. Once uploaded the content would be analyzed for its SEO effectiveness,
     ad impressions, and conversions, and the content as well as the formatting refined to maximize SEO. Then additional orders would be placed using the same process.
181. One insider described the process this way: MindGeek owns studios and works with studios. These studios produce high quality porn at high cost. MindGeek determined that high quality porn doesn’t convert well on tubesites. Most people want to see the girl next door and videos that seem more realistic. To get this content they run networks of advisors who run agencies that acquire porn and cam videos from high trafficking areas like Czech Republic and sell in bulk to MindGeek entities all over the world or license companies that all actively feed the videos into the tube sites as user uploads. Actively feeding content on the sites to make sure it does not touch North America, Germany, or the United Kingdom. It is was clear to anyone in this industry that stuff out of eastern Europe is from trafficking. People within the company knew there were real pimps running these agencies and MindGeek knew it. It was actively communicated among management especially in Cyprus who were the ones working to get stuff through it. ‘We don’t care,’ was their attitude. MG affiliates will contract with a local agent. Local agent interfaces with the production companies. Agent gets it and sell it to MindGeek in bulk to their affiliates. No employee can talk of these studios. Then they create identities and upload it through Cyprus and Canada. They avoided UK and Germany. The contentcouldn’t touch the UK or Germany offices because enforcement and investigation risk was too much. There were other means of bulk uploading. If huge partners have big studio that is part of MindGeek group. You could give it to them and they upload it and they get better treatment and terms and share the revenue. MindGeek pays for it but steer business through agents and pay huge amounts to launder the money and uploading. So you can’t see it went to MindGeek or that it uploaded it.
182. In addition to the general awareness that content from these regions was the product of extensive trafficking operations, MindGeek was aware the content was trafficking because it met with the producers and visited some of their production sites. In one such visit, MindGeek executives witnessed a football-field size warehouse in which women were crammed into adjoining studio stalls “like livestock” to perform on camera. Many of the women appeared young and were engaged in scenes depicting underage girls.
183. When asked by the producer where the women came from and lived, the producer unapologetically explained that his company had agents that scoured Eastern Europe for women who they recruited with promises of lucrative modelling jobs that would allow them to go to college and otherwise have a better life. When those women agreed they were transported to dormitory style housing or apartments and matched with a “boyfriend” who would groom them for porn.
184. Women who were victimized by this trafficking network reported that when they tried to leave, they were informed that their cam sessions had been recorded and if they did not continue performing the trafficker would send copies to their families and otherwise release them publicly and destroy their reputation and future.
185. Similarly, MindGeek allowed its platform to be used for prostitution. Like now defunct online marketplace BackPage (which was indicted along with its founders and seized by federal authorities), and Craigslist’s now defunct “personal” pages, MindGeek knowingly permits its platform to be used to facilitate trafficked prostitution. The website is awash in third party advertisements for “Craiglist,” “Backpage, and other previously known sites where prostitution could be solicited from trafficked women. Ad impressions and customer conversion for these services all generate revenue for MindGeek, and in some instances revenue sharing for it and select Bro-Club members.
186. The Enterprise and Bro-Club repeatedly deflected concerns raised internally by finance people who were alerted when they realized MindGeek was paying numerous ostensibly independent cam models through a single account. This was a trafficking red flag, but the Bro-Club and its capos informed finance to ignore the red flags and continue payments because “they knew the people behind the account and it was ok.”

b. MindGeek’s Unpoliced Platform

187. MindGeek’s intentional use of illegal content was nowhere more apparent than the unrestricted ability to upload such content onto its tubesites. MindGeek’s own Social Media Manager publicly explained that it would be a “disaster” to try to restrict users and uploaders to adults because “then no one would upload anything,” it would “cost[] us money to verify,” “devastate[] traffic,” and “MindGeek loses money.”This MindGeek spokesperson further warned that even pretextual restrictions would be unacceptable to MindGeek because some percentage of minors would not be able to figure out how to circumvent them:“you would get around them, a lot of people here would too but the large majority won’t know how.”
188. Consistent with this ethos, despite knowing illegal content would be uploaded without legitimate monitoring, MindGeek intentionally used an upload process that would not filter out illegal content. As one person familiar with the Bro-Club explained, “they knew they were doing illegal stuff,” but they refused to take any steps to restrict content or traffic because it would restrict SEO and revenue:
     No doubt. I’m sure . . . Were we planning any efforts to stop that? Absolutely not. Because of views. Every time you put an extra layer of control on who watches, you lose content. And it[’]s the same thing, in this case, if you put an extra layer of control on what content goes up, you lose content. And content in this case is more pages, and more pages is more results, more results is more paid views.
189. Thus, while non-pornographic tubesites with far less content uploaded on a daily basis (and far less users seeking illegal conduct) employed tens of thousands of “moderators” and sophisticated technology to ensure content was legal and complied with the terms of service, MindGeek’s uploading process ensured the opposite outcome of successfully uploading illegal content.
190. Located in Cyprus because of the availability of cheap labor in a distressed economy, MindGeek’s sham moderation function consisted over time of as few as 6 but never more than about 30 untrained, minimum wage contractors for all of MindGeek’s tubesites and millions of videos uploaded daily. These employees were untrained, could be terminated at will, and worked in cramped sweltering quarters that one eyewitness described as “inhuman.”
191. It was, of course, impossible for such a minute number of individuals to actually watch and moderate the vast volume of daily videos uploaded. As one eyewitness explained, “the official number was around 700-800 Pornhub videos a day but it was expected to do at least 900 Pornhub and depending on the day more videos for other sites for each person…the more experienced moderators did around 1000 videos on Pornhub and around 150-200 videos on the other tubes.”
192. Indeed, their real function was formatting, and internally were called “content formatters,” not “content moderators.”As formatters, their task was not to moderate legality but format the videos for optimal SEO. To do so, they would add or edit the title, tags, and descriptions and sometimes edit the video. They also “scrubbed” words in the titles and tags that unequivocally indicated criminality. While the red flags of criminality were removed, the video would nevertheless be uploaded with optimized titles, tags, and descriptions that would still permit MindGeek’s search engine to suggest the video to users searching for that illegal content.
193. As an insider familiar with the process explained: They basically went really fast with the content. It’s not like they are watching every Pornhub video. They kind of like would scroll through it, make sure that the titles didn’t have anything awful, and that’s it. And it’s mostly about the titles you know? Because in the end if you can’t find it through a search, then no one who works against human trafficking will. Right?
194. Demonstrating the task was formatting not moderation, MindGeek set unrealistic daily quotas of at a minimum 700-800 videos that bore no relationship to the time it would take to actually screen that content. The quotas were based on how long it should take to format, not screen, the content. Indeed, the quotas made it impossible to actually screen videos for prohibited or illegal content.
195. Moreover, formatting supervisors clearly communicated that actually screening questionable or even obviously illegal content was not the formatters’ task. The goal was uploading content. Thus, one insider explained that the woman with overall responsibility for formatting and ostensible “moderation” was a “sociopath” who would regularly “tell her team to just look the other way.”According to another insider, there was a motto drilled into formatters:“Don’t fk with the fker.” (Asterisks added). As one whistleblower explained, a typical response to a formatter questioning legality of content would be:“Imagine the trouble I will get in if we report this and take time and we don’t meet quota and you will lose your job.”
196. When asked about the testimony of Feras Antoon and David Tassillo before the Canadian House of Commons in which Antoon and Tassillo testified under oath that every video was reviewed to ensure it was consensual, this whistleblower said bluntly, “it is a lie.”
197. Contrary to the perjury before the Canadian House of Commons,MindGeek insiders knew obvious non-consensual content was uploaded and permitted to remain on Pornhub. An insider explained one such notorious example that was common knowledge internally:
     I remember there was one girl, it was huge, from when I was there. But she always seemed, in the videos she never looked okay. Like I remember she was always high. I mean something that, according to the minimum rules of decency, you would at least have a bit of the type of thinking you know, ‘is it okay to have this type of content?Is she really, you know in a state where she should be doing these videos?
198. However, MindGeek did much more than permit illegal content to be uploaded and remain on its site. For example, MindGeek took all content uploaded without restrictions onto its Pornhub tubesite and transferred that content to its other tubesites as well.
199. MindGeek also took all of the content from tubesites and partner channels it acquired like Redtube, YouPorn, Fake Taxi, etc., and transferred that in bulk to its library without review.
200. In addition, as part of its critical SEO process of supplying product for every taste and demand, MindGeek analyzed this illegal content, identified which examples performed better for their intended audience, and modified the formatting (titles, tags, and descriptions) of similar content to improve its performance and SEO generally. This was done for all categories of content, including those depicting minors, rape victims, and other non-consensual conduct.
201. The focus of this analysis was exclusively identifying which content,descriptions, and tags were trending and producing ad impressions and subscriptions. Those that were trending were further refined and tested to amplify them even more,and the conclusions drawn from that were applied to similar content. What was not a focus at all was whether the content was in fact consensual or adult. Nowhere in this process or elsewhere, did MindGeek comply with § 2257’s requirement that they secure proof of age where they were uploading material or its separate requirement that content being transferred by MindGeek contain the required certification of age certification from the producer.
202. When MindGeek identified a title or tags that too explicitly flagged illegal content they would notify the user to change the title or change it themselves. But MindGeek would not disable the illegal video. For example, a member of the Pornhub model program, whose revenues were shared with MindGeek, had multiple videos of apparently underage women with titles indicating they were underage. One video of an apparently underage and incapacitate woman carried the viewers comments, “I thought she was dead until five minutes in” and “I don’t think that girl is old enough to buy lottery tickets. If you catch my drift.” The uploader originally titled the video, “delete your history after watching this” obviously flagging the video as child pornography. But then he changed the title and when asked why by other users, he explained, “Pornhub support told to change all titles.”
203. This analysis was also part of MindGeek’s suggested search and video algorithm by which it would solicit users to view similar content. Thus, when a user,for example, searched for “teen sex,” MindGeek would present the most popular video results associated with that term, and solicit searches with a host of other more detailed terms used by others for similar content, like “barely legal teen sex,” “young teen sex,” “middle school teen sex,” etc. Investigators, advocates, and journalists following MindGeek’s suggestions easily found within a few clicks videos of obvious CSAM/child pornography or other forms of non-consensual sex where terms associated with that type of abuse, like “drunk,” drugged,” “passed out,” etc., were used.
204. This was no accident. It was a product of MindGeek’s knowing,deliberate, and detailed understanding of the content on its site and effort to solicit people to watch that content and continue using the site. As one insider explained, this knowledge and intent not only extended to, but emanated from, the Bro-Club running the platform:“Well they know, they know everything that’s going on . . .they are very involved. For sure. Would Feras know? Absolutely. Would David know? Absolutely,” but, he further explained, “they don’t care” and “don’t’ even check” because all they care about is SEO and revenues.
205. That same insider explained MindGeek had the capabilities to easily search for illegal content, but never did:“I’ve seen it, you can search any word, any video, you can look for the user, anything like any other databaseand the titles are there . . . so, why are they not searching for this and cleaning?Because they want the content on their sites.”
206. The only time MindGeek would voluntarily remove content was when this detailed analysis revealed the content was harming its SEO. For example,through its constant analysis, MindGeek determined that male homosexual content on its more popular tubesites was interfering with its impressions and conversions
207. The intentional exploitation of illegal content was further evidenced by MindGeek’s treatment of videos flagged by authorities, victims, and users as illegal. Such requests were ignored, stonewalled, and stalled as much as possible to preserve the use of the content for as long as possible. This was especially a priority when the content was performing well, and MindGeek’s SEO analysts were trying to use that data to refine their algorithms to effectively solicit views of similar content from the same category of “consumers.”
208. Thus, when victims would notify MindGeek that videos of their abuse had been uploaded, they were typically ignored unless the victims persisted. Then they would be stonewalled with denials or demands for information that they could not possess in many instances. For example, in some instances, often victims were told that only the uploader could request a video be taken down; or they needed to provide the URL’s for the videos; or that the videos did not exist or could not be found when they did exist and could be found; or that they had been taken down when they had not been.
209. Moreover, when victims or authorities succeeded in getting MindGeek to remove an illegal video, it would only disable the video but keep the webpage with its title, description, tags, and comments so that the video though disabled would still continue to increase SEO. When a user searching for such content landed on the disabled video’s webpage, MindGeek’s search and video suggestion algorithms would solicit the user with similar videos to the one disabled.
210. As one insider explained: If you do it [a takedown request] through Pornh15-yearub,then Pornhub eliminates the video but keeps the page. So that page still has the titles and can still run from Google. . . .Because what they want is ad impressions, because that’s what they charge for, for their clients. It’s ad impressions,ad impressions, ad impressions.
211. Indeed, to this day, one can run internet searches for known CSAM/child pornography or other non-consensual content that was ordered taken down by NCMEC or otherwise and the search will bring you to Pornhub even though that video is not enable. MindGeek’s algorithm will then direct you to similar non-disabled content.
212. Much worse, according to multiple insiders, MindGeek systematically and surreptitiously would reupload all content that it had been forced to disable back to the system and do so in a manner in which it appeared to have been reuploaded by independent users and which circumvented MindGeek’s purported systems for identifying previously disabled videos. This is the reason why so many victims reported that even when they successfully got videos disabled, the same videos would be reuploaded again and again.
213. One eyewitness to this process, explained that caches of disabled content “would be provided to employees on disks and they would be instructed to reupload those videos from non-MindGeek computers using specific email addresses that would allow the uploads to bypass MindGeek’s purported ‘fingerprinting’ of removed videos. They say they kept the stuff on the servers to cooperate with authorities but it was really so they could reupload.”
214. MindGeek has stated publicly and repeatedly that it retains on its servers all videos ever uploaded onto its tubesites. This no doubt is necessary for its reuploading practice. MindGeek, therefore, has throughout its existence illegally
215. Moreover, insiders explained that MindGeek provided a download button for users, in part, to facilitate the propagation of content, including illegal non-consensual content. In effect, MindGeek knew and counted on users to download content, make new content and compilations, and then reupload it as new content or as a replacement for disabled content. In addition, MindGeek provided private albums and file sharing, which allowed users to exchange and trade any type of content without anyone else seeing it or MindGeek monitoring it.
216. In this manner, MindGeek was facilitating criminal copyright infringement, and the transferring and distributing of CSAM/ child pornography or otherwise non-consensual content as well as otherwise legitimate pornography in violation of 18 U.S. § 2257 and CSAM laws.
217. Despite admitted possession of massive amounts of child pornography,until 2020, MindGeek never voluntarily made a single legally required disclosure to authorities in the United States or Canada about that material under either countries’ CSAM/child pornography laws. MindGeek failed to do so even when its possession has been publicly reported. For example, in 2019, 58 videos of a 15 year who was beaten and raped were posted on Pornhub. These videos were ultimately removed, but as per the testimony of NCMEC during Canada’s parliamentary investigation, MindGeek had never reported any instances of child sexual abuse to NCMEC as required by federal law or reported to NCMEC’s counterpart under Canadian law until late 2020.
218. Likewise, in 2020 two videos of child pornography – one involving a toddler in diapers being abused and another of a pre-pubescent girl being anally raped – were located on Pornhub. After multiple reports MindGeek notified those flagging it that it the video had been disabled, fingerprinted, and reported to NCMEC. But according to NCMEC’s own testimony, it was not reported to NCMEC. Two months later the same two videos were discovered back up on the site, uploaded by two separate purposed user accounts. Investigators submitted takedown requests to Pornhub that were ignored. It was not taken down until it was reported to the FBI, the FBI notified NCMEC, and NCMEC issued a takedown order to Pornhub. One reupload remained up for almost two weeks after the initial takedown requests and had over 20,000 views and an unknown number of downloads. Even after it was removed MindGeek left the title, tags, views and url live to continue driving traffic to the site using the child rape video.
219. Not only did MindGeek not report CSAM/child pornography it became aware of on its tubesites, it actively discouraged victims and others from reporting it,and lied to do so. For example, MindGeek tried to convince a victim of CSAM/child pornography not to report its presence on MindGeek’s tubesites and lied about MindGeek’s practice of not removing such content unless forced to do so: “You don’t need to report the urls to an agency, just flag them it[’]s very likely if it[’]s not removed it not illegal content. We do have access to our entire upload library, including deleted videos and can confirm this.”

iv. MindGeek’s Successful Exploitation of Non-Consensual Pornography

220. MindGeek’s plan to dominate the online porn industry with unrestricted use of all content regardless of legality succeeded. It has attained near monopoly status in the industry and is certainly dominant.
221. As its business model of unrestricted content intended, the presence of non-consensual content was ubiquitous on MindGeek’s internet platform. Simple Google searches even suggesting non-consensual content would invariably return Pornhub as the top search result. Pornhub’s suggested video and search algorithm would then direct users to similar content. With each click the search was refined further and further. In just a few clicks, in just a few minutes, users (and investigators and journalists) could find seemingly unlimited pages and videos depicting violent rapes, date and drugged rapes, child sexual assault or exploitation, coerced or trafficked subjects, secret and stolen recordings, or any other form of non-consensual conduct.
222. Titles, descriptions, tags and comments with these videos and suggested by MindGeek were blunt, including:“CP” (i.e., child porn), “teen”, “young teen”, “barely legal”, “super-young teen”, “old/young”, “young”, “exploited teen”, “crying teen”, “little”, “xxxtra small,” “drunk girl”, “drugged girl”, and “passed out.”
223. By way of example only, in just minutes of basic searches users,advocates, investigators, and journalists, and certainly those working fulltime to maximize MindGeek’s SEO, would easily find troves of:
     a. homemade videos of adult males having sex with apparently or obviously underage girls with titles such as, “Young Teen Gets Pounded,” “Old Man with young teen,” “Young girl tricked,” “Petite Thai Teen,” “A Club Where You Can Play With Little Girls And It’s So Fun,” “Bratty Little Girl,“ “Giant guys fing with no mercy this little whore while she’s crying” (asterisks added); b. homemade movies of young boys being raped with titles and tags such as “Barely legal step-son well used after school in uniform,” “Young hairless twink gets slapped,” “Daddy fs young teen boy virgin first time” (asterisks added), “Daddy came home frustrated and abused boy to crying”;
     c. drunk, drugged or otherwise incapacitated women,often clearly underage, being assaulted with titles and tags such as “Drunk,” “Passed out teen,” “Passed out sex,” “Drunk and Passed Out Porn,” “Passed out teen fed” (asterisks added), “Teen Totally Drunk Passed Out Sex Video Free,” “Passed Out Naked Teens,” “Tinder Girl Passed out at my House so I stuck it in her ass,” “Mexican Teen She’s to Drunk After Party Real Home Made!,” “Drunk girl let’s me dominate her,” “Cute Amateur Teen Drunk And Stoned In Ecstasy With Her First BBC On Drugs,” “Fed sister hard in the ass while she was drunk and sleeping” (asterisks added), “Drunk girl gets handcuffed and abused,” “Teen gets drunk and gangbanged”;
     d. non-professional secret recordings, often of obviously underage women, such as Asian high school students in a bathroom with hidden camera with the title, “Stolen Teen’s secret peeing scenes”;
     e. stolen underage pornographic videos with titles and tags such as, “Amateur sextape stolen from teen girl[’]s computer”;
     f. videos with extreme hate and racist themes such as “Black slave girl brutalized” with comments including “yes f* that n” (asterisks added) “love seeing this little petite black whore tied up like she belongs taking it in her black ass,” “Busty African Slave Gets Pounded,” “African Busty sluts get tortured by white master,” “You should get your own black slave,” “ Black slave girl pleasures white master and call herself ‘N** whore” (asterisks added) and “Black slave Girls Made to Eat White Girl Asshole” or anti-Semitic Nazi themed content (asterisks added).
224. This content typically had compelling indicia (and often definitive proof) that they were not consensual. And while some amount of such content could still be consensual despite this indicia, substantial percentages clearly were not or likely were not, and another large percentage appeared to be non-consensual with no way of knowing.
225. Despite monitoring and analyzing the content on its platform like NASA monitors the space station, MindGeek did nothing to remove or even investigate this patently abusive content or highly suspect content. It failed to do so even when it was flagged by user complaints and comments.
226. For example, for seven years Pornhub contained a video of a completely unconscious girl with underdeveloped breasts clearly being physically assaulted and raped. The title of the video was “dead pig half-opened eyes after being drugged.” That this title was literally true was painfully obvious from the video. The rapist repeatedly displayed the victim’s dilated, red eyes and even touched her eyeball to prove she was truly unconscious. No moderator or search engine optimizer could have missed the obvious rape depicted in this video.
227. Another example involved one of MindGeek’s most popular partner channels (and a constant focus of its SEO efforts), “Exploited Teens Asia.” A representative video on this channel involved a young girl in a child’s room surrounded by toys and stuffed animals. She was being aggressively penetrated by an old man and she was crying out “karushi,” which meant “stop.”Viewer comments demonstrated the obviously non-consensual nature of the video:
     Do we really know sex trafficking when we see it!! EXPLOITED TEENS ASIA she can’t be older than 15 or 16. This is a real victim. In some moment she looks like she wants to cry. You can see that she doesn’t want this,you can see that she wishes he’d leave her alon! I can’t believe 9k liked the image of an old perv humping a helpless GIRL! Flag the f*** out of this and hopefully pornhub will remove it. My heart breaks for her.”228. Others comments likewise realized this was a rape:“She is crying ‘kurushi’ meaning painful and begging him to stop!” and “She looks underage af”
228. The video had been up for 3 years and received over 4 million views,certainly performance that MindGeek SEO would have closely analyzed and tried to recreate, and the comments had been up as much as 7 months before activists called out the video on twitter. In response, MindGeek kept the title, description, and tags, and swapped out the video.
229. At the end of 2019, a video of an undeniably intoxicated and incapacitated women being sexual assaulted was uploaded to Pornhub. The video was categorized as “homemade,” titled as “Misadventures of a Drunk Girl,” and tagged in the category of “teen,” “teenager, young drunk, funny.”The woman was stripped naked, unable to walk or stand, crawled when she did move, and ultimately was completely unconscious with her eyes rolled into the back of her head.
230. Viewer comments such as, “so hot. Love how drunk she is!”,confirmed her obvious incapacity as did, “I would take advantage of her all nite. dude’s smart for trying get her to drink more. Bet he dumped loads in her stupid c*nt. I know I would.”(Asterisks added).
231. Users who MindGeek directed to this video were then directed by MindGeek’s suggested search and video algorithm to equally clear cases of rape. In one video, the drug needle used to render the victim unconscious was then inserted into the vagina of the victim and zoomed in on. These videos were on the site for years and accompanied by numerous comments flagging them as obvious rape.
232. Likewise, searches for “Pnp,” “meth,” “homeless,” “crack whores,” “meth whores,” and other similar terms turned up countless videos of women who were plainly incapacitated or having a debilitating drug addiction being exploited by pimps and johns.
233. Another video on Pornhub for over four years captured the rape of an Indian woman. The video was not professionally produced. There was no indicia of consent or performance. Neither the uploader nor women were identified. The woman was clearly in distress and desperately trying to hide her face. Two years of user comments plainly flagged the video as rape:“this is f***ing rape!!!!!!! bastards!!!!!!!!” (Asterisks added). MindGeek was aware of the video, its obvious nonconsensual content, and the users’ comments. Rather than remove the video and page, Pornhub instead censored the word “rape” from the comments and left the video.
234. For this video, MindGeek’s suggested search and video algorithm directed viewers to similar rape videos, including a young teen woman in obvious distress, crying, and trying to cover her face while her rape was recorded. The video is titled and tagged “amateur teen” and “hot Indian teen.”
235. Likewise, MindGeek’s suggested search and video algorithm directed users searching “Asian” to a cache of sadistic abuse videos. Among this cache were a category in which underage appearing Asian women were being suffocated in plastic bags attached to a vacuum packing machine. The women were thrashing and screaming. They were not performing. The videos were amateur, poor quality, and had zero indicia of consent.
236. In another such video, another apparently underage Asian women was dragged onto a dirty balcony and submerged in a plastic tub of ice water. Her assailants violently grabbing her hair and used their boots to force her head under the water. They restrained her and sprayed her face from a hose when she tried to breath. There was no indication of consent, only assault:the young woman shook, shivered, wept, gasped, and pleaded. She was not performing. When the men finally removed her from the tub, they continued to dose the collapsed, shivering woman with the hose before all urinating on her shaking body.
237. Abuse videos were also common in MindGeek’s partner channels. For example, one of MindGeek’s official ModelHub partner accounts called PornForce,from which MindGeek received a cut of all revenue, had videos of obvious victims being exploited. For example, a video titled “Thai street teen” with the description “f***ed and facialized for $5” (asterisks added) showed a homeless and disabled Thai teen being penetrated and filmed “for $5.” In the comments a viewer asked, “is she deaf,” and PornForce responded, “yes.”
238. Another ModelHub account was comprised of a man exploiting homeless teens in New Jersey in commercial sex acts. The victims of this exploitation were anally assaulted while crying and pleading for the abuse to stop. MindGeek’s suggested video and search algorithm would direct viewers of these videos to similar videos and suggested search terms of “abused teen,” “crying teen,” “exploited black teens,” “homeless teen,” and the like.
239. In addition, MindGeek allowed its private premium accounts on Pornhub to be used as a secret marketplace to distribute illicit content, particularly CSAM/child pornography, for a fee, sometimes directly on the platform, sometimes through links to an external CSAM cache exchanged privately through the accounts. This trafficking included minors posting child pornography of themselves at the direction of predators and pimps. The content, while private to other unsubscribed users, was visible to MindGeek, part of its SEO analysis, and included in Google and other search engine search result calculations and thus embraced and allowed to remain.
240. Victims of this exploitation who tried to seek assistance from MindGeek consistently reported indifference to outright hostility, even in the most extreme situations. For example, one victim had the video of her rape uploaded to Pornhub with her personal information where it remained for months despite her desperate pleas until she hired a lawyer:
     It was terrifying, there were people on Twitter-sharing screenshots of them buying a train ticket saying they were going to come and rape me. I thought about killing myself it got so bad. Hundreds of thousands of people saw that-video, which I didn’t even know I still had. It was devastating. What a horrible, humiliating thing to do to someone. I moved in with a friend and put my flat on the market because I thought I was going to get raped. I had to change my whole life – leave my job, withdraw from almost everybody I used to work with. I used to stay in my room all weekend crying because I couldn’t deal with it. He ruined my life.
     I came off social media comp etely and the only version of me that existed online was this persona that he created.
241. Remarkably, MindGeek’s indifference was so callous it extended to even public outreach from victims, such as this victim who made her report to a MindGeek’s Social Media Director on social media:
     I was away on an international business trip when I met a man at a hotel bar and went back to his room to have sex . . . Recently my friend sent me a Pornhub video and said it looked like me. I looked at it and it was me having sex in the hotel room with thousands of views. My face was clearly visible in parts. The video had an insulting title calling me a slut. The channel it was on featured a dozen other videos of the same guy having sex with different women in hotel rooms with the same amateur quality I tried flagging the video with no results. I want the video taken down and the guy punished, but I’m really not sure what to do.
242. Pornhub’s only response to this report was to send the victim a link to their site’s takedown page.
243. The same abuse occurred on Pornhub Gay. A simple search for “daddy and son” produced oceans of unprofessionally produced videos of very young looking boys with the titles saying “REAL Father Son” and other videos of distressed young hairless boys being penetrated by older men. Other cases of CSAM/child pornography involved underage boys were videotaping themselves in sex acts, with video titles like “13 yr old boy” and “14yr old.”
244. Like many videos on Pornhub, these abuse videos frequently ran a Pornhub Live ad or other advertisement before playing the video and were surrounded by other ads for which Pornhub was paid. Some of these videos had millions of views alone. The “categories” collectively had many millions more, evidencing the significant contribution unrestricted access to nonconsensual content was to MindGeek’s business model.
245. MindGeek’s Criminal Use of Nonconsensual Content is Revealed
246. Even if the defendants otherwise had no knowledge of the illegal content MindGeek was monetizing on its platform, they could not have avoided the numerous alarming high-profile reports of egregious non-consensual content on their platform.
247. For example, after Taiwanese playboy Justin Lee was arrested by Taiwanese police for the date rape of dozens of women from 2009 through 2014,some minors, police reported that Lee had recorded those rapes and posted them on Pornhub. MindGeek, in turn, transferred those videos to its other tubesites and to hundreds of users who downloaded those videos from those sites. Obviously, none of the videos uploaded and none of the transfers complied with federal law on age and consent verification. And MindGeek’s purported “robust team” of “expertly trained” moderators and state of the art technology did not stop the videos depicting clearly incapacitated women being raped from being uploaded by Lee and transferred by MindGeek.
248. Although Lee’s arrest, conviction, and criminal conduct, including his uploading of the rape videos to Pornhub, were highly publicized worldwide,MindGeek kept those rape videos on its site for years thereafter. Even today, after the videos are no longer viewable on MindGeek’s tubesites, MindGeek continues to benefit from those uploads and transfers as searches for such tapes on leading search engines will still direct searchers to Pornhub, where the tubesite’s search engine will direct the users to similar content categories of content like “celebrity sex tapes.”
249. In February 2018, a Pornhub user repeatedly flagged child pornography being uploaded repeatedly to Pornhub’s gay content categories. One of those users told MindGeek, “[p]lease remove all pictures in the gay category starting with [XXXX] in the title. They contain underage children. Some of whom look 7 or 8 years old. Its disgusting that this has slipped through, two nights in a row. Does this material get screened. I’ll be checking to see if the content has been removed.” Again, MindGeek permitted this illegal content to be repeatedly uploaded and transferred to its other tubesites despite its obviously illegal nature and despite being explicitly being flagged by users.
250. From 2013 through at least part of 2020, MindGeek’s tubesites contained hundreds of videos of child pornography created in video chat service Stickam chat rooms until those chat rooms were shut down in 2014 as part of one of the largest internet child pornography convictions in history, involving the sextortion of over 350 minors via the video chat service. Despite the highly publicized investigation and conviction, for years, those child pornographic videos and compilations of those videos were ubiquitously uploaded by MindGeek users and transferred by MindGeek to its other tubesites and to users downloading the videos. They remain on its servers to this day.
251. From 2013-2017, New York resident Nicole Addimando’s husband physically abused and raped her, and subjected her to sodomy with objects, vaginal torture with heated spoons, and being left for extended periods of time and in degrading and painful positions. These assaults were videotaped and posted to Pornhub. Pornhub not only permitted those uploads, it transferred those videos to its other tubesites. Even after Addimando’s abuse and Pornhub uploads became highly publicized, videos of the assaults remained on MindGeek’s tubesites and were uploaded, downloaded, and transferred by MindGeek numerous times. Those videos remained on MindGeek’s tubesites as late as 2019 and remain on its servers today. To this day, a search engine inquiry of “Nicole Addimando Sex Tape” will result in the top two search results being to Pornhub with the result stating: “Nicole Addimando” and “Watch Nicole Addimando porn videos for free, here on Pornhub.com.
     No other sex tube is more popular and features more Nicole Addimando scenes than Pornhub!”
252. From 2014-2015, 49-year-old Dawn Giannini sexually abused a 14-year-old relative, recorded the abuse, and posted those recordings on Pornhub. MindGeek not only permitted the obviously underage assault and child pornography to be uploaded to Pornhub, it transferred those videos to its other tubesites. The videos were viewed by the victim’s friends at school, one of whom ultimately alerted the authorities leading to Giannini’s arrest in 2018. Those videos were still present on MindGeek sites as late as 2019 and remain on its servers today. To this date, a search of “Giannini sex tape” on Yahoo produces a Pornhub search result listed third, for “Dawn Giannini Porn Videos” and the message “Watch Dawn Giannini porn videos for free, here on Pornhub.com. No other sex tube is more popular and features more Dawn Giannini scenes than Pornhub!”
253. In the fall of 2019, the Internet Watch Foundation, the United Kingdom’s private internet watchdog for child pornography, reported to the Sunday Times that it had been notified of 118 instances of child pornography on Pornhub by the public over the prior 2.5 years, increasing each year. Half of that child pornography was Category A, the worst kind of abuse involving penetration and/or sadism. MindGeek permitted the upload of this child pornography and transferred it to its other tubesites and never reported it the authorities as it was required to do in the United States and other jurisdictions where its servers are located. That child pornography remains on MindGeek’s servers to this day.
254. The Sunday Times’ own investigation in 2019 confirmed that Pornhub was “flooded” with illegal content that it failed to remove even after the paper had notified it of that illegal content:
     the world’s most popular porn website [Pornhub] is flooded with illegal content Pornhub is awash with secretly filmed “creepshots” of schoolgirls and clips of men performing sex acts in front of teenagers on buses. It has also hosted indecent images of children as young as three. . . The website says it bans content showing under-18s and removes it swiftly. But some of the videos identified by this newspaper’s investigation had 350,000 views and had been on the platform for more than three years. Three of the worst clips that were flagged to Pornhub still remained on the site 24 hours later. The Sunday Times found dozens of examples of illegal material on the website within minutes. It followed research by the campaign group #NotYourPorn, which identified revenge porn videos and clips filmed by secret cameras.
     One account, called “Candid teen asses,” is devoted to posting covertly filmed “creepshots” showing UK girls in school uniform. Another features clips of a man performing sex acts among young concertgoers, rubbing up against them in a crowded music venue. While Pornhub has blocked users from searching terms such as “underage” and “child porn,” synonyms including “jailbait,” “very young girl” and “lolita” can still be used to find content. . .
255. In response, the MindGeek disinformation machine disseminated blatantly false denials from a fictious spokesman who does not exist, but who was, in fact, MindGeek VP Corey Urman. As the Sunday Times reported, “Pornhub said it had a ‘robust internal policy’ for removing offending material, including ‘expertly-trained human reviewers’ and ‘scanning content to determine whether it is consensual.’ Blake White, its vice president, said child sexual abuse made up a tiny proportion of content and the aim was to eradicate it. ‘It is important to note that oftentimes videos described as ‘hidden camera footage’ or ‘young teen’ are in fact legal, consensual videos that are produced to cater to various user fantasies,’ he said. ‘They are in fact protected by various freedom of speech laws. Certain words are banned from being used in titles and tags, and we will be doing a thorough audit of our websites to update and expand this list.’”
256. Even months after this reporting, on or about March 10, 2020, four videos of child pornography were uploaded to Pornhub depicting men abusing a toddler in diapers and a pre-pubescent child bound and being raped anally while crying for the abuser to stop.
     At the time, Pornhub publicly admitted that these videos had been uploaded on its site, and misrepresented that they had been removed, “fingerprinted” so they could not be reuploaded, and reported to NCMEC. Two months later, two of the videos were reuploaded to Pornhub by two separate Pornhub accounts to the website, had thousands of views, and were the subject of takedown requests to Pornhub. Pornhub, however, refused to remove the videos for over ten days, during which time they were viewed tens of thousands of times, and only did so when the FBI became involved, reported it to NCMEC, and NCMEC instructed Pornhub to disable the video. Although Pornhub disabled the video, it left the video page, title, tags, and user on its site, did not cancel and remove the uploading accounts or review those accounts for the offending videos or other offending videos. Indeed, to this day, if one googles the title or user, Pornhub remains the number one search result.
     Although the video is not available, Pornhub directed you to similar content identified by its algorithm.
257. From 2009 through 2020, one of Pornhub’s most popular Content Partners, GirlsDoPorn, and its founders produced pornographic content through trafficking women and minors. In 2016, these allegations were made public when twenty-two women sued GirlsDoPorn for being trafficked, and in 2019, GirlsDoPorn, its founders, and others were indicted on federal trafficking charges.
     The website was shut down in early 2020, shortly after the indictment and the flight of its founder to New Zealand to avoid arrest, where he remains a fugitive. Ruben Andre Garcia, one of the traffickers involved in the GirlsDoPorn trafficking operation, was sentenced to twenty years in prison on June 15, 2021. This human trafficking ring was one of Pornhub’s most popular partner channels, with nearly 800,000 subscribers and over six hundred million views, and was heavily promoted by MindGeek.
258. The channel was so lucrative, and MindGeek so indifferent to monetizing non-consensual content, that MindGeek kept the channel on its site and collected revenue from it even after learning of the initial civil lawsuit and did nothing to investigate the allegations.
     Pornhub continued to host and monetize this trafficked content until the company and its founders were indicted and the website shutdown. Nevertheless, even after the formal channel was disabled, trafficked GirlsDoPorn content was ubiquitous on MindGeek’s tubesites and its internal search engine would regularly direct users to those videos. As of October 2020, a simple search of “GDP” would result in over 300 videos and images of those victims.
259. In late 2019, it was widely reported that a “verified” member of Pornhub’s model program was actually a trafficked 15-year-old girl who had been missing for approximately a year. MindGeek allowed the uploading of fifty-eight videos of this child being raped to its “verified” model channel and transferred those videos to its other tubesites. MindGeek never reported this child pornography to NCMEC or CP3 as it was legally required to do according to NCMEC’s testimony before the Canadian Parliament’s Ethics Committee.
260. Once again, MindGeek’s response to these reports was to disavow any responsibility or knowledge, here claiming that the child had been “verified” as an adult with “valid ID”: “ @luxliv3s Hey Lix, she is a verified model with valid ID.” 27
261. This, however, was a lie. MindGeek knew that it had never reliably verified the age of the 15 year old missing girl because the law requires all participants in filmed sex acts to be 18 years old. Rather, MindGeek wanted to continue to profit from advertising impressions from, and sales of the videos.
262. Plaintiffs are Exploited by MindGeek’s Trafficking Venture i. Serena Fleites
263. In 2014, eighth grader Serena Fleites learned that a nude, sexually explicit video her high school boyfriend had coerced her to make months earlier had been uploaded to Pornhub without her knowledge or consent. She was just 13 years old in the video. The video titled “13-Year Old Brunette Shows Off For The Camera,” immediately went viral on Pornhub. By the time Serena discovered the video, it had more than 400 views, and had been widely disseminated throughout her school and neighborhood.
264. Too embarrassed to disclose the video to her mother, teacher, or principal, Serena reached out to Pornhub directly impersonating her mother, and demanding the video be removed: “this is child pornography, my daughter is a minor and only 13 years old.” Approximately two weeks passed before Pornhub responded to Serena. When Pornhub did respond, it acknowledged the video contained CSAM and agreed to take it down. Yet another one to two weeks went by before the video was removed from its site.
265. During the months before the video was removed, it was downloaded countless times and reuploaded by different users and with different titles. In the months and years that followed, Serena regularly received messages on social media from strangers attaching screenshots and active Pornhub links to her video. Each time Serena learned the video had been reuploaded, she recommenced the process to have the video removed. One of the uploads had 2.7 million views. Others had hundreds of comments noting that Serena could not be more than a teenager. Yet, Pornhub still took weeks to take each video down, each time requiring Serena to provide photographic proof that she was the child depicted in the video before removing it from its site.
266. The dissemination was not limited to Pornhub. The original Pornhub video depicting 13-year-old Serena was downloaded and then reuploaded countless additional times to other pornography sites and widely disseminated through email and other forms of electronic communication.
267. In response to the viral dissemination of the video, Serena was bullied and harassed. Classmates demanded that Serena send them sexually explicit videos of herself and threatened to disclose the sexually explicit video to Serena’s mother or to her school if she did not comply. The ongoing harassment sent Serena into a downward spiral. She began to regularly skip school which resulted in Serena receiving a truancy notice. Serena’s mother, still unaware of Serena’s sexually explicit video on Pornhub, and frustrated with Serena’s failure to regularly attend school, suggested Serena move in with her sister. Serena agreed. Serena, no longer able to face her classmates who incessantly harassed and bullied her, unenrolled from high school, and commenced an online high school program.
268. Approximately one year later, Serena moved back in with her mother. She was depressed, hated her life, and in a failed suicide attempt, hung herself in the bathroom. She was found by her younger sister and her mother’s boyfriend who removed the power cord from her neck. Serena received treatment by paramedics and was admitted to a mental health facility in Bakersfield.
269. The downward spiral precipitated by the viral dissemination of her nude video continued for years. Following her failed suicide attempt and hospitalization, Serena avoided going back home and facing judgment from her family and community. In need of a place to stay, she reached out to a female friend who had experienced similar mental health challenges. Serena went to visit her friend, who she discovered was using methamphetamine. While staying at her friend’s house, Serena was introduced to heroin by an older male who she subsequently began to date, became addicted, and struggled with addiction for the next three years. To fund their joint heroin habits, the older man manipulated Serena, who was still a minor at the time, into creating sexually explicit videos of herself, which were then sold on Craigslist and the Kik app. Serena subsequently learned that once sold, some of the videos were uploaded to Pornhub without her knowledge or consent. These videos were still on Pornhub a recently as June 2020.
270. Although Serena is now sober, the long-term effects of Pornhub’s wrongdoing continue to this day. The CSAM videos continue to be accessible on Pornhub as recently as last year. Moreover, the original Pornhub videos of Serena continue to be disseminated through other platforms, including on MindGeek affiliated sites and other pornography sites. Serena remains estranged from certain family members. Throughout various stages of the past five years she was homeless and lived in her car. She continues to suffer from depression and anxiety and has attempted suicide on multiple occasions over the years.

ii. Jane Doe No. 1

270. Beginning at age 7, and continuing for more than 21 years, Jane Doe No. 1 was raped, trafficked, and exploited by a ring of Hollywood men and New York financiers, including Jeffrey Epstein. These interactions were often recorded and since no later than 2007 have been widely and continuously distributed on Pornhub.
271. The first recording was made in a garage in Maryland in or about 2001- 2002 when Jane Doe No. 1 was 10 years old. The next year, Jane Doe No. 1 was “sold” to another trafficker in New York. She was trafficked by this man and his organization in various states along the East Coast, and was forced to provide escort services and film pornographic videos and livestreams. The videos were produced in various warehouses.
272. In 2004, Jane Doe No. 1 was transported to Florida, where she was introduced to Jeffrey Epstein and other men. Jane Doe No. 1 was directed to give Epstein “massages,” which the New York Times explained was a known code word for sex among Epstein’s inner circles. She was transported to Epstein’s properties in New York, Palm Beach, Florida, and his private island, Little St. James in the U.S. Virgin Islands, which she visited on multiple occasions. This went on throughout her middle school and high school years and ended right before she started college.
273. Jane Doe No. 1 is aware of at least seven explicit videos of her on Pornhub between 2011 and 2016, as well as at least one recording from a livestream. The videos were filmed in warehouses in multiple locations in California. The seven videos were uploaded multiple times on Pornhub. In some instances, Jane Doe No. 1’s traffickers forced her to actually upload and reupload old videos of herself as a form of punishment.
274. Jane Doe No. 1’s therapist assisted her with takedown requests, but she was not successful in having them all removed.
275. The years of sexual abuse and exploitation caused Jane Doe No. 1 to suffer from an eating disorder and substance abuse. These conditions forced Jane Doe No. 1 to take a leave of absence from college. She continues to receive medical treatment for the emotional distress she suffered.

iii. Jane Doe No. 2

276. At age 15, Jane Doe No. 2 was blackmailed by now convicted child sex offender, Abdul Hasib Elahi, into sending him sexually explicit photographs and videos. These photographs and videos were widely disseminated on MindGeek’s tubesites, including Pornhub, without her knowledge or consent.
277. In 2017, Jane Doe No. 2 received an unsolicited message from a stranger on What’s App, who was later identified to her by law enforcement as Elahi. Elahi blackmailed Jane Doe No. 2 with a naked photograph of herself and threatened to send the photograph he had to her friends and family if she did not send additional photographs and videos. Although he acknowledged that she was a minor, he demanded eighty photographs of her in underwear, eighty nude photographs, a three- minute video of her removing her clothing, a three-minute video of her engaged in vaginal and anal masturbation, and a video of her spitting on herself. He demanded that the photographs and videos be full body and that her face be exposed. Fearing that he would carry through on his threat to disclose the photographs he had already obtained, Jane Doe No. 2 complied with his demands.
278. Thereafter, Elahi demanded that Jane Doe No. 2 send additional photographs and videos, including videos of her drinking her own urine and eating feces. Elahi again threatened that he would release the photographs and videos he had of her if she did not comply. This time Jane Doe No. 2 refused.
279. In or about September 2018, Jane Doe No. 2, then 17 years old, learned that the nude and sexually explicit photographs and videos Elahi had extorted were on Pornhub. That same month, one of Jane Doe No. 2’s classmates posted one of the videos to Snapchat. The video was screen recorded from Pornhub.
280. Jane Doe No. 2 immediately contacted the police. Then she contacted Pornhub and demanded that the photographs and videos be removed. Pornhub complied with Jane Doe No. 2’s demand, but the photographs and videos were immediately re-uploaded, along with Jane Doe No. 2’s personal information, including her home address and family’s social media accounts. Throughout the fall of 2018, Jane Doe No. 2 received hundreds of follow requests daily on her social media accounts and dozens of messages a week forwarding links to her videos on Pornhub. The active Pornhub links were viewed hundreds of thousands of times. Pornhub viewers also forwarded the videos and photographs of Jane Doe No. 2 to her mother and father.
281. Each time Jane Doe No. 2 contacted Pornhub about subsequent uploads, she was informed that a link to the video was required to take the video down. However, she could not always locate the links to the video and photographs that were sent to her, and when she raised this issue, Pornhub directed her to upload the videos she was requesting be taken down to a third-party site it controlled. Of course, Pornhub was not even legally allowed to take possession of the videos which contained child pornographic materials (nor was Jane Doe No. 2 legally allowed to possess or upload child pornography). Jane Doe No. 2 informed Pornhub of these facts, that the situation led her to be suicidal, and threatened legal action if the videos and images were not immediately removed. Pornhub ignored her, and she never contacted Pornhub again. As of December 2020, there were at least five separate links to Jane Doe No. 2’s video still active on Pornhub.
282. Pornhub’s lies were subsequently revealed in January 2021, when in response to a cease and desist letter from counsel, MindGeek purported to conduct independent searches to facilitate the removal of all content depicting Jane Doe No. 2 from all the sites under the MindGeek “umbrella.” Moreover, despite MindGeek’s claim that all content is reviewed prior to upload, its director of legal affairs conceded the high volume of CSAM takedown requests and sought to facilitate a mechanism to respond to these requests and accelerate response times in the future.
283. In the months and years following the initial 2017 upload of Jane Doe No. 2’s nude and sexually explicit videos and photographs she has been subjected to severe harassment. Individuals who viewed her videos reached out to her through social media, denigrating her, and accusing her of posting the content intentionally and requesting additional content. Two years later, she continues to receive regular messages and requests through social media.
284. The illegal dissemination of CSAM and ongoing harassment has caused Jane Doe No. 2 to suffer severe anxiety, panic attacks, and body dysmorphia that led to significant weight loss, to a low of just 80 pounds. Jane Doe No. 2 suffered from suicidal thoughts and has attempted suicide on more than one occasion. Jane Doe No. 2’s anxiety is so severe that she rarely leaves her home because she fears that someone will recognize her from one of the Pornhub videos or photographs. This anxiety caused her to quit her job and resort to online work that does not necessitate going out in public.

iv. Jane Doe No. 3

285. Just days after Jane Doe No. 3 returned home from her junior year of college, she learned that a video her high school boyfriend had coerced her to take during spring break her senior year of high school had been uploaded to Pornhub under the title “Young Stepsister Stripped.” The video depicted Jane Doe No. 3, at age 17, removing her clothing and engaging in sexually explicit acts. At the time Jane Doe No. 3 discovered the video on Pornhub, it had more than 234,000 views and had been downloaded and reuploaded countless times.
286. Immediately upon discovering the video, on May 27, 2020, Jane Doe No. 3 contacted Pornhub, informed Pornhub that she was a minor in the video, did not consent to the posting of the video, and demanded the video immediately be removed. Later that same day, Jane Doe No. 3 received an e-mail from Pornhub confirming that the video “will be” removed but stating that “we offer no guarantee” that the video will not be re-uploaded. It took seven days before Pornhub confirmed on June 3, 2020 that it had “removed the video.”
287. By the time Jane Doe No. 3 secured the takedown of her video, it had had been widely disseminated throughout her college campus and her hometown. Horrified and embarrassed, Jane Doe No. 3 withdrew from the college she was enrolled in at the time. She googled her name daily to confirm the videos had not been reuploaded. She deleted all her social media accounts. She suffered from severe anxiety and depression and was prescribed medications for those conditions. She continues to undergo medical treatment for emotional distress.

v. Jane Doe No. 4

288. At the age of 16, Jane Doe No. 4 was videotaped, without her consent, performing oral sex on another minor. That video was then posted to MindGeek’s tubesites, including Pornhub, without her knowledge or consent.
289. In 2016, Jane Doe No. 4 was coerced by her then 15-year-old boyfriend to perform oral sex in the backseat of his parent’s rental car. Jane Doe No. 4, who at the time of the incident resided in California, had traveled to Florida on vacation with her family to meet her New York-based boyfriend. The two had been conversing through Facebook for several years and the relationship had turned romantic. During the sex act, Jane Doe No. 4 discovered that her boyfriend was filming her. She immediately demanded he stop, but he continued to film the encounter. Afterwards, she demanded that he delete the video.
290. Two years later in June 2018, Jane Doe No. 4 learned through a classmate of her boyfriend that the nonconsensual video had been uploaded to Pornhub two years earlier. Consistent with her minor status at the time the video was recorded, the video title included references to “teenager,” and “amateur.” The classmate identified Jane Doe No. 4 as the girl in the video, including accurate descriptions of Jane Doe No. 4’s hair style, and the glasses and jewelry Jane Doe No. 4 was wearing the day of the sexual encounter in Florida. The CSAM video was disseminated on Pornhub without Jane Doe No. 4’s knowledge.
291. Jane Doe No. 4 sought treatment from mental healthcare professionals and has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. She has a physical reaction whenever she sees or hears something that reminds her of this traumatic experience and, accordingly, has difficulty maintaining a job. She continues to suffer from severe emotional harm.

vi. Jane Doe No. 5

292. During her freshman year of high school, Jane Doe No. 5’s 17-year-old boyfriend videotaped the two engaged in a sex act in Jane Doe No. 5’s bedroom without her knowledge or consent. Jane Doe No. 5 first learned of the sex tape four years later when a classmate’s parent informed her father that the video was on Pornhub. She was just 14 years old in the video.
293. Immediately upon learning of the video, Jane Doe No. 5’s father contacted law enforcement and demanded that the video be removed. Pornhub complied, but the damage had already been done. By the time Pornhub removed the video, the link had been disseminated throughout Jane Doe No. 5’s school. Moreover, the video was repeatedly reuploaded. Jane Doe No. 5 continues to receive active links and screenshots of the video on Pornhub.
294. Pornhub’s illegal and widespread dissemination of pornographic material and CSAM of Jane Doe No. 5 at age 14 has caused Jane Doe No. 5 to suffer from severe anxiety, depression, and a failed suicide attempt.

vii. Jane Doe No. 6

295. In 2018, Jane Doe No. 6 discovered that a compilation video of men masturbating to nude photographs of her at 14 years old was on Pornhub. The video was listed under the tag “naked teen.” Ashamed to disclose the video to her parents or the police, Jane Doe No. 6 immediately reached out to Pornhub, informing Pornhub of her age and demanding that the video be removed. Pornhub responded with a generic, automated response. Two weeks later, having heard nothing further from Pornhub and desperate to have the video removed, Jane Doe No. 6 reached out to Pornhub again demanding it remove the video. This time she provided Pornhub with a picture of her passport to verify her age and identity. The image of the passport confirmed she was underage. Pornhub eventually responded, but failed to remove the video. After these failed attempts, Jane Doe No. 6 gave up.
296. The experience continues to traumatize Jane Doe No. 6 to this day. She wakes up wondering if the video is still available on Pornhub, if it has been reuploaded under different titles, and whether it has been disseminated more broadly. Moreover, she fears the widespread dissemination of the sexually explicit photographs will interfere with her dream of becoming a teacher. Jane Doe No. 6 suffers from severe depression and anxiety and is under the care of a mental health professional.

viii. Jane Doe No. 7

297. From approximately 2017 to 2018, a video of Jane Doe No. 7 engaged in sex with her adult boyfriend were uploaded to Pornhub, without her knowledge or consent. The sex video was titled “Ginger GF sucks c*** and gags.” (asterisks added). Jane Doe No. 7 was 17 years old at the time the video was recorded and the photographs were taken.
298. Upon learning that the video had been uploaded to Pornhub, Jane Doe No. 7 proceeded to notify law enforcement, which facilitated the removal of the illegal video.
299. At no time prior to posting the video did MindGeek, Pornhub, or any other website owned or operated by MindGeek attempt to verify Jane Doe No. 7’s identity or age. Neither Jane Doe No. 7 nor her parents consented to having a video of her appear on Pornhub, and neither Jane Doe No. 7 nor her parents could lawfully consent to the possession and dissemination of child pornography.
300. Jane Doe No. 7 suffered and continues to suffer from significant emotional harm and is being treated by a mental health professional.

ix. Jane Doe No. 8

301. In 2018, 15-year-old Jane Doe No. 8 was trafficked into prostitution by a female pimp in Colombia. During one encounter, Jane Doe No. 7 was paid approximately one million Colombian pesos in cash to have sex with now indicted sex offender, Victor Galarza, while another man, Herbert Fletcher, recorded the sex acts. Thereafter, Galarza demanded that Jane Doe No. 8 watch the recording with him, after which he purported to delete the recording. Two years later, Jane Doe No. 8 learned that the putatively deleted video was on Pornhub.
302. The video had been uploaded to Pornhub in April 2020 under the title, “Prostituta colegiala Colombiana acepta follar sin condon x 10 dolares la cuarentena la obligo a vender su cuerpo en Medellin,” which translated means “Prostitute school girl from Colombia agrees to f*** without a condom for $10.00 the quarantine forced her to sell her body in Medellin.” (asterisks added).
303. Immediately upon learning of the video, Jane Doe No. 8 contacted Operation Underground Railroad, a nonprofit organization dedicated to combatting child trafficking. In October 2020, Tyler Schwab, an employee of Operation Underground Railroad, reached out to Pornhub on Jane Doe No. 8’s behalf and had the video removed. Nevertheless, during the seven months that the video was on Pornhub, it was downloaded and reuploaded multiple times, including to other pornography sites. As recently as December 2020, the video was live on multiple internet sites.
304. Both Galarza and Fletcher have been arrested and face criminal charges including sexual exploitation of children and possession and transportation of child pornography.
305. Jane Doe No. 8 continues to suffer from significant emotional harm and is being treated by a mental health professional in Colombia.

x. Jane Doe No. 9

306. From approximately September 2017 through February 2018, 17-year- old Jane Doe No. 9 was a victim of the same sex trafficking ring that was operated out of Columbia by Galarza and Fletcher. Jane Doe No. 9 was recruited by Galarza through social media. He offered to pay her to have recorded sex. He assured her that the video was just for himself and that he would delete it after watching it. Under financial duress, Jane Doe No. 9 complied.
307. On three separate occasions, Jane Doe No. 9 met Galarza at three different hotels in Colombia. On the first occasion, she met Galaraza and two other men at Hotel Poblado in Medellin, Colombia where she was provided lingerie to change into and directed to engage in sexual acts with one of the men, while Galarza recorded the encounter. The same interaction occurred two additional times on two subsequent occasions with different sexual partners at different hotels. Galarza recorded all three encounters.
308. Nearly three years later, in November 2020, Jane Doe No. 9 learned that one of the putatively deleted videos was on Pornhub under the title “Scort venezolana acepta follar sin condón en trio en su primer casting en Medellin Columbia,” which translates to “Venezuelan Escort agrees to f*** without a condom in a trio at her first casting in Medellin Columbia.” (asterisks added). It was also available on, among other sites, XVideos, XNXX, and MannyVids. Advocates from Operation Underground Railroad are currently working to get the video taken down from Pornhub, as well as the countless other sites that the video has been uploaded to. 27

xi. Jane Doe No. 10

309. In 2017, 15-year old Jane Doe No. 10 received an unsolicited message through Facebook, from now-convicted sex trafficking felon, Kamonsak Chanthasing, who posed as a female, and offered to pay Jane Doe No. 10 for video clips and photographs of herself masturbating wearing her middle school uniform. Although Jane Doe No. 10 initially refused, she ultimately acquiesced and sent a video and approximately 100 photographs of herself with her genitalia exposed. Her age was readily apparent from the style of her uniform which are differentiated in Thailand by school grade. She never received compensation for the images, and subsequently learned that Kamonsak had committed similar crimes with twelve other female victims.
310. Approximately one year later, Jane Doe No. 10 learned that the photographs and video were available on Pornhub, under the title “Thai Student.” Jane Doe No. 10 immediately contacted Pornhub and demanded the images be removed. Although Pornhub removed six separate links to the video and photographs on or around April 14, 2020, screenshots of Jane Doe No. 10’s underage body and genitalia remain on the site to this day.
311. But the harm did not end there. Pornhub’s download policies resulted in the video being uploaded to multiple other sites, including vk.com, the largest social networking website in Russia. The widespread dissemination of child pornography featuring Jane Doe No. 10 led to severe bullying and harassment, which ultimately became so extreme that Jane Doe No. 10 was forced to transfer schools. She continues to suffer from depression and other mental health conditions.

xii. Jane Doe No. 11

312. Jane Doe No. 11 is another victim of Pornhub and Kamonsak. In or around 2016 or 2017, 16-year-old, aspiring actress, Jane Doe No. 11, received an unsolicited message from an unknown individual, who she later learned through law enforcement was Kamonsak. Kamonasak offered her $1,000 for a sexually explicit video of herself, and $5,000 for each subsequent video. Kamonsak misrepresented that the content would not be distributed and that other actresses were participating to make ends meet. Jane Doe No. 11 initially refused the offer, but eventually complied and sent one video. She never heard from Kamonsak again, nor did she receive the promised compensation.
     313 Approximately, six months later, Jane Doe No. 11 learned that the sexually explicit video had been anonymously uploaded to Pornhub and viewed more than 1.5 million times. Her Facebook profile and identity were disclosed in Pornhub’s comment section and she immediately began to be bullied by her classmates and humiliated by her teachers. Two weeks prior to graduation, Jane Doe No. 11’s school attempted to expel her because she was wearing her school uniform in the videos and she was not able to attend her graduation.
313. Traumatized, Jane Doe No. 11 reported the video to Pornhub, but to no avail. Pornhub ignored her requests and refused to take the video down. In 16 December 2020, the videos of Jane Doe No. 11 continued to appear on Pornhub under various titles. She solicited help from the HUG Project in Chiang Mai and was eventually able to get her video removed.
314. In the weeks and months following the discovery of the Pornhub video, offers for roles in television shows were withdrawn.
315. Moreover, throughout this period, Jane Doe No. 11’s sister, who bears a close resemblance to Jane Doe No. 11, was frequently mistaken for Jane Doe No. 11 and faced severe harassment on the street and online. She dropped out of university, suffered from severe mental health issues, and attempted suicide.

xiii. Jane Doe No. 12

317. In 2017, 17-year-old Jane Doe No. 12 received an unsolicited offer from an unknown individual on BIGO Live, a live streaming platform, of 20,000 Baht in exchange for a ten-minute video of herself removing her clothing. Throughout the filming process, Jane Doe No. 12 was provided explicit instructions on requested positions. Immediately after she was done, the live stream was closed and she was blocked from the unknown individual’s BIGO Live account. Jane Doe No. 12 never received any compensation, and she never heard from the unknown individual again.
318. Three years later, on February 5, 2020, Jane Doe No. 12 learned that the video was on Pornhub. It was posted to Pornhub without her knowledge or consent. She immediately sought assistance from the HUG Project in Chiang Mai, and in response to its request to Pornhub for removal, the video was taken down.
319. But the damage had already been done. Upon discovering the video on Pornhub, Jane Doe No. 12, in her last semester of university, had a mental breakdown and dropped out of school just weeks before graduation. Moreover, she was bullied and harassed, which continues to this day.

xiv. Jane Doe No. 13

320. 13-year-old Jane Doe No. 13 was trafficked by an adult man, Thanawut Pawalee, to engage in recorded sex for compensation. Jane Doe No. 13 was paid 1,200 Bhat cash for the sexual encounter. Despite misrepresenting that the video would be edited so that Jane Doe No. 13’s face was not visible; the video was subsequently posted to Pornhub with Jane Doe No. 13 clearly identifiable.
321. In response to the widespread dissemination of the sex tape, Jane Doe No. 13 was asked to leave her high school. She was bullied by her classmates, which continued even after she transferred to a new school. The severe bullying and anxiety caused by the dissemination of the sex tape, led Jane Doe No. 13 to engage in self-harm including cutting herself. To this day, she continues to wear rubber bands on her wrists as a preventative measure and is under the care of a mental health facility.
322. On November 4, 2019, Thanawut was arrested on charges of human trafficking.

xv. Jane Doe No. 14

323. Jane Doe No. 14 was trafficked on Pornhub for more than 1,100 days. In August 2020, Jane Doe No. 14 discovered that three years earlier her now estranged ex-husband had drugged her, sexually assaulted her while she was unconscious, recorded the assault and uploaded it to, among other sites, Pornhub. The Pornhub video title disclosed that she was unconscious and was tagged with the following Pornhub tags: “while sleeping,” “hold her hands,” and “sleeping pills.” Many viewers commented on the video, describing in detail the sexual gratification they received while watching her be assaulted while she was unconscious.
324. She did not consent to the sex or the recording. In fact, she did not know about either until she found the video on Pornhub. In June 2021, Jane Doe No. 14’s now ex-husband was criminally charged with, among other charges, sexual asset and distribution of intimate images without consent.
325. Upon learning of the Pornhub video, Jane Doe No. 14 immediately informed law enforcement. Within three days the link to the original video on Pornhub was deactivated. Moreover, by September 2020, Jane Doe No. 14 found that Pornhub had removed the tags associated with nonconsensual content, such as “sleeping pills.”
326. However, even after the original video was no longer available, a google search run in January 2021 for the title of the original Pornhub video returned more than 1,900 results. One explanation for the large number of results were user downloads and reuploads. In addition, MindGeek added Jane Doe No. 14’s video to its affiliated sites as a cheap way of adding additional content and driving traffic. Of the 1,900 search results, Pornhub was the source for all of the active videos.
327. Moreover, even after Pornhub deactivated the original video, it maintained a thumbnail image file of the video which depicts Jane Doe No. 14 naked accompanied by the original title. In January 2021, Jane Doe No. contacted Pornhub and demanded that the thumbnail and data associated with her videos be removed. After eight emails and forty-five days, Pornhub removed some, but not all, of the data and thumbnails.
328. The experience has traumatized Jane Doe No. 14. She is humiliated, demoralized, and suffers from severe anxiety.

xvi. Jane Doe No. 15

329. In 2017, then-22-year-old Jane Doe No. 15 attended a party where she was drugged and then raped while unconscious. Unbeknownst to Jane Doe No. 15, the rape was recorded and monetized on Pornhub.
330. After blacking out at the party from a date rape drug, Jane Doe No. 15 woke up the next morning with no recollection of the prior evening. Approximately one week later, Jane Doe No. 15 learned that a video taken while she was unconscious was on Pornhub. The video depicted another guest sexually forcing himself on her while she was unconscious. She had not consented to the sex or the recording.
331. Immediately upon discovering the video, Jane Doe No. 15 reached out to Pornhub, and demanded that the video of her sexual assault be taken down. In response, Pornhub misrepresented that without a url code, title, or link there was no way for them to identify the video to remove it.
332. To this day, Jane Doe No. 15 continues to be recognized in public, harassed, and called a “slut” or a “whore.” This experience has caused Jane Doe No. 15 to suffer from severe depression and anxiety.

xvii. Jane Doe No. 16

333. At 19 years old, Jane Doe No. 16, a college sophomore, was recruited and transported from her home in Ohio to Arizona, where she was exploited and coerced to record sex videos that were then uploaded to Pornhub without her knowledge or consent. The videos were recorded by 13RedMedia and uploaded to Pornhub affiliated channels “HotGuysF***,” “GayHoopla,” “HelixStudios,” and “13RedMedia.” (asterisks added)
334. During her sophomore year of college, Jane Doe No. 16 began to pursue a modeling career. She responded to an advertisement on Craigslist for a modeling job and was contacted by an older man purporting to be a modeling agent. He informed her that she fit the agency’s criteria for the modeling opportunity and flew Jane Doe No. 16 to Scottsdale, Arizona in April 2015.
335. Upon arriving in Scottsdale, this man took Jane Doe No. 16 to a hotel where she was coerced to engage in sex with two men. At the hotel, the man took a picture of her id and coerced her to sign papers. She does not recall what she signed and was not provided with a copy. He then recorded the sexual encounters and paid Jane Doe No. 16 $1,000. Later that night, the offender came to Jane Doe No. 16’s hotel room where he raped her himself and videotaped the encounter.
336. In December 2015, Jane Doe No. 16 learned that the recorded sex videos were on Facebook and Pornhub. The videos disclosed her name and subjected her and her family to harassment on social media. Jane Doe No. 16 immediately contacted Facebook and Pornhub and demanded that both sites remove her videos. Facebook immediately removed these videos. Weeks went by before Jane Doe No. 16 received any response from Pornhub, and when it did ultimately respond, it sent her an automated message. She followed up three more times, but never received a response from a real person.
337. The videos remained on Pornhub throughout the next five years and were live on Pornhub as recently as December 2020. Her identity was disclosed in the comments section to at least one video on Pornhub. To this day, an image of Jane Doe No. 16 still appears on Pornhub in an ad for another site, HotGuysF***. (asterisks added). Moreover, the Pornhub videos have been downloaded and re- uploaded countless times and to countless sites. As of March 2021, Jane Doe No. 16’s videos appeared on countless sites.
338. The experience caused Jane Doe No. 16 to suffer from severe depression and anxiety. For many years she was under the care of a medical professional. As a result, Jane Doe No. 16 dropped out of college.

xviii. Jane Doe No. 17

339. In 2006, Jane Doe No. 17 was forcibly raped by two men. The rape was recorded and monetized through MindGeek’s tubesites, including Pornhub.
340. In the months that followed, Jane Doe No. 17 learned that the video had been uploaded to the MindGeek tubesite “Exploited College Girls,” without her knowledge or consent and was available worldwide. Moreover, still photographs from the video of her rape were also publicly disseminated. Like Pornhub, “Exploited College Girls,” allows for the download of videos hosted on its site which led to the widespread dissemination of the video across a multitude of sites, including Pornhub. The video was also uploaded under a multitude of different titles, including a title that indicates Jane Doe No. 17 was just out of high school.
341. In 2010, Jane Doe No. 17 reached out to Pornhub and demanded the video be removed. Pornhub refused, claiming that Jane Doe No. 17 could not lawfully demand the takedown since she did not own the copyright. Throughout the next six years, the video was continuously available on MindGeek’s tubesites. It appeared under different titles and had been uploaded by countless different usernames. Many of the uploads were accompanied by Jane Doe No. 17’s name and other identifying information which subjected her and her family to harassment.
342. Ultimately, in 2016, Jane Doe No. 17 retained an attorney to assist with the purchase of copyrights. By 2017, she successfully secured the copyright. She immediately notified Pornhub and again demanded the video be removed. This time, Pornhub complied.
343. But the damage had been done. The initial video posted on MindGeek’s sites had been downloaded and reuploaded a multitude of times and was continuously reuploaded and disseminated on the internet for the twelve years between 2006 and 2018. Moreover, even after Pornhub removed the video in 2018, it continued to be re-uploaded on Pornhub and various other sites between 2018 and 2020. Throughout these years, each time Jane Doe No. 17 learned of a new link, she recommenced the process to have the video taken down. In one takedown request sent to Pornhub in 2018, Jane Doe No. 17 was explicit that she was being raped in the video. Nevertheless, it still took Pornhub 648 days to have the video removed from its site.
344. The experience caused Jane Doe No. 17 to suffer from severe depression and anxiety. For many years she was, and remains to this day, under the care of a mental health professional.

xix. Jane Doe No. 18

345. Jane Doe No. 18 was sexually assaulted on multiple occasions between 2001-2008. In 2019, Jane Doe No. 18 discovered that the videos of her assaults had been uploaded to Pornhub years earlier without her knowledge or consent and were widely available, including under the titles “Capture and Rape of [Jane Doe No. 18’s name]” and “Cl*t Torture.” (asterisk added). Many of the videos identified Jane Doe No. 18 by name.
346. Immediately upon discovering the Pornhub videos, Jane Doe No. 18 filled out Pornhub’s takedown form and demanded the videos be removed. Pornhub never responded. As of February 25, 2021, the video “Cl*t Tickle Torture” (asterisk added) was still on Pornhub. Moreover, throughout the years, the videos had been downloaded from Pornhub and uploaded to numerous sites including, among others, MindGeek affiliate, YouPorn.
347. As a result of MindGeek’s wrongdoing, Jane Doe No. 18 has been subjected to ongoing and severe online harassment. She is estranged from her family and has been foreclosed from numerous employment opportunities. Jane Doe. No. 18 suffers from severe depression and anxiety. She is currently under the care of a mental health professional.

xx. Jane Doe No. 19

348. From 2005 to 2008, when Jane Doe No. 19 was between the ages of 19 and 22, her then boyfriend recorded numerous private videos of them engaging in sex. However, it was not until October 2020 that Jane Doe No. 19 learned that the videos were posted to Pornhub without her knowledge or consent. The videos were posted under the “teen” category.
349. Immediately upon learning that the videos were on Pornhub. Jane Doe No. 19 reached out to Pornhub and demanded they be removed. Pornhub never responded to that email. Jane Doe No. 19 followed-up with Pornhub again in 15 November 2020. But at this point the damage had been done. Several of the original videos had been uploaded to numerous other MindGeek owned tubesites including, among others, Tube8.
350. Videos of Jane Doe No. 19 continue to be disseminated through various internet platforms, including MindGeek affiliated sites. Jane Doe No. 19 has, and continues to suffer, from emotional distress and is under the care of a mental health professional.

xxi. Jane Doe No. 20

351. For over eighteen months in 2006 and 2007, Jane Doe No. 20 was trafficked and coerced to perform sex acts that were videorecorded. She was drugged, assaulted, and in one instance gang raped by nearly twenty men. The assaults were videotaped and commercialized on MindGeek’s sites, including Pornhub. She appeared in over forty videos, many of which continue to be monetized on Pornhub and its affiliated sites to this day.
352. The abuse and pain from the assaults and sexual exploitation was so extreme that Jane Doe No. 20 ended up in the emergency room from a nervous breakdown. Years later, she continues to suffer from anxiety, panic attacks, and contemplated suicide.

xxii. Jane Doe No. 21

353. For more than eight years, Jane Doe No. 21 was sex trafficked by her then-boyfriend. On one occasion, in 2015, a man she was coerced to have sex with videorecorded the sexual encounter, misrepresenting that it was for his own personal use. Yet, months later, Jane Doe No. 21 learned that the video was on Pornhub.
354. Jane Doe No. 21 immediately reached out to Pornhub and demanded that the video be taken down. Initially, she did not receive a response. On January 3, 2016, she sent a follow up request. More than two days passed before Pornhub responded. Although Pornhub ultimately agreed to take the video down, several additional days passed before the video was deactivated.
355. As a result of this experience, Jane Doe No. 21 suffers from severe depression and anxiety.

xxiii. Jane Doe No. 22

356. In March 2020, Jane Doe No. 22 discovered that two sexually explicit videos of her had been uploaded to MindGeek affiliated sites without her knowledge or consent. One video depicted her masturbating; the second depicted her engaged in a sexual act with a partner. Jane Doe No. 22 did not consent to the acts being recorded or uploaded to or commercialized on MindGeek affiliated sites. In fact, she was not even aware that the sex acts had been recorded until she was informed they were posted online. She immediately reported the videos to the police, however, without a link or url, the police were unable to have the video removed.
357. As a result of the videos, Jane Doe No. 22 has been subjected to ongoing harassment by her co-workers. She suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and has contemplated suicide.

xxiv. Jane Doe No. 23

358. Jane Doe No. 23 is a victim of the same sex trafficking ring as Jane Doe No. 10 and Jane Doe No. 11. In 2018, when Jane Doe No. 23 was 19 years old, she received an unsolicited message through her Facebook messenger account from now convicted, known East Asia sex trafficking felon, Kamonsak Chanthasing. Kamonsak, using a fake account and posing as a woman, offered to pay Jane Doe No. 23, an aspiring actress model, for sexually explicit video recordings and photographs of herself. Jane Doe No. 23 initially refused Kamonsak’s demands, but he was persistent. Accordingly, she subsequently sent one sexually explicit photograph. Jane Doe No. 23 was ultimately coerced into sending three sexually explicit videos and approximately 100 sexually explicit photographs.
359. In October 2019, Jane Doe No. 23 learned that one of the sexually explicit videos had been uploaded to Pornhub without Jane Doe No. 23’s knowledge or consent. Jane Doe No. 23 sought assistance from the HUG Project in Chiang Mai, who contacted Pornhub and had the video removed. But the damage was already done. Jane Doe No. 23 has been subjected to bullying and harassment at university and by fake Instagram accounts. As a result, to this day, Jane Doe No. 23 suffers from severe anxiety and depression.

xxv. Jane Doe No. 24

360. Jane Doe No. 24 is yet another victim of convicted sex trafficking felon Kamonsak. In or around 2018, Jane Doe No. 24 received an unsolicited message through Instagram from Kamonsak. Kamonsak, using a fake account and posing as a woman, offered to pay Jane Doe No. 24, an aspiring actress and model, for video recordings and photographs of herself in various stages of undress in her school uniform. Jane Doe No. 24 initially refused, but Kamonsak and his co-conspirator, now convicted sex trafficking felon Naphat Puangchankham, coerced Jane Doe No. 24 into sending three videos and approximately 200 photographs of herself in various stages of undress, many with her genitalia exposed. Jane Doe No. 24 never received any compensation. Kamonsak sold her video to Naphat who worked as an online seller. Naphat’s trial is still on hold due to Covid but he was arrested for human trafficking in the form of production of pornography and he was also charged under Computer Crime Act.
361. Approximately one year later, Jane Doe 24 discovered the sexually explicit photographs and videos of herself on Pornhub without her knowledge or consent. At least two videos were uploaded to Pornhub under different titles. One video had at least 114,000 views, and the other had 5,000 views.
362. Jane Doe No. 24 sought assistance from the HUG Project, who repeatedly contacted Pornhub and demanded the videos be removed. As of January 2021, the videos were still on Pornhub.
363. But the harm did not end there. Pornhub’s download policies resulted in the videos being uploaded to multiple other sites, including vk.com, the largest social networking website in Russia. Additionally, the Thai national news issued a report on the trafficking scheme which included Jane Doe No. 24’s sexually explicit photographs. While the news outlet blurred out Jane Doe No. 24’s face, she was readily identifiable. Overcome with embarrassment and shame from the widespread dissemination of the nude photographs and videos, Jane Doe No. 24 resigned from her job at a five-star hotel where she held an executive position. She also has changed her name and deleted her social media accounts.

xxvi. Jane Doe No. 25

364. In or around April or May 2018, Jane Doe No. 25 was trafficked by convicted sex trafficker, Thakorn Sophonpanichakorn. Thakorn videorecorded the sexual encounter without Jane Doe No. 25’s knowledge or consent and sold her video to several online channels.
365. Very shortly after the sexual encounter, Jane Doe No. 25 learned that the video was on Pornhub. Jane Doe No. 25 immediately filed a police report and sought assistance from the HUG Project in Chiang Mai. The HUG Project representatives repeatedly contacted Pornhub to remove Jane Doe No. 25 videos. While the HUG Project was ultimately successful in getting Jane Doe No. 25 video removed from Pornhub, Pornhub’s download policies resulted in the videos being reuploaded to Pornhub under different titles, as well as uploaded to multiple other sites, including XVideo.
366. As a result of MindGeek’s conduct, Jane Doe No. 25 suffered and continues to suffer significant emotional harm. Additionally, due to the sexually explicit videos being disseminated on Pornhub, Jane Doe No. 25 had to defend herself against a threatened lawsuit by her high school who intended to pursue damages because Jane Doe No. 25 was wearing her high school uniform in the videos. The HUG Project and the Thai police advocated on her behalf and the high school ultimately did not file the lawsuit.

xxvii. Jane Doe No. 26

367. From 2012 to 2015, Jane Doe No. 26 was trafficked by a man she met on the internet. He forced and coerced her to engage in videorecorded sex acts with others in exchange for payment in various states in the United States. These sexually explicit videos were uploaded to MindGeek’s tubesites, including Pornhub, without Jane Doe No. 26’s knowledge or consent. When Jane Doe No. 26 would not comply with his demands to engage in sex acts with others, he physically assaulted her and, on at least one occasion, he injured Jane Doe No. 26 to the point where she required medical attention. This man also forced Jane Doe No. 26 to engage in sex acts with him, which he videorecorded.
368. In March 2021, Jane Doe No. 26 discovered that these sexually explicit videos were uploaded to various websites including Pornhub and other MindGeek tubesites.
369. As a result of MindGeek’s conduct, Jane Doe No. 26 suffered and continues to suffer significant emotional harm and struggles with various mental health illnesses. Jane Doe No. 26 is under the care of a mental health professional.

xxviii. Jane Doe No. 27

370. When Jane Doe No. 27 was just 23 years old, she was a victim of a sex trafficking ring led by Derek Hay, owner of LA Direct Models. In 2003, Hay contacted Jane Doe No. 27 and offered her a modeling opportunity in Las Vegas. He flew Jane Doe No. 27 to Las Vegas for the photoshoot; however, shortly after arriving, it became apparent that Jane Doe No. 27 had been transported to the United States from England to engage in an illegal pornography scheme that recruited, enticed, transported, and solicited young women for purposes of engaging in commercial sex acts.
371. When Jane Doe No. 27 refused to engage in pornography, Hay refused to let her leave until she was able to repay him for her flight and other expenses, which Jane Doe No. 27 could not afford. As a result, Hay forced her to travel to Los Angeles where he kept her locked in a house with nine to eleven other women under close monitoring. Over the course of three and a half weeks, Jane Doe No. 27 was forced to attend a film set where she was forced to engage in sex acts with numerous men and women. Many of these sex acts were violent and Jane Doe No. 27 suffered physical damage as a result. The sex acts were videorecorded.
372. In March 2020, Derek Hay, and his co-conspirators, were charged with twelve felony counts of pimping and pandering.
373. Since no later than 2007, Jane Doe No. 27 learned that the videos of the coerced sex acts were uploaded to the internet without her knowledge or consent. In the following years, Jane Doe No. 27 discovered that her videos were uploaded to Pornhub without her knowledge or consent. Although Pornhub eventually removed her videos as part of its purge in December 2020, sexually explicit photographs of Jane Doe No. 27 still appear on Pornhub today.
374. As a result of MindGeek’s conduct, Jane Doe No. 27 suffered and continues to suffer significant emotional harm, including post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety. To this day, she continues to be under the care of medical professionals for the emotional trauma and permanent physical damage she has sustained as a result of the commercial sex acts.

xxix. Jane Doe No. 28

375. In 2014, Jane Doe No. 28, an 18-year-old professional athlete in the United Kingdom, was videotaped and photographed engaged in sex acts. These sexually explicit videos and photographs were uploaded to Pornhub without Jane Doe No. 28’s knowledge or consent. At least one of the sexually explicit videos of Jane Doe No. 28 trended on Pornhub as one of its top three videos. Because many of the videos were accompanied with comments disclosing Jane Doe No. 28’s name and other identifying information, Jane Doe No. 28 was subjected to harassment.
376. In early 2019, Jane Doe No. 28 learned that the sexually explicit videos and photographs were posted to Pornhub without her consent. Jane Doe No. 28 immediately submitted an inquiry to Pornhub using its take-down demand form, but she received no response. Jane Doe No. 28 then sent numerous emails to Pornhub over the course of six months demanding that Pornhub remove the videos, explaining that she did not consent to the videos and photographs being uploaded and informing Pornhub that this was causing her to have suicidal thoughts. Pornhub, however, only responded with generic, automated responses. Jane Doe No. 28 was so desperate to have the videos removed, she misrepresented her age to Pornhub in an email, alleging she was a minor in the videos. This finally got Pornhub’s attention. In August 2019, Pornhub confirmed the video was removed.
377. The dissemination was not limited to Pornhub. The videos and photographs were downloaded from Pornhub and re-uploaded to various pornographic and social media websites. Jane Doe No. 28 hired a reputation defender company to assist with identifying and removing the videos and photographs from various sites, including Pornhub, but the company’s efforts were unsuccessful. Jane Doe No. 28 also filed a police report with the Hertfordshire Police Department.
378. In response to the viral dissemination of the videos and photographs, Jane Doe No. 28’s employer fired Jane Doe No. 28 from her job as a coach in the education sector. Jane Doe No. 28 also received strong messaging from the professional sports league expressing their displeasure with the videos and photographs and two professional sports leagues rejected Jane Doe No. 28 from playing for their teams, forcing Jane Doe No. 28 to resign from playing professional sports for approximately one year.
379. Jane Doe No. 28 suffered and continues to suffer significant emotional harm, including anxiety, suicidal thoughts, and panic attacks.

xxx. Jane Doe No. 29

380. In 2011, when Jane Doe No. 29 was just 19 years old, she was trafficked by an adult couple.
381. A few months later, Jane Doe No. 29 learned for the first time that the sexual encounters were recorded and that approximately twelve videos had been created. These videos were uploaded to Pornhub without her knowledge or consent. Jane Doe No. 29 contacted the offenders asking them to remove the videos, but they refused.
382. Jane Doe No. 29 then hired an attorney hoping the attorney could assist with removing the videos. However, the attorney was unsuccessful. Feeling defeated, Jane Doe No. 29 stopped pursing the take-down of the videos and focused on her mental health.
383. Years later, Jane Doe No. 29 again began the process of trying to have her videos taken down. In April 2020, Jane Doe No. 29 contacted Pornhub requesting that the videos be removed. Pornhub responded that “The Model” had provided the necessary documentation and identification and so Pornhub did not remove the videos. Jane Doe No. 29 contacted Pornhub again in December 2020 explaining how she was coerced into the sex acts that she did not consent to the posting of the videos on Pornhub, and demanding they remove the videos. The next day, Jane Doe No. 29 received a response from Pornhub stating that the video “will be removed” and apologizing for the “anxiety, frustration and inconvenience that this has caused.”
384. As a result of MindGeek’s conduct, Jane Doe No. 29 suffered and continues to suffer significant emotional harm.

xxxi. Jane Doe No. 30

385. In 2010, at just 18 years old, Jane Doe No. 30 was trafficked and sexually assaulted during a putative modeling shoot. The assault was videotaped.
386. In or around fall 2020, Jane Doe No. 30 learned for the first time that this sexual assault video was uploaded to Pornhub and had been streaming on Pornhub for more than ten years. Because MindGeek allows videos to be downloaded from its tubesites, Jane Doe No. 30’s video was uploaded and available on other pornographic website as well. As of January 2021, the video was no longer available on Pornhub, but the thumbnail image of her remained for months.
387. As a result of MindGeek’s conduct, Jane Doe No. 30 suffered and continues to suffer significant emotional harm and struggles with various mental health illnesses. The experience caused Jane Doe No. 30 to suffer from severe depression and anxiety. She was under the care of mental health professionals for years.

xxxii. Jane Doe No. 31

388. In March 2018, Jane Doe No. 31, a ranking member of and then-sixteen year veteran of the military, was informed by her superior and a Master Sergeant that a video depicting her and her then husband engaged in a sex act was trending on Pornhub. The video — which Jane Doe No. 31 never consented to and did not know existed prior to March 2018 — had been secretly recorded by her now ex-husband in 7 December 2016. At the time Jane Doe No. 31 discovered the video, it had been on Pornhub for more than fourteen months and had nearly 500,000 views on that site alone.
389. Mortified and concerned about the career implications, Jane Doe No. 31 immediately contacted Pornhub demanding the video be taken down. Six days passed before Pornhub responded, and when it did, rather than immediately remove the nonconsensual content, it demanded to know “how do you know this is you?” It was only after Jane Doe No. 31 explained “That is my bed . . . that is my face, my voice, THAT IS ME,” did Pornhub proceed to deactivate the video. Even then, it failed to take down the page, which continued to be accessible through google searches and drive traffic to the site. It took four more days and countless additional requests, before the page was finally removed.
390. But, as Pornhub confirmed in writing, the video was only removed from that one site. Due to Pornhub’s policies in place at the time concerning downloads and automatic upload of content to its affiliated sites, in the fourteen months the video was on Pornhub, it had been reuploaded to countless other pornographic and social media websites. After days of unsuccessful efforts to reach out to each of these sites individually, in March 2018 Jane Doe No. 31 was forced to hire the takedown company, DMCA Defender, at a substantial cost, to assist her with removing all sexually explicit videos from the internet, each of which originated with the video posted on Pornhub. She subsequently learned through online searches that her ex-husband had also posted a second video (which she likewise did not previously know existed), was also on Pornhub and disseminated to various other sites through that initial Pornhub upload.
391. After further investigation, Jane Doe No. 31 learned that this was not an isolated incident. Her now-ex-husband had posted dozens of nonconsensual videos of himself engaging in sex acts with other women to Pornhub. Jane Doe No. 31’s ex-husband was subsequently charged with, among other things, nonconsensual dissemination of private images of Jane Doe No. 31. That criminal case is currently pending. Two other victims have also pressed charges.
392. Jane Doe No. 31’s concerns about career implications from the Pornhub video proved to be well-founded. The nonconsensual video jeopardized and adversely impacted Jane Doe No. 31’s career trajectory. In the days after the video was discovered, Jane Doe No. 31 was put on administrative leave and disciplinary action was commenced. This was, the first and only time this occurred in her sixteen-year career. Her monthly stipend was revoked and Jane Doe No. 31 was required to step down from a leadership role she held for five years on one of her employer’s internal committees.
393. Moreover, Jane Doe No. 31 also expended significant financial resources in hiring DCMA Defender, as well as a private investigator, to assist with identifying and removing of the videos.
394. In addition to the economic harm, Jane Doe No. 31 suffered and continues to suffer significant emotional harm, including anxiety and panic attacks for which she is receiving treatment under the care of a psychiatrist and a therapist. Jane Doe No. 31 also faces harassment from her neighbors and others in here community. Three years later she continues to check to see if the videos have been reuploaded and as recently as November 2020 found the videos on multiple sites.

xxxiii. Jane Doe No. 32

395. Jane Doe No. 32 is another victim of Pornhub and the same offender that perpetrated crimes against Jane Doe No. 31. This offender, who was Jane Doe No. 31’s ex-husband, also dated Jane Doe No. 32.
396. From approximately December 2015 to September 2016, Jane Doe No. 32’s ex-boyfriend videorecorded them engaging in sexual acts, misrepresenting that it was for his own personal use. As their relationship continued, Jane Doe No. 32’s then-boyfriend would demand that all of their sexual acts be recorded regardless of whether Jane Doe No. 32 consented to the recording. On one occasion, he forcibly raped Jane Doe No. 32.
397. In early 2017, Jane Doe No. 32 learned that sexually explicit videos of her were posted on Pornhub without her knowledge or consent. At that time, the videos had been publicly available on Pornhub for more than twelve months. One of the videos on Pornhub had a title referencing Jane Doe No. 32’s home state and her ethnicity.
398. Shortly after learning of the existence of the videos, Jane Doe No. 32 reached out to Pornhub demanding that they remove the videos because they were posted without her consent. Jane Doe No. 32 also filed a police report against her ex-boyfriend. She subsequently learned that he had engaged in the same misconduct with other women. Jane Doe No. 32’s ex-boyfriend is currently facing criminal charges for, among other things, nonconsensual dissemination of private images of three victims, including Jane Doe No. 32. That criminal case is currently pending.
399. Jane Doe No. 32 suffered and continues to suffer significant emotional harm and is receiving mental health counseling.

xxxiv. Jane Doe No. 33

400. Jane Doe No. 33 is another victim of Pornhub and the same offender that perpetrated crimes against Jane Doe No. 31 and Jane Doe No. 32. This offender, who was Jane Doe No. 31’s ex-husband, also dated Jane Doe No. 32 and secretly recorded Jane Doe No. 33 engaged in sex acts with him.
401. In 2017, Jane Doe No. 33 learned that her ex-boyfriend had secretly recorded a video of their sexual encounter and uploaded it without her knowledge or consent to Pornhub. Jane Doe No. 33’s face and tattoos on both wrists were visible in the video. She also identified the location of the video as her ex-boyfriend’s master bedroom. The videos were posted under the “BBC” category.
402. Immediately upon learning of the video, Jane Doe No. 33 contacted Pornhub by e-mail, provided the URL, and demanded that the video be removed from its site. Pornhub complied.
403. However, the damage had been done. The Pornhub video had been uploaded to various other sites. It was still on various sites as recently as 2020, at which time Jane Doe No. 33 “stopped digging” as she was exhausted from the constant searching, did not have the funds to hire a firm to assist with the removal, was in a custody fight, and feared the video (which she did not consent to and did not even know about until she learned it was on Pornhub) could detrimentally impact her custody proceedings.
404. As a result of this experience, Jane Doe No. 33 began to consult a mental health professional who she continues to see to this day. The incident has caused stress in her current relationship and her and her current boyfriend attend couples counseling as a result. 23 * * *
405. Each of these plaintiffs were victimized on multiple occasions. First, when they were first abused and exploited. Second, when the videos of their abuse were uploaded to MindGeek’s platform. Third, when MindGeek, as a matter of course, transferred those videos to its other tubesites, to users downloading them, and to its platform again when it periodically reuploaded disabled content or non- disabled content that it had further optimized. Fourth, when defendants did nothing to police and report such content to the authorities.
406. Visa Profited from MindGeek’s Trafficking Venture
407. Uniquely situated to prevent MindGeek’s trafficking venture were the financial institutions processing the transactions upon which that venture monetized the content. At the top of that list were major American credit card companies Visa and Mastercard. The impact these financial institutions could have had in preventing the victimization of women and men as well as children worldwide was made apparent in December 2020 when, in response to public outrage from a bombshell New York Times report exposing MindGeek’s trafficking, they cut ties with Pornhub and consequently forced MindGeek to take down over 10 million unverified videos from its tubesites in response.
408. But that expose was not a bombshell to Visa and Mastercard. For over a decade they had been well aware of the facts the New York Times exposed and instead of insisting that MindGeek commercialize only legal consensual content, and comply with United States laws concerning the same, they elected instead to facilitate and profit from the MindGeek trafficking venture. Even today, Visa continues to process payments for MindGeek paysites that are themselves rife with trafficking and are promoted, marketed, and sustained by the MindGeek trafficking venture.
409. At all times relevant to this complaint, major credit card companies and their member banks providing merchant services to MindGeek were aware of its trafficking venture and knowingly profited from it. They did so despite numerous high profile publicly reported instances of obvious and indisputable trafficking, the termination of relationships with MindGeek by competitors and other business partners, facts in plain sight and known to them, and detailed reports presented to them from numerous anti-trafficking advocacy groups.
410. These credit card companies and their member banks providing merchant services to MindGeek were aware of the trafficking risk because it was common knowledge in the pornographic industry since no later than the 1980 and the subject of numerous public reports from government and advocacy agencies ever since, particularly since the emergence of online pornography industry. They were likewise fully familiar with 18 U.S.C. § 2257 provisions designed to prevent CSAM/child pornography.
411. More particularly, these financial institutions and their member banks were aware of actual instances of trafficking and CSAM/child pornography and red flags of such content from their own due diligence and compliance functions. Indeed, since its inception, all one needed to do was visit MindGeek’s tubesites to observe tens of thousands of videos (with the help of MindGeek’s suggested search and video algorithm) depicting subjects who were obviously underage, under duress, incapacitated, being raped, or secretly exploited. One would also easily observe tens of thousands more videos depicting the very same content where there was no way to determine whether the content was a consensual depiction of a non- consensual event or non-consensual.
412. In addition, it was apparent from the most such superficial inquiry that MindGeek was taking no steps to police the presence of obviously non-consensual content or determine if ambiguous content was consensual. To the contrary, that simple investigation would have revealed that the titles, descriptions, and tags and MindGeek’s algorithmic suggested video and search functions did not merely tolerate non-consensual content but encouraged its upload and viewing.
413. Furthermore, the most basic inquiry would have revealed that MindGeek made no effort to effectively employ technology to police illegal content, employed virtually no human moderation, employed no human moderation remotely approximating that of other websites with far less content, and had an incoherent random selection of superficial policies to prevent such content that were plainly not intended to do any such thing but were, as one insider said, “100% BS.”
414. Moreover, it was apparent to anyone, including the credit card companies and their merchant banking members, that MindGeek systemically ignored the requirements of 18 U.S.C. § 2257, which was enacted decades earlier because it was a known fact that absent basic age verification CSAM/child pornography would infest the pornography business.
415. The most basic observation also would have revealed that while major websites with video libraries and upload volumes as big as or smaller than MindGeek reported millions of CSAM/child pornography depictions to authorities, MindGeek reported virtually none. This fact alone would have alerted anyone who cared that MindGeek was intentionally concealing and commercializing such content.
416. Certainly, taken together, all of this would have informed even the densest inquisitor that MindGeek was intentionally engaged in commercializing non- consensual trafficked content. The credit card companies and their members providing merchant banking to MindGeek were not uniquely incapable of understanding all of this. To the contrary, they were uniquely capable and in the best position to understand this. And they did understand this. They simply chose to do business with MindGeek and benefit from its trafficking venture nevertheless.
417. Most important, these companies and member banks were well aware that it is was impossible to segregate MindGeek’s trafficking venture from its legitimate porn business. These companies were intimately familiar with MindGeek’s business model and that all its content, including its trafficked content and CSAM/child pornography, was inextricably intertwined in MindGeek’s SEO, promotion, solicitation, and funneling of website traffic to its paid porn services. Indeed, as the campaign exposing Pornhub went viral in 2020, these credit card companies began pressuring MindGeek to clean up explicit references to trafficked content and CSAM/child pornography on its sites by removing titles, descriptions, and tags that explicitly flagged such content. However, Visa did not insist that the content itself be removed or that MindGeek put in place systems to reasonably ensure it was not commercializing such content and/or using it to benefit its business through SEO and the funneling of traffic to its websites.
418. Not all financial institutions chose to continue benefiting from MindGeek’s trafficking venture. For example, in November 2019, Visa’s competitor PayPal terminated its relationship with MindGeek because it could no longer ignore the overwhelming evidence of MindGeek’s trafficking venture. At the time, PayPal publicly explained that “[PayPal] explicitly prohibits the use of [its] services for the sale of materials that depict criminal behavior, or the sale of sexually oriented content to minors.”1 Despite this public disclosure, Visa continued to partner with MindGeek. They continued to do business with MindGeek because Visa and its merchant banks servicing MindGeek were long aware of the same information and intentionally elected to not terminate their relationships with MindGeek.
419. Likewise, Visa continued to process payments for MindGeek partner channels even after one of its most popular partner channels, GirlsDoPorn, was indicted and then convicted for being a human trafficking venture. When it did this, Visa was aware that it had made millions of dollars in profits from GirlsDoPorn and similar MindGeek partner channels and elected to continue to do so without any investigation or diligence. It did so because it was already aware that MindGeek’s business was infested with trafficked content like GirlsDoPorn, was aware that MindGeek systemically violated 18 U.S.C. § 2257 in neither requiring its partner 26 1 https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/paypal-cuts-off-porn-site-that-ran-child-abuse- videos-98j2bdnjt. channels to secure and certify age verification and consent and by transferring millions of videos a year in and through MindGeek’s network of websites that did not comply with § 2257.
420. Even worse, Visa continued to do business with MindGeek even after it was confronted directly with evidence of its complicity in MindGeek’s trafficking venture. For example, in 2020, Visa was included for the first time on the annual Dirty Dozen List issued by anti-trafficking advocates to highlight mainstream business that facilitate, participate in and profit from sexual abuse and exploitation. In response, Visa issued a public statement misrepresenting that:
     Visa only permits transactions on the Visa network for the purchase or sale of lawful products and services. We categorically prohibit transactions involving child pornography and human trafficking. As a founding member of the Financial Coalition Against Child Sexual Exploitation, Visa works together with our coalition partners to identify potentially illegal merchants or illegal activities and bar them from the Visa network.
421. In fact, Visa was aware that it and its merchant banks servicing MindGeek permitted and profited from tens of thousands of transactions annually that benefited from MindGeek’s trafficking venture. Specifically, in addition to transactions processed to pay for trafficked content and child pornography specifically, Visa and these banks, together with MindGeek, used their trafficking venture to promote, solicit, and facilitate the purchase of consensual porn. And they did so despite its flagrant violation of § 2257. Visa and its network banks were intimately familiar with MindGeek’s business model and how it used illicit content to attract and funnel business, advertising, and paid memberships, all of which Visa elected to process and profit from nevertheless.
422. Further evidencing Visa’s commitment to doing business and benefiting from MindGeek’s trafficking venture, in April 2020, during a conference call with Elizabeth Scofield, the Director of Global Brand Protection for Visa, anti-sex trafficking advocates detailed the ways in which MindGeek was enabling and profiting from the rape and trafficking of women and children. At the conclusion of the call, Scotfield requested written information that she could present to others at Visa, which was provided to her on April 30, 2020 in the form of a lengthy, detailed presentation detailing the ways in which Visa was participating in the exploitation of victims of sex trafficking through its partnership with MindGeek. Visa never responded further, and elected instead to continue doing business with and benefiting from MindGeek’s trafficking venture.
423. Thereafter, Visa’s participation and facilitation of MindGeek’s illegal enterprise was reiterated by a letter sent by another non-profit organization dedicated to ending human trafficking and modern slavery on May 1, 2020. The letter, which was addressed to Visa’s president, Alfred Kelly, detailed MindGeek’s documented complicity in the trafficking of women and children and concluded with a plea to Visa to terminate its partnership with MindGeek.
424. MindGeek’s illegal and criminal activities were further detailed in a second letter sent to Visa five days later on May 5, 2020. Among other important disclosures, the May 5, 2020 letter explained that it is impossible to “judge or verify consent in any videos on [Pornhub] let along live webcam videos” which inherently make it “a target for sex traffickers, child abusers, and other sharing predatory nonconsensual videos.” This was not a novel alert. The presence of trafficking in the webcam industry was notorious and well known to Visa.
425. Nevertheless, Visa and its member banks processing payments from MindGeek elected to continue processing such transaction even when they carried 27 with them obvious red flags such as involving accounts from known trafficking regions and where payments from large numbers of purportedly independent cam models were being deposited into single accounts of obvious traffickers.
426. When Visa failed to take any action in response to the detailed presentation of facts and follow up correspondence, anti-trafficking public advocates launched an email campaign, targeting the executives of Visa. Within two days of the May 8, 2020 campaign launch, hundreds of emails had been sent. On May 15, 2020, a second campaign was started. By May 22, 2020, thousands of emails had been sent to Visa executives calling for Visa to terminate its relationship with Pornhub.
427. Yet Visa did not respond. However, over two months later when the campaign against MindGeek again picked up steam due to a viral video released by advocates, Visa did conduct a CYA scramble to avoid being accused of ignoring the issue entirely. On July 15, 2020, it sent a response letter.
428. That response was stunning. Instead, of seriously considering the evidence of illegality it was already well aware of, it offered mealy-mouthed platitudes about its vital role in commerce, its need to remain neutral, and the need for others to do something about a pure evil it was uniquely situated to immediately address: “We believe that any truly effective solution must come from thoughtful changes to laws and regulations by those elected to establish the laws of our country . . . Maintaining a neutral stance under the law is vital for the free flow of commerce.” That is to say, translated into English: we do not want to get involved in policing illegal conduct when we are making money on the illegal conduct even if we admit it is evil and we could easily stop it” (emphasis added). The ease with which anyone, and certainly sophisticated financial institutions with rigorous due diligence obligations, would have become aware of MindGeek’s trafficking venture was made obvious by the December 4, 2020 New York Times bombshell report by Pulitzer Prize winner Nicholas Kristoff, “The Children of Porn Hub.” Acknowledging that MindGeek’s business involves much legitimate, legal pornography, Kristoff also reported how his relatively modest investigative efforts easily revealed that its business also was flooded with non-consensual content and seems designed so be so:
     Yet there’s another side of the company: Its site is infested with rape videos. It monetizes child rapes, revenge pornography, spy cam videos of women showering, racist and misogynist content, and footage of women being asphyxiated in plastic bags. A search for “girls under18” (no space) or “14yo” leads in each case to more than 100,000 videos. Most aren’t of children being assaulted, but too many are.
     A great majority of the 6.8 million new videos posted on the site each year probably involve consenting adults, but many depict child abuse and nonconsensual violence. Because it’s impossible to be sure whether a youth in a video is 14 or 18, neither Pornhub nor anyone else has a clear idea of how much content is illegal.
     I came across many videos on Pornhub that were recordings of assaults on unconscious women and girls. The rapists would open the eyelids of the victims and touch their eyeballs to show that they were nonresponsive.
     Pornhub profited this fall from a video of a naked woman being tortured by a gang of men in China. It is monetizing video compilations with titles like “Screaming Teen,” “Degraded Teen” and “Extreme Choking.” Look at a choking video and it may suggest also searching for “She Can’t Breathe.”
     Facebook removed 12.4 million images related to child exploitation in a three-month period this year. Twitter closed 264,000 accounts in six months last year for engaging in sexual exploitation of children. By contrast, Pornhub notes that the Internet Watch Foundation, an England-based nonprofit that combats child sexual abuse imagery, reported only 118 instances of child sexual abuse imagery on its site over almost three years, seemingly a negligible figure.
     The Internet Watch Foundation couldn’t explain why its figure for Pornhub is so low. Perhaps it’s because people on Pornhub are inured to the material and unlikely to report it. But if you know what to look for, it’s possible to find hundreds of apparent child sexual abuse videos on Pornhub in 30 minutes. Pornhub has recently offered playlists with names including “less than 18,” “the best collection of young boys” and “under- – age.”
     So while it is now no longer possible to search on Pornhub 6 in English using terms like “underage” or “rape,” the 7 company hasn’t tried hard to eliminate such videos. A 8 member called “13yoboyteen” is allowed to post videos. A 9 search for “r*pe,” turns up 1,901 videos. “Girl with braces” 10 turns up 1,913 videos and suggests also trying “exxxtra 11 small teens.” A search for “13yo” generates 155,000 12 videos. To be clear, most aren’t of 13-year-olds, but the 13 fact that they’re promoted with that language seems to 14 reflect an effort to attract pedophiles.
     Moreover, some videos seem at odds with the list of banned content. “Runaway Girl Gets Ultimatum, Anal or the Streets” is the title of one Pornhub video. Another user posts videos documenting sex with teenage girls as they weep, protest and cry out in pain.
     While Pornhub is becoming more careful about videos of 22 potentially litigious Americans, it remains cavalier about 23 overseas victims. One Indonesian video is titled “Junior 24 High School Girl After Class” and shows what appears to 25 be a young teenager having sex. A Chinese sex video, just 26 taken down, was labeled: “Beautiful High School Girl Is 27 Tricked by Classmates and Taken to the Top of a Building Where She Is Insulted and Raped.”
     In the last few days as I was completing this article, two 3 new videos of prepubescent girls being assaulted were 4 posted, along with a sex video of a 15-year-old girl who 5 was suicidal after it went online. I don’t see how good-faith 6 moderators could approve any of these videos.
429. Almost immediately after this report was published, both Visa and 8 Mastercard terminated substantial connections with MindGeek, claiming that after 9 just a few days of “investigation” they had “discovered” that MindGeek’s websites 10 were permeated with illegal content. In fact, these companies and their member 11 banks providing merchant banking services to MindGeek were aware of these facts 12 for over a decade but elected to continue doing business with them and make 13 millions of dollars in profit from MindGeek’s trafficking venture.
430. On December 10, 2020, Visa posted on Twitter: “[g]iven the allegations 15 of illegal activity, Visa is suspending Pornhub’s acceptance privileges pending the 16 completion of our ongoing investigation. We are instructing the financial institutions who serve MindGeek to suspend processing of payments through the Visa network.”
431. Unlike Visa’s response which merely acknowledged “allegations of 19 illegal activity,” the CEO of Visa’s biggest competitor, Mastercard, acknowledged 20 publicly that after just a few days of “investigation” it had determine MindGeek was 21 trafficking in illegal content:
     We went back and we looked, and we found actually 23 instances where clearly the legal standard of what should 24 be allowed on Pornhub had been crossed. So, we went back 25 to Pornhub and said, ‘Sorry, you’ve crossed the legal 26 standard. Porn’s not illegal. It is certain kinds of porn that 27 are illegal. So child porn is, and that’s what we saw. That’s 28 why we pulled out.”
432. Visa’s investigation revealed the same thing, and more, yet it refused to also publicly acknowledge this fact because it wanted to continue doing business with, and profiting from, MindGeek’s trafficking venture.
433. And that is what it did. Visa’s ban on MindGeek’s websites was short- lived. Although Visa continues its ban on MindGeek’s websites that host user- generated content, like Pornhub, in short order Visa reembraced MindGeek and began processing payments again for MindGeek’s paysites despite knowing that these revenue streams are likewise permeated with trafficking like GirlsDoPorn, and that MindGeek used its trafficking venture overall to attract, advertise, and funnel visitors revenues to these paid sites. As of the filing of this lawsuit, Visa continues to process payments for such content.
434. The Criminal Scheme to Conceal the Enterprise’s Racketeering and Shame, Discredit, Intimidate, and Silence Victims.
435. MindGeek worked as hard to conceal and suppress the truth about its business model as it did on SEO. When such videos were publicly questioned in social media discourse, it initially hid behind the false façade it had built of itself as a mainstream legitimate company. This played on the general public’s misunderstanding that because users were not operating on the dark web, but on Pornhub, the content was consensual and legal.
436. Indeed, Social Media Optimization (“SMO”) was also an integral part of its Enterprise. As part of this SMO, MindGeek used its extensive control and influence over all aspects of the new online porn industry that it dominated to mount powerful public messaging campaigns when it felt necessary. This network 26 3https://endsexualexploitation.org/wp-content/uploads/2021-Dirty-Dozen- List_Notification-Letter_Visa_Final.pdf. included innumerable porn performers and producers who depended on MindGeek’s platform for their livings, putative public interest not-for-profits like the Free Speech Coalition, which received substantial support from MindGeek and was called by industry and MindGeek insiders its “lobbying arm,” and porn industry publications, like XBIZ, and bloggers, all of whom received substantial advertising and other renumeration from MindGeek in exchange for acting as MindGeek mouthpieces.
437. When it felt necessary, MindGeek would activate this extensive network of seemingly independent voices to generate an “astroturf” campaign promote messaging MindGeek needed. They did this through sophisticated SMO that included “ghost blogging,” illegal undisclosed placed content and social media influencing and amplification, and extensive marketing, advertising, and aggressive media outreach. Through all these tools, MindGeek worked tirelessly to manufacture a false public image that concealed its illicit practices and to silence those who posed a risk to that façade.
438. In particular, this included MindGeek’s extensive Pornhub Cares effort to create an image of its flagship Pornhub brand as mainstream, legitimate, and ethical. As part of this effort, MindGeek promoted various social causes including billboard ads in Times Square, ads on snow plows during blizzards, breast and testicular cancer campaigns, voting campaigns, pop-up shops on Valentine’s day, and environmental campaigns like Save the Oceans, Save the Pandas, and Save the Bees.
439. It also attempted to publicly align itself with anti-exploitation entities. For example, in 2020 MindGeek began making donations to the European anti-child exploitation network called InHope causing the Canadian Centre for Child Protection – which is charged under Canadian law with combatting child pornography, has the leading technology to detect such abuse material, and knows MindGeek best of all – to withdraw from the network. It did so because as the leading anti-child pornography organization in Canada it fully understood the hypocrisy of the affiliation and MindGeek’s obvious effort to corrupt and compromise this organization dedicated to combatting organizations of which MindGeek was the poster child.
440. But these hypocritical efforts to falsely portray itself as a responsible, ethical corporate actor palled in comparison to MindGeek’s surreptitious efforts to use its influence network for unethical and illegal purposed. For example, MindGeek funneled money from its foreign subsidiaries in Luxembourg and Cyprus through its MindGeek USA subsidiary into California to lobby against California laws governing the porn industry in violation of California law. This illegal lobbying and laundering of money to oppose these proposed laws resulted in fines imposed by California Fair Political Practices Committee.
441. Most troubling, MindGeek aggressively used its powerful messaging network to insidiously attack, discredit, and intimidate former employees and partners, whistleblowers, activists, and victims of its criminal schemes. These efforts were directly led by MindGeek vice-president Corey Urman, who closely controls and often personally participates in the public messaging. Urman on behalf of MindGeek leads these efforts and works closely with powerful public relations and social media firms in North America and Europe, including most prominently powerful New York public relations and social media firm 5wPR.
442. Urman and 5wPR regularly purport to publicly speak on behalf of MindGeek using false identities of non-existent people misrepresented as MindGeek spokespeople. These identities include Ian Andrews, Mike Williams, Chris Jackson, Brett Hall, Dusty Gitalto, and Corey Price. On occasion, reporters or others have called a numbers for a purported MindGeek spokespeople only to learn they were talking to a person of a different name who was employed by 5wPR. These false identities were used because they know the statements they were making were false and they did not want them attributed to themselves.
443. MindGeek and 5wPR directly and through investigative firms and “partners” in Eastern Europe do deep opposition research and investigation of their “enemies” and their immediate and extended families. This information is then used to intimidate and blackmail them. MindGeek “enemies” also repeatedly experience hacking of personal information and doxing. Insiders uniformly report that it is understood that anyone who crosses MindGeek or is seem as a threat to expose their illegal practice will be subjected to this treatment. Over the course of the last 16 months, MindGeek, 5wPR, and their operatives have mounted an aggressive “astroturf” campaign against advocates and victims calling attention to its true business practices.
444. MindGeek’s Criminal Scheme is Publicly Revealed
445. On February 9, 2020, activist Laila Mickelwait published an op-ed in the Washington Times about Pornhub to make the public aware that the site used nonconsensual content, did not have meaningful processes to exclude such content, and was profiting from such content:
     It took me under 10 minutes to create a user account and upload blank test content to the site, which went live instantly. I could have then gone on to become Pornhub- verified, and all I would need to do is send a photo of myself holding a paper with my username. That’s it. 21
     One of the most-searched terms on Pornhub is “teen” pornography. The search will result in videos that are constantly being added faster than any individual could watch them. Many feature girls who look 13 years old at best — girls with braces, pigtails, flat chests, no makeup, extremely young faces, holding teddy bears and licking lollipops, all while being aggressively penetrated. A quick search for the word “teen” turns up titles such as “Young Girl Tricked,” “Innocent Brace Faced Tiny Teen F—ed,” “Tiny Petite Thai Teen,” “Teen Little Girl First Time,” on and on ad infinitum.
     Pornhub has no system in place to verify the girls (and I say “girls” because they are not women) in the videos it hosts are not trafficked children being raped on film in order to line the pockets of its executives.
     What all of this means is that at this very moment, there could be hundreds, if not thousands, of videos of underage sex trafficking victims on Pornhub. If there could be, I can almost guarantee you there are. We already have evidence, and it is just the tip of the iceberg. 17 It’s time to shut down super-predator site Pornhub and hold the executive megapimps behind it accountable.
446. The article gained a significant amount of traction as it was shared by advocates, advocacy groups allied with Mickelwait’s work, and the public who were hearing about the issue for the first time.
447. Thereafter, Mickelwait launched a Change.org campaign to shut down what the campaign branded as “Trafficking Hub” and titled “Shut Down Pornhub and Hold Its Executives Accountable for Aiding Trafficking.” Mickelwait’s “Traffickinghub” Campaign went viral, with tens of thousands of individuals and organizations quickly taking up the cause. Among the groundswell of viral support were hundreds of porn performers. For example, on February 16, 2020, Jenna Jameson, called “the Queen of Porn” and “the most famous porn star of all time,” said “Pornhub profits off of the rape and torture of women and children, Take a stand against these monsters at MindGeek . . . Shut it DOWN.”
448. Also included in the viral support were parents who became aware that their children were easily accessing the site, and even uploading content of themselves, sometimes at the behest of predators. Even a young minor boy joined the effort on his own by becoming a “verified” user of Pornhub, obviously without showing any government issued identification or without anyone at Pornhub questioning the obviously underage boy applications to become “verified.”
449. After years of acting with impunity, Pornhub’s initial response was muted. Indeed, it did not even deny the Op-Ed’s claims, instead only stressing that MindGeek was a technology company registered in Luxemburg for tax purposes. The Washington Times Op-Ed editor noted the response “speaks volumes” about the accuracy of the petition’s claims.
450. However, as the Traffickinghub Campaign went viral and others began coming forward, MindGeek’s disinformation and intimidation machine sprang into action. Rather than acknowledge and correct its now exposed misconduct, MindGeek instead unleashed an aggressive gaslighting campaign designed to smear, discredit, and intimidate advocates and victims who dared to begin speaking out.
451. MindGeek’s gaslighting disinformation campaign developed false messaging asserting that (a) it did not incorporate and monetize CSAM, rape, and other non-consensual acts; (b) it did employ “robust” technological and human monitoring to prevent the uploading and use of nonconsensual content; and (c) its critics were lying and motivated not by the truth but by money that they could raise attacking MindGeek. The goal of the disinformation campaign was to reinforce MindGeek’s fraudulent depiction of its business model and products; discredit advocates and victims; and intimidate advocates and victims by doxing them and their families and exposing them to hateful online and in-person attacks and threats.
452. This campaign began at home, with insiders reporting MindGeek management misrepresenting to employees that the public claims were “lies” that were being spread not because they were true but because those making the claims actually wanted to destroy the porn industry for “religious reasons.”
453. MindGeek and 5wPR also fully mobilized their extensive network of social media agents, influencers, and amplifiers and fed that network opposition research on, and disinformation about, advocates and victims. For those victims who spoke publicly under pseudonyms, extensive intelligence and covert investigative work was done to identify and expose them.
454. On or about February 25, 2020, Corey Urman, falsely posing under the alias Blake White, misrepresented to the media that MindGeek was and continued to be committed to ensuring non-consensual content was not part of its product and that claims otherwise were “factually wrong” and “intentionally misleading” lies:
     Pornhub has a steadfast commitment to eradicating and fighting any and all illegal content on the internet, including non-consensual content and child sexual abuse material. Any suggestion otherwise is categorically and factually inaccurate Pornhub is actively working to put in place state-of-the-art, comprehensive safeguards on its platform to combat this material. These actions include a robust system for flagging, reviewing and removing all illegal material, employing an extensive team of human moderators dedicated to manually reviewing all uploads to the site, and using a variety of digital fingerprinting solutions. We use automated detection technologies such as YouTube’s CSAI Match and Microsoft’s PhotoDNA as added layers of protection to keep unauthorized content off the site. We also use Vobile, a state-of-the-art fingerprinting software that scans any new uploads for potential matches to unauthorized materials to protect against banned video being re-uploading. We are actively working on expanding our safety measures and adding new features and products to the platform to this end, as they become available. Furthermore, Pornhub will continue to work with law enforcement efforts and child protection non-profits in the goal of eliminating any and all illegal content across the internet. The petition is not only factually wrong and intentionally misleading, it was created and is promoted by a radical rightwing fundamentalist group in the United States – a group who’s founders have long vilified and attacked LGBTQ communities and women’s rights groups, aligned themselves with hate groups, and espoused extremist and despicable language. https://www.dailydot.com/irl/petition-pornhub-shut-down-sex-trafficking/
455. These claims were gross misrepresentations. There was no such commitment to avoiding non-consensual content; it was embraced. MindGeek had no effective way to moderate content either by technology or human moderation, and was not even trying. MindGeek did not work with law enforcement or report suspected CSAM as required under federal law. And Laila Mickelwait was not a bigot, anti-LGBTQ or women’s rights, or misleading, let alone, intentionally misleading.
456. Over the course of the next year, MindGeek’s press relations and social media organization would aggressively disseminate this gross disinformation. This campaign, led by Urman and 5wPR, included numerous MindGeek Pornhub models, including Maya Morena, Ginger Banks, Gwen Adora, and its Brand Ambassador Asa Akira, who were instructed via direct messages on Pornhub’s website and provided with talking points to disseminate MindGeek’s disinformation. In return for participating in this disinformation campaign, these agents of MindGeek were rewarded with supplemental compensation and better promotion on the MindGeek platform.
457. It also included “ghost bloggers” and other undisclosed operatives publishing scripts provided by MindGeek and 5wPR as “independent” work. That placed content by MindGeek would then be amplified by its social media network, captive reporters, and 5wPR and other SMO efforts. The false claims generated by this coordinated and aggressive gaslighting campaign of disinformation were repeated in hundreds of news stories and incalculable more social media posts and memes during 2020, smearing, shaming, and attempting to intimidate advocates, whistleblowers, and victims from speaking out.
458. In addition, MindGeek and 5wPR worked surreptitiously to “vandalize” the Wikipedia page for advocates and to load onto those pages the disinformation they were aggressively disseminating. Their efforts were so aggressive and obvious that Wikipedia put a disclaimer on the target’s page. Over the next year, MindGeek would continue to push this gaslighting disinformation campaign (a) misrepresenting that non-consensual content was not present on MindGeek’s tubesites; (b) misrepresenting that MindGeek disapproved of nonconsensual content on its tubesites; (c) misrepresenting that MindGeek had robust human and technological moderation to prevent such content from being uploaded; and (d) explicitly accusing Mickelwait of (i) lying in claiming otherwise in her op-ed, petition, and other public comments about MindGeek, (ii) lying about her objectives and motivations, and (iii) fraudulently using her claims to defraud people and enrich herself. These materially false claims were repeated ubiquitously for the next year by MindGeek, particularly Urman and 5wPR, and the agents and operative in their press and social media network.
459. For example, as the viral opposition to Mindgeek gained steam in 6 February and March 2020, Mindgeek made various public statements intended to gaslight the public, its users, its partners, and law enforcement. By way of example only, on March 5, 2020, Mindgeek misleadingly tried to disassociate itself from its own business, falsely reporting that it was merely “a technology company that doesn’t film or produce any adult content and is headquartered in Luxemburg, not Montreal.” Two days later Urman and 5wPR had two separate statements issued from Mindgeek and Pornhub to make it appear they were separate businesses both, denying their businesses were involved in illegal content and calling such accusations “lies” and “grossly misrepresented.”
460. During this time, one of the early operatives commissioned by Urman and 5wPR was a person operating on social media under the moniker EyeDeco. From shortly after the viral online campaign against MindGeek began, EyeDeco and 5wPR commissioned EyeDeco as an operative in their “astroturf” gaslighting campaign. She would dox activists and victims, call them liars and grifters, and attempt to harass and intimidate them with releases of personal information about them and their extended families that Urman and 5wPR provided to her and instructed her to disclose.
461. EyeDeco’s real identity is a female living in Montreal known to the plaintiffs with the initials GS. Among other things, investigation revealed that GS uses the unique moniker “EyeDeco” in other mediums not readily available to the public and has other connections to senior people involved in the MindGeek Enterprise. On March 1, 2020, she began disseminating MindGeek’s gaslighting narrative misrepresenting that it only operated legally and with consensual content and that those publicly claiming otherwise were lying to enrich themselves. She indicated that her audience would discover this if they “#FollowtheMoney.” For months she would continue to disseminate this false “#FollowtheMoney” meme.
462. More ominously, GS began publicly doxing and releasing personal information about those who dared speak up against MindGeek and their extended families. This personal information was researched and provided to GS by Urman and 5wPR. As part of this intimidation campaign, in June 2020, GS doxed Mickelwait and her extended family with a release of an assortment of information. Among that information was properties that they owned, including that Mickelwait owned, which GS suggested was used as a brothel: “BTW . . . what kind of property rental businesses are generally known for renting on an hourly basis.”
463. Shortly thereafter, Mickelwait’s extended family members discovered that their bank accounts, messaging apps, and iClouds had been hacked. Those who committed this illegal intrusion then sent an intimate stolen picture of one of her family member’s spouse in an effort to threaten and intimidate. Other critics of MindGeek received similar treatment. For example, senior executives at vocal critic National Center for Sexual Exploitation as well as their siblings had computers, cloud storage, emails, and social media accounts hacked. Other victims and advocates who spoke out or expressed support and who Urman and 5wPR viewed as a threat were also threatened with or actually doxed.
464. GS also directly targeted CSAM victims to discredit, sham, and intimidate. One victim going by the name Sofia shared her story of being trafficked as a child on Pornhub in a blog she wrote. In the blog she detailed the way in which from the age of nine to fifteen she was sex trafficked and how she found the videos of her child rape and exploitation on Pornhub over and over:
     “I am a survivor of child trafficking” a sentence iv’e put off saying for a very long time, I didn’t consider myself a victim because I didnt know anything different. As a 9 year old I thought I was just helping mommy and daddy, as a child I had always been taught to not question my parents to be seen and not heard that as a girl I was nothing more than a inconvenience, that I needed to help my parents pay the bills because that’s the least I could do.
     My suffering did not end with those who had the power to use me, it continued but this time through a screen. Videos of my assaults and videos of me being forced to dance and strip began popping up on the popular tube site Pornhub, in some of them I was as young as 9 in others I was 15. I didn’t know what to do I remember sitting in front of my phone and watching the view count go up. I used to spend hours reading the comments, people asking how much a night with me would cost.
     I became so desensitized I stopped caring that videos continued to get uploaded, they would get deleted then a couple of days later they would get reuploaded or new ones would pop up. Some of the titles of the videos that continued to be uploaded to Pornhub were “Young girl begging to stop” “Screaming teen gets pounded” “barely legal getting choked” “Sexy brunette forced to strip” some of the videos were reuploaded 6 times.
     I’m telling my story because I don’t want anyone to go through and feel the way I did, I thought if I spoke up everyone would think I was a liar I don’t care anymore to anyone that’s gone through something similar I’m with you, I see you and I believe you. It is not our fault and those who monetized and downloaded our trauma need to be held accountable.
     Pornhub needs to answer for their mistakes they need to be shut down they’ve had countless opportunities to address and fix their mistakes but they have continued to brush off complaints and ignore victims, mistakes that have ruined not only my life but countless others. It’s time they take responsibility for their actions and get their platform taken from them.
465. In response to this Medium post, GS publicly called out Medium: “Suggest using #CrticialThought to understand how these #grifters have hijacked a legitimate issue in order to further their own agenda,” which as the “grifter” reference clearly indicated was to enrich themselves.
466. Sofia created a Twitter account with which to share the article and continue advocating for herself and other victims while remaining anonymous. Within moments of it being shared, GS attacked her as a liar and grifter. In doing so, GS made an argument only someone very familiar with the details of Pornhub’s website would know, and which was fed to her by Urman and 5wPR. She claimed that the screenshot Sofia had posted purportedly from her abuser showed an “edit button that would only appear on the screen of the person uploading the video.
467. Based on this claim, GS asserted that the abusive materials had been uploaded by “Sofia herself.” She called the young victim a “scammer” and tagged “#Scammer #LailaMickelwait” to indicate Sofia was a fake operated by others looking to use their campaign to enrich themselves. Urman and 5wPR knew when they instructed GS to make these claims that they were false.
468. GS went on to harass Sofia, saying, “I see you created your twitter account rather quickly – as in today. Your ‘friend’ #LailaMickelwait must have coached you on how to open a new account. What timely timing. As to why you would #lie about this – no doubt Laila knows she does a lot of it re: #Pornhub.”
469. Sixteen-year-old Sofia, distraught over the attack said, “maybe its because I don’t want people knowing who I am no one coached me I made this decision myself.” GS taunted her “uh huh . . .” then suggested again that Sofia fabricated the whole account and was just a puppet of Mickelwait. She went on, “Laila aka Sofia franchement all your #followers are sadly lacking in #CriticalThought.” GS use of the French word “franchement,” which means “frankly,” gave away her likely location in MindGeek’s home of Montreal.
470. GS then repeated her defamatory claim directly to Medium: “Before uploading stories, suggest vetting sources first see above regarding #edit button ONLY being available to #Uploaders Which in this case as per screenshot in your #Article #Story is Sofia herself. #LailaMickelwait #scammers.”
471. Distraught Sofia responded, “So now I am a liar because my assaulter sent me the screenshot himself. He used it to make me know he could profit of my body I am just a 16 year old why would I lie about this.”
472. It was then that Sofia uploaded the screenshot of the actual text message her abuser sent to her with the screenshot in the text. In Spanish it reads “See told you I could do whatever I wanted with you” “cheap whore” “they don’t even have to wear a condom I am gonna tell Desire I found more clients for you.”
473. After Sofia uploaded the proof that she was not lying, GS ceased her attacks. She was the only one to have attacked Sofia with that claim until Urman and 5wPR had the same assertion made to the New York Times in an effort to stop its report “The Children of Pornhub.”
474. Urman and 5wPR also had GS attack plaintiff Serena Fleites, who was featured in the New York Times story. MindGeek fed GS opposition research on Fleites derived from a “scrap” of the young woman’s social media accounts after she too went public with her abuse and exploitation by MindGeek. GS used that social media material to likewise attack Serena as a “#grifter”: “Serena seems like she knows and has known for quite some time exactly what she is doing aka #grifting.”
475. When the New York Times asked MindGeek about the GS’s targeting of Serena and Sofia, and the coincidence of both MindGeek and GS accusing Sofia of uploading the video herself, GS’s began taking down her social media and locked her account.
476. Before ending her campaign, GS worked to transition her efforts to another operative being run by Urman and 5wPR under the false identity of Justine Halley. After GS was compromised, Halley took up her role as a “ghost” blogger and social media operative in or about July 2020. Posing as an independent writer, Halley began publishing the Urman 5wPR narrative, including on medium. That narrative, like the one Urman and 5wPR fed GS, attempted to gaslight readers that MindGeek tolerated no non-consensual content and aggressively worked to exclude it from its platform. And she repeated the false narrative that those saying otherwise were lying.
477. Justine Halley was actually Sarah Valmont, a porn writer who had attended graduate school in Montreal. Valmont was unemployed during Pornhub’s gaslighting campaign and was hired by MindGeek to pose as an independent author while actually writing as a MindGeek agent and publishing the narrative it was paying here to publish.
478. According to the narrative she was paid to publish, the viral campaign to hold MindGeek accountable was “a calculated creation with an agenda that goes beyond the push to shut down Pornhub” and really an effort to
     exploit[] the pain of real victims in [support of the advocate’s] million dollar trafficking hub campaign . . . Churning out increasingly sensationalist messages and outright falsehood to make it appear as though Pornhub is intentionally acting in bad faith, and is encouraging people to abuse their own platform terms of service by uploading illegal content. Pornhub dos not allow illegal content period. Pornhub has a robust system in place to moderate content using both cutting edge technology and human moderators.
479. The fictitious Halley’s claims were outright lies she was instructed to disseminate by Urman and 5wPR.
480. Thereafter, in August and September, Halley went even further at Urman and 5wPR’s direction. She claimed falsely that Mickelwait was “doctoring screenshots” that she was presenting publicly to prove her claims: “I have evidence that Laila Mickelwait is doctoring screenshots she shares of Pornhub content and is deliberately lying and misrepresenting the platform. In some legal circles that kind of things is called, ‘libel’. More to come.” ((8/29/20) see also “I hope Laila gives whoever doctors her screenshots of PH a nice raise, along with plenty of Kleenex.” (9/1/20)).
481. Urman and 5wPR instructed Halley to make this extraordinary claim because the content readily available from MindGeek’s own tubesites was the most devastating evidence debunking their gaslighting narrative. Unwilling to actually remove such content from its platform, MindGeek was forced instead to claim it was all fabricated when it was revealed.
482. Halley combined these false claims with repeated claims that the entire campaign was based on “evangelical bigots [who] are lying to well meaning people about their real agenda and using the pain of victims to further that agenda.” See supra n.4.
483. MindGeek’s more overt network operatives also aggressively prosecuted its gaslighting disinformation campaign with the same false narrative. One of the most aggressive was its exclusive Brand Ambassador Asa Akira. For example, on July 2, 2020, Akira publicly gaslighted victims and advocates in parroting MindGeek’s lie that it did not monetize child pornography and trafficked content and all non-consensual content had always been “strictly prohibited”:
     Their claim that Pornhub is profiting off of child porn is FALSE. Illegal content is (and always has been) strictly prohibited on Pornhub; that included any porn involving anyone underage and any porn involving anyone who is there without consent.
484. On October 17, 2020, she called such claims “straight-up lies and misinformation.”
485. Likewise, throughout 2020, Pornhub’s social media director “Pornhub Aria” gaslighted the public by misrepresenting that Mindgeek strictly prohibited illegal content, screened for it, had technology to detect it, and removed it immediately. For example, on April 10, 2020, Pornhub’s Aria comprehensively presented its gaslighting lie on social media, when she wrote on social media about “misinformation circulating” on social media by advocates and victims who “misrepresent [MindGeek’s] policies and procedures”:
     First and foremost, illegal content is strictly prohibited on Pornhub. This has always been the case and will always be the case and the safety of our users and models is our number one priority. Upon upload, every video and photo uploaded to Pornhub is reviewed manually by a large and extensive team of moderators looking for illegal content. This sets us apart from other platforms like Twitter or You Tube as well as other adult sites and allows us to act swiftly and promptly for users who violate the terms of service. In addition we use automatic detection technologies on uploads such as YouTube’s CSAI Match and Microsoft Photo DNA as added layers of protection. Finally, we also review flags or content removal reports for illegal content. We have a dedicated community that works actively to ensure that content adheres to our TOS and rapidly flags any they find questionable for review/removal. Any content removal request we receive on our content are priorities and expedited faster than any other type of support request and acted upon within hours, not days. If we come across CSAM, the videos are fingerprinted so they cannot be reuploaded, and the user is banned. We report the user and the uploads to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) who will work with global authorities. All illegal content, in addition to content that breaches our terms of service, is immediately removed as it is detected.
486. Every sentence of this MindGeek statement was a lie.