The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - September 03, 2024


My Chat with Laila Mickelwait, Fighting Against Pornhub (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_706)

Topics
child sex trafficking pornhub exploitation fake victimhood narratives
Hosted by
Gad Saad
Mentioned
Sarah McLachlan Jussie Smollett Shut Down Sackler Serena Nicholas Cruz Sex Trafficking Pornhub Cares Joe Rogan Linda Visa
Justin Trudeau, Parasitized Minds, and Suicidal Empathy (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_705) Suicidal Empathy and Deontological Ethics - The Will Cain Show (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_707)

Episode Stats


Length

49 minutes

Words per minute

173.55

Word count

8,535

Sentence count

479

Harmful content

Misogyny

6

sentences flagged

Toxicity

10

sentences flagged

Hate speech

3

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Laila Micklewaite is the founder of Trafficking Hub and author of Takedown: Inside the Fight to Shut Down, Pornhub for Child Abuse, Rape, and Sex Trafficking. She is also the co-founder and CEO of the Justice Defense Fund.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 With great excitement, I introduce you to Northwood University, a truly exceptional institution in
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00:01:16.900 Hi everybody. The last few days I've had a series of female honey badgers that have been on the show. 1.00
00:01:23.300 As you know, the honey badger is a very fierce, dogged creature, and we certainly have one today.
00:01:30.660 She is not afraid to take on the big guys and come out victorious today. I've got Laila
00:01:36.140 Micklewaite. How are you doing? I'm doing well. Thank you so much for having me.
00:01:40.440 It's a pleasure to have you. So I'm just going to introduce you very quickly and show your book.
00:01:45.620 You are the co-founder and CEO of the Justice Defense Fund. You are the founder of Trafficking Hub.
00:01:50.960 You hold a master's degree of public diplomacy from USC. We could talk about how USC treated me
00:01:57.320 when I went there to give a talk last year. It wasn't pretty. And you are the author of the
00:02:02.700 national bestseller, Takedown, Inside the Fight to Shut Down, Pornhub for Child Abuse, Rape, and Sex. 0.98
00:02:10.220 Welcome on the show. Trafficking. Sex trafficking. 0.96
00:02:12.460 Sex trafficking. Yes. 0.93
00:02:13.860 I missed the trafficking. Thank you. Let me repeat the title. Takedown, Inside the Fight to Shut Down,
00:02:19.720 Pornhub for Child Abuse, Rape, and Sex Trafficking. Did I miss anything that you'd like to add in the
00:02:25.680 bio? No, that's great. Thank you.
00:02:27.700 Okay. So let's maybe start with, I think you began your activism on this issue in 2006.
00:02:34.840 What compelled you to start down that very dark rabbit hole?
00:02:39.500 Yeah. Well, I mean, I grew up in a family where my father had, you know, just a beautiful person.
00:02:46.020 He was a general and vascular surgeon that had dedicated his own life to saving lives and,
00:02:52.120 you know, at great expense himself. It was a real sacrifice for himself and our family
00:02:56.300 for him to choose that particular profession, but he wanted to make a difference. And I think,
00:03:02.660 you know, even from an early age, just watching him do what he did impacted me and influenced me.
00:03:09.080 And he was also, you know, very attuned to issues around the world. He was paying attention. He would
00:03:14.660 watch, you know, history channel documentaries, the news, and always trying to get down to the root
00:03:21.000 causes of things like, you know, slavery and war. And we had some of our most meaningful
00:03:25.680 conversations and bonding moments as father and daughter speaking about these very deep
00:03:30.860 subjects. And so I think from a very young age, I was kind of attuned to wanting to pursue
00:03:37.660 something in the realm of human rights issues. And I ended up doing that after my father brought me
00:03:45.920 into the living room one day and showed me a documentary about sex trafficking. It was child
00:03:51.220 sex trafficking in Calcutta, India. And I was just so shocked. And I was horrified that this could even
00:03:56.240 be real, that this could be happening to the most innocent, to children. And it set me on a path
00:04:03.140 of learning, discovery, research, and then ultimately engaging in the fight against sex
00:04:08.000 trafficking. And that's what I did. So that's, I kind of set, set myself on that path and have stayed
00:04:13.080 on it until today. That's how I got involved.
00:04:16.440 Well, I mean, in the intro, I mentioned the honey badger. You may or may not know this,
00:04:21.740 Laila, but in the last chapter of the parasitic mind, this yellow book, I talk about a call,
00:04:28.840 you know, a call to action. And I say, activate your inner honey badger. And precisely because
00:04:34.960 the honey badger truly epitomizes what it is to be fierce, to be ferocious. It's the size of a small
00:04:41.240 to medium sized dog. And yet it could withstand an attack from, you know, six adult lions because of
00:04:47.560 its ferocities. Now, when I'm asking people to activate their inner honey badger, I'm not saying
00:04:52.480 to be violent, but I'm saying, once you see something that you can defend, that you have,
00:04:57.840 you know, you have a set of principles, you shouldn't cower in silence. You should engage,
00:05:03.360 you know, your voice matters. And in a sense, you exactly exemplify that because it starts with
00:05:08.160 you having these wonderful conversations with your dad. And then he empowers you with the
00:05:13.300 honey badger spirit. Is this something that we can teach in a seminar? Or do we all have to pray
00:05:19.680 that we have as lovely and nurturing father as you did in order for us to nurture that capability?
00:05:27.080 That's such a great question. And I would love to hear what you think about that. But,
00:05:32.640 you know, I think a lot of it maybe comes from experience and practice as you grow up and as you
00:05:38.080 maybe confront smaller things in your life, maybe things that may seem not very consequential,
00:05:43.300 but you know, they're wrong. And I actually, I have a whole chapter of my book, where I'm thinking
00:05:48.460 back and reflecting, you know, from a very young age, and on the first in first grade, when the bully,
00:05:54.400 the classroom bully, you know, was kissing girls against their will, when they would squirm and
00:05:58.940 disgust. And, you know, we're telling him to stop, and he wouldn't do it. And then one day he,
00:06:03.980 you know, I was bending my head to drink at the water fountain at the playground, and he came and swooped in
00:06:09.180 and kissed me on the lips. And I was so angry that he did this, but I wanted to teach him a lesson.
00:06:14.900 It was wrong. And so I, you know, came behind him, he was on one of the steepest slides on the
00:06:19.660 playground, and I kind of shoved him down with all my force. And he was crying, and I felt a sense of
00:06:25.400 accomplishment for what I had done. And so, you know, I kind of reflect on different experiences
00:06:31.340 like that in my younger years, when there was something that was wrong, and I knew was wrong,
00:06:36.260 and I was able to practice this, you know, I guess, pursuit of justice, and not being afraid to
00:06:43.760 confront injustice. And I think probably it's that, you know, it's not like we wake up one day with
00:06:49.940 courage to do something that's difficult in the face of opposition. But if you've been exercising that
00:06:56.880 muscle, I guess, in your younger years, that maybe it becomes more natural and easier to do,
00:07:02.860 but I'd love to know what you think. Yeah, thank you for turning it back to me. I think what your
00:07:08.320 answer hints to is something that I talk about as a evolutionary behavioral scientist that tries to
00:07:14.460 tease out, you know, how much of a particular phenomenon is due to nature versus nurture. In a
00:07:19.720 sense, it addresses your question, which is, I think that you, you meaning Layla, were already born
00:07:26.700 with the personhood to be a fighter, but then that could be further nurtured, right? So now,
00:07:33.680 even if you're not born with that mentality, there are things that you can pursue to empower that
00:07:40.520 quality in you or to ignite it. So like most things, it really is a mixture of nature and nurture. So for
00:07:46.440 example, one of the, in my own battles of trying to, you know, save the West from parasitic ideas,
00:07:54.620 from the dreadful ideas that are destroying our, you know, enlightened societies, I try to convince
00:08:01.820 people that their voice matters irrespective of how, how small they think and inconsequential their
00:08:08.140 voice is, right? Because they'll often retort back to me, well, I'm not Joe Rogan. I don't have a
00:08:12.760 podcast with 20 million people. I'm not some fancy professor with all the titles. I say, but that
00:08:17.540 doesn't mean that, that's, that doesn't absolve you from when your professor says something idiotic 0.99
00:08:22.720 in the classroom, challenge them politely. If you're at a bar and someone says something that 0.99
00:08:27.740 is insane, maybe you can challenge them. Don't, don't always diffuse the responsibility. It's not
00:08:33.460 only for Layla to take care of sex trafficking on behalf of all of us. You have a voice. Have you been,
00:08:40.500 I'm, I mean, you've been able to gather an army, I think of 2 million people. It is, has that been
00:08:46.860 some of the, the, the ways by which you were able to bring them onto the team? Well, I, I love what
00:08:53.060 you said. And, uh, you know, when I started this battle with Pornhub for monetizing and globally
00:08:59.340 distributing sex crimes, including child abuse and trafficking, um, I w I didn't have a big platform.
00:09:06.480 I had a few thousand followers on Twitter. Um, but I knew what was going on was completely
00:09:15.840 unjust. I mean, it was a horrific crime against these victims, uh, shattering their lives and I
00:09:23.220 couldn't keep quiet about it. And so it really evolved organically on Twitter where I was taking
00:09:29.840 what I knew, what I had discovered about this site and what was going on. And I was sharing it
00:09:36.480 with passion, you know, trying to wait tagging, you know, the FBI and the prime minister of Canada
00:09:43.560 and celebrities and people just saying, this is happening, you know, and, uh, and at that time,
00:09:50.340 if I thought, well, what could I do? You know, I'm just one person shouting on Twitter. Is this going
00:09:56.800 to do anything? And if I kind of backed down from that position of feeling, um, disempowered to really
00:10:03.020 make a difference just because I didn't have a big platform, none of this would have ever happened.
00:10:06.900 And so I guess your point, I would just encourage people. And I hope this, I hope my story is
00:10:12.180 inspiring to others to say, I'm a re I'm a regular person who, you know, when this began, I, you know,
00:10:18.720 it was some of the worst time of my life when I had a baby who was very sad, three month old,
00:10:26.480 who had gone through a birth complication and was up at all hours of the day and night screaming and
00:10:32.080 I'm, you know, comforting him and the darkness of my bedroom, thinking about some stories that I had
00:10:37.200 heard in the news about children who had been trafficked and found on Pornhub. And we can talk
00:10:42.220 about the, some of those stories. Um, but when I discovered what was going on on Pornhub, again,
00:10:48.000 it was just, there was there, it was a small platform, but it was an important message and I knew it had to
00:10:53.860 get out and, and the truth had to be told. And I think that's, what's important is that we're,
00:10:59.920 you know, when you have a conviction about something, when you know, something is wrong
00:11:03.540 and you call it out, it doesn't matter who's listening. It's your responsibility to do it
00:11:08.820 regardless. Yeah. I mean, I often tell people when they ask me, well, why do you get involved in all
00:11:15.000 these things? I mean, you lead enough of a stressful life. Why do you take on all these difficult
00:11:19.540 situations where you get death threats and so on? And I always tell people, and I'm
00:11:23.780 almost willing to bet that this is likely to resonate with you. Uh, I tell people that I'm,
00:11:28.220 I'm my worst, uh, uh, critic, if you'd like, in that, you know, I need to please myself in the deep
00:11:36.620 recesses of my thoughts so that when I go to bed at night and I put my head on the, on the pillow,
00:11:41.800 the only way that I can feel whole and that I will not, you know, toss and turn with insomnia
00:11:47.920 is to know that I was fully authentic and that I didn't walk away from defending truth,
00:11:52.600 defending freedom, defending in your case, uh, children's rights, not to be raped. And so if I
00:11:59.680 didn't do that, I would feel like a fraud and nothing would be more painful to my sense of
00:12:04.560 personhood. And I, I suspect that probably applies to you. Correct.
00:12:07.800 That resonates with me so much because, you know, something that I tried to do often is think about
00:12:14.160 death and this may seem morbid to some people, but it's, I feel like it's a really important practice
00:12:20.420 for me is to think about, you know, being on my deathbed or visiting my grave, you know, in my
00:12:27.640 mind and thinking, do I have regrets? Do I, I don't want to have regrets. And if I do, then go back and
00:12:36.200 fix what it was that I would regret that I didn't do that. I should have done, uh, or that I did that
00:12:43.120 I shouldn't have done. So, yeah, I mean, I, in that sense, it totally resume resonates with me
00:12:50.360 is that I don't want to get to the end of my life and think I should have done this and I was scared
00:12:55.460 or, you know, uh, and have those regrets and that really is helpful. So how did you, I mean, one of the
00:13:04.320 things that it's kind of become a joke now, but you know, that, that, uh, song by, is it Sarah
00:13:10.560 McLaughlin or McLaughlin? She, it's the, the eyes of a angel or something. It's the, it's the animal
00:13:18.000 song you're talking about. Yeah. Animal cruelty. So I've been conditioned like a, you know, a operant
00:13:24.200 conditioning or Pavlovian conditioning to, as soon as I hear that, I want to flip the channel because I,
00:13:29.440 I simply cannot bear to watch the very powerful images of animal cruelty. And so while I want to
00:13:37.460 protect every animal, even in the, uh, you know, I, I'm not a vegan, I eat animals and I recognize
00:13:43.800 that they are treated horribly, which is a moral dilemma that I face. I, it's very, very hard to
00:13:49.780 ever be exposed to those images. Now, in your case, and you can tell us, you know, fill in the details,
00:13:54.680 you have to go and quote, consume those, those videos. How are you able to do that and actually
00:14:03.940 come on the show today without having jumped off the proverbial ledge? How, how, what kind of fortitude
00:14:09.680 must you have had to inoculate yourself against the horrors of what you were viewing?
00:14:14.320 I think part of it is having purpose in pain is knowing it's not without reason. And I, you know,
00:14:25.580 having the power to press pause, right. And understanding that victims don't have that,
00:14:31.660 they have to live with this trauma for the rest of their lives as it's been immortalized
00:14:36.520 online. And they do call it the immortalization of their trauma. One victim said, my rapist put me
00:14:44.120 in a mental prison, but Pornhub gave me a life sentence because they actually had a download button on
00:14:48.980 every single video. Many of these were blatant rape, unconscious rape, uh, trafficking, and even
00:14:57.820 consensually filmed, but non-consensually uploaded revenge porn, image-based sexual abuse. It's kind 0.96
00:15:04.540 of like, there's a spectrum of abuse all the way from child rape to self-generated, um, child
00:15:09.760 pornography in this age of sexting, right. Where, where then it gets uploaded online and it sends a
00:15:15.260 victim into a spiral of trauma. Um, you know, I can give one example of how that has happened. Um,
00:15:21.320 there was a, a girl named Serena. She was the, uh, kind of face of this groundbreaking article in
00:15:28.120 the New York times by Nicholas Kristof called the children of Pornhub that was released in December of
00:15:33.180 2020. And she was an innocent 14 year old girl. She had never kissed a boy before. She was a straight 0.89
00:15:39.240 a student and she had a crush on a boy older than her who had convinced him to impress him, to send
00:15:45.900 some nude images and videos, which she did. He sent them to classmates and then they ended up getting
00:15:51.800 uploaded to Pornhub, getting millions of views. And, you know, she would beg for them to be removed. 0.95
00:15:57.800 They would hassle her, prove that you're a victim, prove that you're underage. Um, if they answered at
00:16:03.580 all, she may get one down and they would get uploaded again and again in this sadistic, you know, 0.61
00:16:10.360 game of whack-a-mole of a child trying to handle this. And it sent her into this spiral of despair.
00:16:17.220 She ended up being bullied at school. She had to drop out of school. She ended up self-medicating,
00:16:22.620 uh, to numb the pain. And she ended up living homeless out of a car. And that was the trajectory
00:16:30.480 for her. And then we have adults, you know, it's not just children who've been affected adults who've
00:16:36.780 been raped, uh, trafficked, abused on the site, a spectrum of abuse. But I think the thing that
00:16:43.780 really has helped me is, uh, you know, the idea of it's, it's pain that has a purpose and actually
00:16:49.480 seeing the traction and seeing the progress that we have been making by bringing this truth to the
00:16:56.100 world to say, you know, Pornhub is the largest or was the largest and most popular porn site in the
00:17:02.500 world. You know, at the time that this fight against them began in early 2020, you know,
00:17:08.040 they had 130 million visits per day, 47 billion visits to the site per year, enough content uploaded
00:17:14.260 every year. It would take 169 years to watch if you put those videos back to back. So 6.9 million
00:17:20.700 videos, um, researchers had named Pornhub the third most influential tech company on global society,
00:17:27.400 just behind Facebook and Google. And it was the 10th most trafficked website in the world.
00:17:32.240 This was a household brand name for porn. There were people, you know, joking about it on Saturday
00:17:37.340 night live and they had pop-up shops for New York fashion week and people are wearing their apparel
00:17:42.160 proudly in public. And at the same time, it was an unchallenged crime scene, uh, because what I
00:17:48.800 discovered in, uh, you know, one night in February 1st, 2020, uh, I was thinking about the story of, uh,
00:17:56.980 that I had recently heard in the news of a 15 year old girl from Florida who was missing
00:18:02.060 for an entire year. She was finally found when her mother was tipped off by a Pornhub user that
00:18:06.780 he recognized her daughter on the site. And she was found in 58 videos being raped in traffic.
00:18:11.740 They were able to actually match the attacker, the rapist face in the Pornhub videos to surveillance
00:18:18.040 footage from a seven 11. And they were able to locate the girl from his apartment and rescue her.
00:18:22.640 He had impregnated her. Um, and it was just this horrific story. And I kept coming back to it.
00:18:29.860 Also at the same time, there was an investigation that was published by the London Sunday times
00:18:34.820 that had found dozens of illegal videos on Pornhub within minutes, even children as young as three
00:18:40.880 years old. And so I had been thinking about that, thinking how in the world did this content end up
00:18:48.640 on Pornhub and a wise phrase, my dad always used to say is assumption is the mother of all screw ups.
00:18:56.360 And we were all collectively assuming right. Millions and millions of people, uh, were assuming
00:19:03.340 that this content was vetted, that it was legal and consensual because that is what they had been
00:19:09.180 projecting to the world. I mean, they had done an amazing job actually of spending millions of dollars
00:19:14.720 on PR for their image. Uh, they w they had this whole arm of Pornhub called Pornhub Cares,
00:19:20.720 which was the philanthropy arm of Pornhub, where they were, you know, doing these highly publicized
00:19:25.280 campaigns to save the bees and save the whales and clean the oceans and donate for breast cancer
00:19:31.020 research. And at the same time, their site was infested with equal, equal content because when I
00:19:38.580 tested the upload system, so I had an idea, I said, listen, I'm just going to test this upload system
00:19:43.340 to see what it takes to upload content to the world's largest porn site. And this is user generated
00:19:49.320 porn. So this is the YouTube of porn, right? Anybody with a phone anywhere in the world can film a sex 0.94
00:19:55.600 act, upload it online. So I just said, let me test it. I took a video of the dark room, the keyboard,
00:20:01.020 and just went through that process in minutes without any verification of ID, without any verification of
00:20:08.640 consent anonymously with only an email address, you were able to upload content to Pornhub. Um,
00:20:18.480 and that is how I started to connect the dots that this site is potentially one of the largest
00:20:23.960 repositories of sexual crime in North America, if not the world. At the time they had almost 11 million
00:20:29.020 videos on this site. They had 42 million images that were uploaded with the same non-verification
00:20:34.080 process. And that's when it all began. And I said, I have to sound the alarm on this,
00:20:38.260 what is going on? And that's when trafficking hub began. I started the hashtag on Twitter,
00:20:45.240 trafficking hub, and it all kind of spiraled from that moment when I made that discovery.
00:20:51.040 So there are different, uh, constituencies, if you'd like of, of evil here, there is, okay. The,
00:20:58.120 the perpetrators of the, the, the acts, the, the rapists, the traffickers, and so on. Okay, fine.
00:21:04.100 We can talk about those, but we, we have an intuition why they're doing what they're doing. Uh,
00:21:09.500 we have the Pornhub people who probably are just driven by greed. You know, I think that 99 point,
00:21:19.000 I'm speaking now as if I were them, 99.9% of all of the stuff is completely legal. And between consenting
00:21:26.500 adults, we don't have the sieve or the, the algorithms to be able to ensure that every
00:21:32.120 single clip that's up there is good. And we'll do our best next time around. Is, does that sound
00:21:37.540 like? Absolutely not. That's, that's not what they say. Absolutely not. I mean that, well,
00:21:43.520 that may be what they try to project to the public. Yeah. That's what I meant. That's right. As,
00:21:49.180 as that they're kind of this passive entity that doesn't really have, although when they started to be
00:21:55.340 confronted with what was going on, they've made some very damning statements about their own
00:22:01.640 policies, which we can talk about, but, um, the onion layers of peeling back the deep complicity
00:22:08.000 of Pornhub and its owners are, you know, part of this story and the intentional decisions that they
00:22:13.760 made that enabled and monetized this illegal content knowingly is, is really unbelievable.
00:22:21.580 Oh, okay. So it's not, so it's not the plausible deniability. Absolutely not. Oh no. So they're
00:22:28.180 willfully looking for that material. Well, the way that they set up their system. So this is stuff
00:22:34.160 that we uncovered as so, so trafficking hub starts, hashtag people, you know, starts catching on. I,
00:22:40.160 some new followers say you got to start a petition to shut down Pornhub. This is unbelievable and hold
00:22:45.280 its account executives accountable victim. So I start a petition. It goes viral today. We have 2.3
00:22:51.580 million signatures from every country in the world on the petition to shut down Pornhub and hold its
00:22:55.880 executives accountable. And as this is going viral, uh, victims are starting to come forward,
00:23:01.520 whistleblowers and insiders from the company are starting to come forward and they're starting to
00:23:05.720 reveal how the site works, the policies that these executives put in place, uh, to enable and allow
00:23:15.760 the unrestricted content from being monetized online. So the way you have to understand the
00:23:21.280 business model of free porn. So this is like the free user generated YouTube of porn. The way that
00:23:26.480 they make the most money is by selling 4.6 billion ad impressions on Pornhub every day. And the only way
00:23:32.540 that they can do that is if they have massive amounts of content to be picked up in Google so
00:23:38.460 that it can drive massive amounts of traffic to the site so they can sell those advertising
00:23:42.920 impressions. So from their perspective, they want no friction in uploading because they want as much
00:23:49.720 content to be uploaded as possible. So moderators who came forward, they said it was our job not to
00:23:55.100 keep illegal content off the site, but to allow as much content to go through as possible. So let's just
00:24:01.760 take a few of these business decisions, policy decisions that they made knowing all the while
00:24:07.080 they do not verify agent consent for upload, right? They had hired 10 moderators per shift. So per eight
00:24:15.080 hour shift, there was a team of 10 moderators in Cyprus. They had 30 total to be viewing these
00:24:21.560 millions of videos and images that were being uploaded, not only to Pornhub, but this is really
00:24:27.720 important. Pornhub was owned by a parent company called MindGeek. MindGeek has a monopoly on the
00:24:33.400 global porn industry. They own most of the world's most popular porn sites and brands, including most
00:24:39.620 of the world's most popular tube sites like Pornhub. So these 10 moderators were in charge of not only
00:24:45.780 porn hub, but red tube, you porn, gay tube, extreme tube, X tube, uh, uh, you know, you porn, all of 0.86
00:24:54.020 these tubes. And they were reprimanded if they watched less than 700 videos per shift where they 0.99
00:25:00.760 would just skip through these videos with the sound off. It was just to say that they had somebody
00:25:05.040 doing it. Um, some of them were watching up to 2000 videos per shift, just skipping through again.
00:25:11.480 And they told me, I know people in my office that let very underage content go through. And it was
00:25:18.920 because of the philosophy of the site is they didn't want to keep that content off the site.
00:25:25.100 So, um, the other quick example I'll give is they had 1800 employees working for this company. They're
00:25:32.860 making hundreds of millions of dollars a year. And they hired one person five days a week to review
00:25:39.640 videos that were flagged by users as terms of service violations, including child rape, trafficking,
00:25:45.280 um, and other, uh, non-consensual sex acts. And they had a backlog of 706,000 videos.
00:25:53.080 So what imagine in a, in a, in a company that big to hire one person to do that. And then they had a
00:25:59.780 policy where they would only put a video in queue for review if it had over 15 flags. So a victim
00:26:06.120 could flag their video 15 times, and it wouldn't even be put in line for review. And we have internal
00:26:13.340 emails that were uncovered in legal discovery in these lawsuits that victims are suing the company.
00:26:18.580 And he says in these emails, as he's talking about this policy, that it's good and it's reasonable. Um,
00:26:24.980 so those are just some examples of the way that they set this up to enable and monetize exploitation.
00:26:31.400 Okay. So when I was starting earlier with the constituencies of, of evil, I, I mentioned the
00:26:36.800 perpetrators that I mentioned the, the porn, uh, hub, uh, you know, executives and owners and the third
00:26:43.980 group, which again, you'll, you'll tell me whether it's willful ignorance or, or, or apathy or complicity.
00:26:51.840 So why doesn't the criminal justice system, you know, I'll, I'll let you explain the intricacies of
00:26:59.480 who has jurisdiction over an internet company, but why aren't you able to mention this to someone in
00:27:06.300 the justice department in the United States? And they go, what? I didn't know this. All right. I'm
00:27:10.840 on it Tuesday morning. That's the first thing on my item. And I could shut this down in four minutes.
00:27:15.640 What stops that the good guys from intervening? That's the question of the day. And I want to
00:27:24.520 know what you think about it. Um, because that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to get justice
00:27:31.240 fully served. And it's so important because victims need justice in order to heal, in order to have
00:27:38.380 closure for what happened when their lives have been completely shattered and countless victims. I mean,
00:27:43.440 it's out of their control, right? The criminal justice system is out of civilian control. Uh,
00:27:49.480 that, that is up to the U S government, the Canadian government, they have offices all over
00:27:53.800 the world. They can be criminally prosecuted, um, in Canada. I can mention specifically the laws that
00:27:59.180 they violated in Canada, uh, where they're headquartered, but the civil justice system is in
00:28:04.600 their control. And there are currently, you know, over, let's say nearly 300 victims suing in 25 lawsuits
00:28:10.920 across the U S Canada and the UK, including multiple class action lawsuits on behalf of tens of
00:28:16.760 thousands of child victims. And they're not only suing the company, but they're suing the individual
00:28:20.540 owners of the company. They're also suing their enablers visa and the hedge funds in dozens of
00:28:26.840 these lawsuits are suing the hedge funds that actually provided the money for mind geek to exist
00:28:31.540 and knew the risk they were taking. And instead of saying, no, we don't want to have any part in
00:28:35.740 monetizing child sexual abuse and rape, they said, let's charge 20%, uh, interest on our investment.
00:28:43.000 So we can make a lot of money on this high risk venture. So they're suing them for that. But
00:28:48.680 that's the question is what is, what is holding back justice being fully served where, you know,
00:28:55.200 we have a example of backpage.com in the United States where that website was selling cars.
00:29:01.500 It was also selling children to be trafficked and the justice department actually seized the site.
00:29:07.900 If you go to backpage.com, there's a seal of the department of justice that you,
00:29:11.720 they have seized the site. They're prosecuting and sentencing the owners, I think even this week.
00:29:16.740 So why what's going on with horn?
00:29:19.700 I mean, there could only be two possible bifurcations in terms of causes. One is there is
00:29:26.340 a vested interest not to act. So that would only be if, you know, whomever is, has the power to
00:29:33.520 handle this issue is financially benefiting and doesn't want them. Now that seems a bit too
00:29:38.520 conspiratorial. So could it simply be that the wheels of justice are moving, but they move so slowly
00:29:45.620 that it's, you know, justice delayed is justice denied. Could, could that simply?
00:29:49.760 I think that that, I think you're, I think you're exactly right. And I think it's a matter of putting
00:29:53.680 enough pressure. I think I am a firm advocate. We need multiple strategies to see justice fully
00:29:59.920 served. You know, one is hit them where it hurts in the bank account. I mean, these companies above
00:30:05.120 everything else are making their calculations about what they do and they don't do based on
00:30:10.340 what is best for their bank account. And so victims being able to courageously pursue civil litigation,
00:30:15.720 I think is incredibly important, shining a huge spotlight on this issue, which I hope, you know,
00:30:20.800 the book actually does as it gets to many, many people who've never heard this story and
00:30:25.200 they go on a journey. Yeah. They go on a journey of discovery with me from that moment. I described
00:30:31.100 that night, February 1st, 2020. And, you know, it's told in first person is told in present tense,
00:30:35.920 where you actually go through all of this. You meet the victims, you meet the whistleblowers,
00:30:39.880 you watch the videos with me as I describe them in detail, what was, you know, being shown on the site.
00:30:46.660 You're almost making, you're, you're, you're assuring me that I might not end up reading your
00:30:52.420 book because as cowardly as it might sound, I don't want to be exposed to that kind of stuff, but
00:30:57.320 that's, that's my moral. I felt like it was important, you know, not to go too far because
00:31:03.500 there's so much more that I could have shared, but to do it enough where you understand this isn't
00:31:09.140 pretend. A lot of people want to assume, look, you just don't understand. This is consensual non-consent.
00:31:15.720 This is just rough sex and you're a prude who doesn't understand, right? That that's what, 1.00
00:31:20.860 no, I needed to explain this in a way where, you know, without a doubt, what I know and what the
00:31:28.320 victims know, and that this is real sexual crime. This is not pretend. And so, you know, not going
00:31:35.580 too far, but going far enough where people understand the reality. And so there's a strong
00:31:41.520 trigger warning on the front of the, in the front of the book and people can skip over some of that
00:31:46.900 stuff if it's too much, but I thought that, you know, it's important because this is, I feel the
00:31:53.280 indictment that hasn't been brought yet in, in the United States and Canada and other countries that
00:31:59.460 needs to be with the evidence and the, the proof of what was going on. And so, you know, I hope that
00:32:05.700 this helps raise the level of awareness and puts pressure on those in power to do something.
00:32:11.680 You know, we've got, got the book in the hands of every member of Congress in the U S every state
00:32:16.740 attorney general. And in Canada, we're trying to get it into the hands of MPs and those who can
00:32:23.440 actually take action. There has been criminal action in the U S. So there was a criminal charges
00:32:30.100 that were brought against Pornhub in December of 2023 by the U S federal government, where they
00:32:36.980 were charged with knowingly benefiting and profiting from the transactions of a hundred specific victims
00:32:43.360 in California who are victims of sex trafficking. Unfortunately, they were offered a deferred
00:32:48.160 prosecution agreement by the government where they were told you have to pay $1.8 million and you have
00:32:55.740 to have a government babysitter, basically a monitor over what you're doing for three years. And if you
00:33:01.580 do these things and we won't move forward with our full prosecution, but I feel like that is a slap on
00:33:07.320 the wrist, to be honest. Um, I mean, it's something, but so much more has to be done in order to really
00:33:12.880 bring justice that is commensurate with the harm that has been done to victims.
00:33:17.220 What, what amazes me is that so many of these, you know, orgiastic transgressions, whether they be,
00:33:23.460 I mean, certainly criminal ones or moral ones, how the perpetrators get away with it, right? So
00:33:29.260 the 2008, uh, housing bubble crisis, how many, how many CEOs of those investment banks have gone to
00:33:36.240 prison? Oh, none. Uh, when you think about this, the Sackler family, I had the, the, uh, the author of,
00:33:44.220 of the book that had done an expose on the, you know, the opioid crisis with the Sackler family and how
00:33:50.740 they were involved. Yes. They ended up paying a hefty penalty, but I, if I, I hope I'm not
00:33:55.440 mistaken, but I don't think anybody served prison. So there are really two, two elements of punishment.
00:34:02.560 There is the, as you said, hitting them where it hurts, which is, you know, their bank accounts.
00:34:07.860 But at least from my perspective, maybe I'm too pure, uh, that wouldn't be enough, right? I mean,
00:34:12.600 I, you, you need to go for 80 years to prison because that's, and now it's, it's very confusing to
00:34:19.140 me because you often will hear a story of some football coach. Maybe I'm being too stereotypical,
00:34:25.020 but some football coach who's stopped, uh, because he downloaded child porn and he's got 80 of those
00:34:32.240 photos and he gets sentenced to 37 years. So why isn't it that very easily with the technology that
00:34:38.600 we have today, you can go after all of them very, very quickly in one quick swoop. I mean, you download
00:34:44.280 willingly images of where it's clear that it's a four-year-old being great while we're coming
00:34:50.220 after you. What stops the government from doing that? Right. Well, I a hundred percent agree with
00:34:57.180 you. And I think that I agree as well, that civil justice is not enough. It's something, and I think
00:35:02.380 it's meaningful to victims, right? Cause it's recognizing the harm done, which is so important,
00:35:06.440 but criminal justice, I think is, is crucial, not only for what it does to victims and recognizing the
00:35:13.160 harm and bringing them healing, but also because it becomes a deterrent to future abusers. So if we
00:35:18.340 want to take a step back and say, okay, it's one thing to deal with Pornhub, but how are we going to
00:35:24.380 prevent this from, you know, on the internet, uh, as a whole, right. From there's many user generated
00:35:31.180 porn sites that, um, are operating on the internet and how are we going to stop this? Right. So one way
00:35:39.040 is we need to create a deterrent because for, I call them corporate traffickers, right? It's a risk
00:35:44.020 benefit calculation for them. And they will continue doing this as long as the benefit outweighs the
00:35:50.140 risk. However, when you see a executive held accountable where they pierce that corporate veil
00:35:58.080 and actually hold the owner accountable and they serve prison time, that will create an enormous
00:36:06.640 deterrent for decision makers at these corporations running these websites to maybe do something
00:36:12.720 different. Um, at the same time, we need policy to prevent it in the future as well. So simply
00:36:19.600 common sense policy that says, if you run a user generated porn site, you have to verify the age and
00:36:27.500 the consent of every individual and every video that is uploaded to that site. And I think it's really
00:36:35.480 important for governments to do that, but because these are international corporations, even more
00:36:40.860 important are for financial institutions to implement that policy. So Visa, MasterCard, Discover, PayPal,
00:36:47.400 they say we do not do business with user generated site or websites that distribute user generated porn
00:36:52.580 unless they reliably verify via a third party, the age and consent of those who are in the videos. And when
00:36:58.540 they do that, it's instant, it's global. And these companies are so motivated to maintain their profits
00:37:06.520 that they will comply. And so I think that could be a huge way to stop this in the future.
00:37:13.660 Yeah. Well, as you know, if any of those folks end up going to prison, their time is not easily
00:37:20.080 served when other prisoners find out what they're there, what they're there for. So, uh, you know,
00:37:25.900 even within the context of the prison ecosystem, there is a moral code and the lowest person on
00:37:32.160 that ladder is the child abuser. So in a sense, you almost feel a sense of cosmic justice. If a few
00:37:38.040 of those guys can go in there, face a really rough time in there, and then cosmic justice has been
00:37:43.100 meted out. Let me ask you, I hope you don't want to ask you this, uh, of course, going after the
00:37:49.140 non-consensual adult stuff, the revenge porn, as you said, bad, you know, rape of even an adult is
00:37:55.780 bad of a child. It's horrifying, but do you take a position against porn in general, or you clearly
00:38:05.640 make a delineation? I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm taking no moral stance against porn or porn consumers,
00:38:11.880 or is it all part of one sort of crusade against porn in general? Yeah. I think what's really
00:38:17.720 important is our language, right? Because porn is porn. What I'm talking about is sexual crime. 0.98
00:38:24.300 And in fact, when victims, um, hear it called porn, it's very offensive and, and hurtful. And, you know,
00:38:31.000 that's why we're moving away from even calling it child pornography, instead calling it child sexual
00:38:36.160 abuse material, because there is a difference between legal pornography, which is again, legal.
00:38:43.220 And, you know, if it's done between two consenting adults and it's consumed by adults, that's none of
00:38:49.380 my business. I don't, you know, that's not the aim of my work. That's not the aim of trafficking hub.
00:38:54.020 That's not the aim of the justice defense fund, my organization. We are very specifically and narrowly
00:38:59.140 focused on eliminating the distribution and the monetization of online sexual crime in all that
00:39:05.520 kind of spectrum of, of illegality and non-consensual image-based sexual abuse. Um, that is our
00:39:13.440 position. Um, and really quick, going back to what you were just talking about regarding criminal
00:39:21.020 penalties. I did, there was one thing I did want to add and to understand for viewers that, you know,
00:39:27.680 there's actually a download button that they had placed on every single video. So they were transferring
00:39:35.320 from their servers onto the devices of potentially 5 million users per hour who were consuming content
00:39:42.620 on Pornhub. Every single video had a download button and that would enable the actual transfer
00:39:48.880 of this contraband, this illegal content, including, you know, most obviously it's child sexual abuse,
00:39:56.160 right? It's even illegal for a victim to possess their own child sexual abuse material. And so having that
00:40:04.540 possessed on the servers, then transferred right from there to devices, and it's a, it's not a
00:40:10.860 download like on YouTube when you can download it and then watch it later, it's an actual possession
00:40:16.200 where you could then take that file and you could do what you want with it. You could re-upload it to
00:40:21.340 Pornhub at the time that was happening or to anywhere else across the internet. And in, in the U S and
00:40:27.540 Canada, I mean, that is actually a felony level offense, each instance of that. And I learned
00:40:33.800 something interesting in Canada is that it's even illegal to distribute the depiction of a child,
00:40:41.880 regardless of whether it's real or not. In Canada, it's actually a criminal offense. I don't know if
00:40:47.420 many people knew this to, to transfer, possess the depiction. And you mean like it could be a drawing?
00:40:54.080 What does the picture mean? Yeah. It means that it would appear to be a real child, but it may not
00:40:59.360 be right. So it could be an 18 year old that looks like they're 13. And consider this, that teen was
00:41:08.760 one of the top searched terms on Pornhub for years in a row. And these teens, right? Like think about
00:41:15.560 the word teen. The only teens that are legal are 18 and 19. But many of these videos that you would
00:41:22.020 see on Pornhub appeared to be very young braces, pigtails, flat chest, no makeup. And those videos
00:41:30.560 that were depictions were interspersed with videos of real child sexual abuse. So I'm just putting that
00:41:37.400 out there for people in Canada, as far as the criminal code goes. I mean, there's a huge amount
00:41:42.940 of liability there. And besides the fact that in Canada and in the US, it's mandatory to report
00:41:50.740 child sexual abuse to the authorities when you're aware of it as a corporation. And it's a criminal
00:41:55.920 offense in Canada. I think it's seven years in prison that you can get if you don't report.
00:42:00.620 And we have testimony from the heads of the leading child protection organizations in Canada,
00:42:05.340 in the US, as well as depositions that were taken of employees that now prove that Pornhub went 13
00:42:12.640 years without reporting a single instance of known child sexual abuse to authorities.
00:42:18.140 Again, it's illegal to do that. And we can think about how many children could have been rescued from
00:42:23.920 situations of abuse if they were actually doing what they should have been doing and reporting.
00:42:27.980 Are there any... I mean, you earlier told us about the haunting story of that 15-year-old who ended up
00:42:37.120 living in her car. I'm afraid to ask, what is the conclusion of that story? But you can answer
00:42:43.020 that. Or are there any other positive stories? Here's a story of Linda who went through a horrible
00:42:49.480 ordeal. She's now married. She has three kids. And she's a neurosurgeon. Because it always
00:42:55.960 gives people a sense of purpose to know that there is a way out of the infinite darkness.
00:43:03.120 Well, I would say in the case of Serena, I couldn't be more proud of what she's done to
00:43:08.580 help bring justice to herself and to so many other victims. So not only did she courageously share her
00:43:16.820 story in the New York Times article that really blew this up in 2020, but she is suing. And I say
00:43:23.680 she's suing the literal hell out of Pornhub, its owners, Visa, the hedge funds. And she's making 1.00
00:43:29.200 enormous progress in what she's doing to get justice and to help prevent this in the future. 0.99
00:43:36.120 So she's progressing in her life. She has support. She has advocacy support. And she's trying to
00:43:45.060 get a business up and running with something that she cares about. So I don't want to go
00:43:50.720 into too many details about her. But she is trying to move forward and also just courageously. Talk
00:43:57.800 about the honey badger. I mean, Serena, the one that was actually abused, going and taking it on
00:44:04.580 and head on, even though she's faced a lot of backlash and attacks that I talk about in my book
00:44:10.680 with even her specific story of things that happened to her after she spoke out. And then
00:44:15.460 there's other victims too that have done, that are doing the same, that a 12 year old boy in Alabama,
00:44:21.800 he was drugged, overpowered and raped in 23 videos. The rapist, his name is Rocky Shea Franklin. He's in
00:44:28.080 prison for 40 years and he uploaded those rape videos to Pornhub and they were being sold, paid to
00:44:33.440 download content in a profit sharing partnership with Pornhub. And police reached out multiple times to
00:44:40.600 get those down. Pornhub ignored the police until the third time when they finally removed it after
00:44:45.600 seven months. But that victim, that boy is currently suing Pornhub in Alabama. And he just filed his
00:44:53.360 amended complaint a couple of weeks ago. And it's powerful. And I think that if it goes to trial,
00:45:00.200 I mean, these could be billion dollar judgments for what's happened to these victims. And
00:45:04.880 I'm anxious to see what, what happens. Incredible. I mean, it, it points to something
00:45:09.880 that I've talked about, this idea of faux victimhood, which of course, none of the people
00:45:14.680 that you're talking about belong in that category. They're, they're the epitome of real victims and
00:45:20.240 how in our society today, we tend to lionize all these fake victimhood story. And I always tell
00:45:26.960 people, you know, I grew up, I'm, I'm a, my childhood was in the Lebanese civil war and we
00:45:32.760 faced some very, very difficult circumstances. And I always tell people that, you know, it, it cheapens
00:45:38.080 the victimhood narratives of actual victims. When you try to ascend the social hierarchy with your
00:45:45.720 fake, you know, Jussie, Jussie Smollett stories. And then you hear stories of these, you know,
00:45:51.600 unimaginable victimhood stories, real victimhood stories, and that people can still persevere. It's,
00:45:56.760 it's certainly it's, it's invigorating in a sense, because you know that there's always a brighter
00:46:02.620 day tomorrow. Okay. Let's suppose that we press the magic button, we wave the magic wand, and we got
00:46:10.220 rid of all of these diabolical issues. What would Laila wake up tomorrow to tackle next, given her
00:46:19.320 infinite honey? I think I would just take a break, play with my kids, have time to read really good
00:46:25.840 books. And you know, I, what a wonderful day that would be when there's no more work to do in this
00:46:33.860 particular fight. So it's not, so the reason why I'm asking this is that there are other injustices
00:46:42.660 that exist that could just as easily invoke your ire and your indignation. So that if I solved
00:46:50.700 pancreatic cancer tomorrow, that doesn't mean that I need to retire, maybe the next day I'll tackle
00:46:55.440 diabetes. So it for you, is it a singular issue, which is, of course, gigantic and infinite in its
00:47:02.500 and how evil it is, but that would you given sort of your own sense of purpose and meaning always want
00:47:09.780 to look for the next battle? Or would you say, look, I've contributed enough, I got rid of child sex 1.00
00:47:16.400 trafficking, mic drop, I'm done, I'm retiring at the beach in Newport Beach?
00:47:22.540 I don't know what would happen at that point. I mean, it's definitely a situation we have to imagine,
00:47:30.080 right? Because it's not going to end tomorrow. It probably, well, I could probably fight this until
00:47:36.140 I'm old and gray and on my deathbed, right? But in that case, you know, I have just felt,
00:47:43.220 again, you know, for so long, just this passion for this very specific and narrow issue and even
00:47:49.620 getting even more narrow, even in the last four years of going just after a particular
00:47:55.800 behemoth, right? Like Pornhub and its parent company, MindGeek, and to the point where it's
00:48:02.900 like, I'm a broken record, just going after the same thing again and again. And it's even gotten
00:48:09.180 more narrow, right? Even than generally sex trafficking at large in the world. And that
00:48:15.980 feels to me to be the place, you know, where I want to just keep focusing my attention. And when it's
00:48:24.000 when it's over, God willing, that there is a day when that happens, I guess we'll see, you know,
00:48:31.420 if there's something else that stirs my heart the way that this has. And if that were to happen,
00:48:38.260 then maybe there's a new journey on a different part, different issue. But for now, this is this
00:48:45.020 is it. From your lips to God's word, God's ear. This is the book people take down, go read it. It's
00:48:51.800 a fantastic book. You know, if every person had your mindset, we wouldn't be facing all of the
00:48:57.280 problems that we are facing in the West today. Layla, thank you so much for coming. Stay on the
00:49:01.960 line so we could say goodbye offline. Real pleasure. Thank you for having me. It was just a wonderful
00:49:07.200 conversation and I really appreciated it. Thank you. Thank you, Layla.