The CEO and COO of PornHub parent company MindGeek have resigned.
The resignations were reportedly prompted by a damning report made by The New Yorker which exposed the company’s most popular enterprise PornHub as having hosted images of child rape, rape of trafficking victims, thousands of results for search terms referring to the sexual abuse and explotation of underage girls, and otherwise sexually explicit nonconsensual videos “for years”.
The report also exposed the company’s reticence in removing explicit material depicting the sexual exploitation of a 15 year old girl.
CEO Feras Antoon and COO David Tassillo oversaw the running of several internet companies including, Pornhub, RedTube, YouPorn, and Brazzers,
The New Yorker report states that these sites “received approximately 4.5 billion visits each month in 2020, according to a company spokesperson—almost double Google and Facebook combined.”
MindGeek had claimed that PornHub does not post content before approval by an internal review panel, however anti-porn activist and founder of ExodusCry, Laila Mickelwait, related how she
“uploaded a video of a darkened corner of her bedroom to Pornhub. It appeared to go live almost instantly.” Continuing, “ No one had verified who she was, her age, or what her video contained.”
Exodus Cry is an American Christian non-profit advocacy organization seeking the abolition of the legal commercial sex industry.
MindGeek describes itself as an “Industry-leading exclusive technologies driving unparalleled performance”. Its headquarters are located in Luxemburg, and the company’s revenue is reported to be in the region of $97 billion a year.
Now former COO of Pornhub David Tassilo, was named in the so called ‘Panama Papers’ as having registered companies using shareholders’ names, although the Montreal resident claimed that his actions were in “accordance with the law”.
Last year The Daily Mail reported that Tassilo “was the sole owner of Appscrutiny LLC and Application Management LLC, which were both registered in Delaware,” and that he “used nominee shareholders and directors to create the companies, which allowed him to hide his identity.”
Allegations of this nature were first widely exposed by New York Times journalist Nicholas Kristof in his op-ed entitled “The Children of PornHub”, he wrote that PornHub was “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.” In its defense P