Laila Mickelwait
speaker
585 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Apr 2025
Laila Mickelwait’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
They did want me to tone it down. And I did. I did. But also I just said, look, at the same time, it has to bring true. I didn't want to traumatize people. So I'm so glad that you said that. I did want people to experience it the way that I experienced it. They could feel how I felt.
It's a very complicated ownership structure that we still don't fully understand even today. But they were based in Luxembourg for tax purposes. They had offices or moderation offices in Cyprus. They had offices in Romania, in London, British Virgin Islands. They had their headquarters in Canada. So that's where they had most of their employees and they were operating.
So that was their headquarters. They had offices in L.A. Today they have offices in Texas as well. They were all over the world. And so in that way, they did that on purpose in a way to avoid responsibility in any one place.
They were hiding. And not only hiding money, they were hiding themselves. They were hiding their own identities from the public for years.
They had, I mean, it was like 200 sister companies, related sides, PO boxes, bank accounts, companies that would appear and then disappear and appear and disappear and interrelated and. It's just very complicated. That was probably the part of all of this that I understood the least. That was the most difficult for me to wrap my head around.
Forensic accountants and lawyers. And they did that. And the lawyers that are suing Pornhub today, they took two years of jurisdictional discovery. They went in and they've tried to understand all this. And in doing that, they actually were able to now rope in the hedge funds to the lawsuits.
The victims are suing, and they're not only suing Pornhub and its individual owners, they're suing the hedge funds, they're suing Visa, and trying to hold everybody accountable for all of this. Good. Oh, Visa?
No, it was for even the ads. For buying the ads, for selling the premium memberships, for the pay to download content, all of that was being monetized by the credit card companies. And PayPal, PayPal actually disengaged with them. When that London Sunday Times story came out, I told you about, PayPal was like, we're out.
Well, they said they were. They said they were so concerned and we were against this kind of content. But it was a lot of talk. It was really hard.
Yeah, they were charging a lot, you know, because these are high risk transactions. So they get to charge more per transaction on porn transactions.
I've heard certain cards or different financial transactions are even more than that. So significantly more. And what was interesting about all this, you know, at first we said, okay, looking at this, how do we move them? How do we go after this? And yes, of course it was like public shaming, but one of the things that was early on we understood was it was the credit card companies.
And we knew this because there was a site called Backpage.com a number of years ago. It was kind of like Craigslist where they were selling kids. And one of the things that was really effective was going after the credit card company. So we had that. But then the former owner of Pornhub came forward and
Fabian Tillman, the guy that had that $362 million loan to roll up the porn industry, and he's the one who put Pornhub on the map. And he had sold the company, I think, six or seven years before all this started. And he came forward to me in the summer of 2020 to say he wanted to help. And one of the things that he said was, go after the credit card companies.
The only thing they care about is the credit card companies. That was a confirmation.
Yeah. Especially if that's their motivating factor. That's all they care about. That's the reason why we saw the payoffs that we did later on in the book with them taking down content.
So I learned a lot about Firas through dozens of hours of conversations with company insiders from the company experiencing him as an employee, but also people who were close to the family. But I learned a lot about his personality, and it was interesting. I tried to be as detailed and honest as I could about him to describe his character, who he was.
He was actually very dedicated to his family at the same time.
Willing to completely exploit other children and other people.
Yeah. I hope that people really do get to know as much as you can because they did hide themselves.
So one of the things I really wanted to do as much as humanly possible was let the world know who are these people, what are they like, and truly expose them because at the same time that they were exposing for profit the bodies of unwilling victims since 2007 and profiting from that, they were hiding themselves. So they were using fake names like VP of Pornhub.
Showing 121–140 of 585 · page 7 of 30
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