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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It was like intimidation tactics. It's so dumb, though. It's so juvenile. Right? Yeah. I currently have a situation right now, and it's not as nefarious as this, but just an AI thing saying that I'm a porn star using an interview and describing this particular scene that I was in and whatnot. But yeah, all of these things that were happening, they were intimidation, harassment.
Some of them I can tie directly back to the company. Some of them are just people who are financially incentivized, who support the company, who don't want to see revenue disturbed or angry that this is happening.
Yeah, random people. doing this kind of thing. Yeah. But that was certainly happening. But I always had this feeling of this may be uncomfortable. This may be painful. But when you're going through, it's like when there's purpose to it, it's so much easier to go through. And when you're seeing progress, fine, go for it. We're making progress.
That was hard. We argued and I brought the evidence to the VPs of Visa and MasterCard. It wasn't until Nick Kristof released his groundbreaking article called The Children of Pornhub. He ends that article with these words. Pornhub is Jeffrey Epstein times a thousand. And he specifically called out the credit card companies in his article.
Why are you still doing business with a company that distributes rape videos to the world? And at that point, there were thousands of follow on articles to that. And the pressure was on. There was journalists calling Visa and asked, why are you still doing it? Bill Ackman, who is a billionaire hedge fund manager, and he read The Children of Pornhub. He was incensed. He has daughters of his own.
And he reached out and I got connected with him and he learned the story. And not only did he just go on Twitter to express his dismay and call out Visa MasterCard, he knew the CEO of MasterCard from the tennis circuit. And he made a phone call. He sent some texts. He said, this is trafficking going on. Are you going to do the right thing?
And Ajay Banga, who was the CEO of MasterCard at the time, said, I'm on it. And he was on it. And he actually, at that point, cut off the credit card companies and then Visa followed, Discover followed. However, this was the time when they then, in a panic, because this was the worst thing that could happen to Pornhub, they took down 80% of the entire website overnight. It was gone.
Over 10 million videos, over 30 million images disappeared. in what Financial Times called probably the biggest takedown of content in internet history. And that was 24 hours, all their unverified content was gone because they wanted to try to woo back the credit card companies.
Right, although they actually didn't. But however, so this all happened and made huge headlines, but I found out that two weeks later, The credit card companies quietly snuck back to the advertising arm of Pornhub. So it was kind of behind the scenes because people don't see those transactions.
Owned by Pornhub, owned by MindGeek. And then it was round two. It was two more years of fighting. And it was only until Bill Ackman got involved again. We went on SquawkBox, calling out CEO Al Kelly of Visa. After Visa was not let out of their motion to dismiss in the case where Serena, Serena was a young teen. She was exploited on the site. Her videos were uploaded again and again.
Millions of views. She would beg for the videos to come down. She'd be hassled. They would say, prove that you're underage in the video. Prove that you're a victim. She didn't have to prove that when it was being uploaded. And it sent her on a spiral of despair. She dropped out of school. She was a straight-A student before all this happened. Never kissed a boy before.
She dropped out of school from bullying. She got addicted to drugs to try to numb the pain. She tried to kill herself multiple times.
She wound up homeless living out of a car. But she sued Pornhub. And not only did she sue Pornhub, she sued its individual owners, the hedge funds, and Visa. And Visa lost their motion to dismiss her case. And that is when everything...
It's still ongoing.
Yeah.
But they lost the motion. And that was when the pressure was on. So then we publicly were calling out Al Kelly. Her lawyer was on Squawk Box as well. And finally, he made a personal statement. And he said, I'm a father. And we're finally, you know, cutting off Pornhub once and for all.
Yeah.
But then it happened and that got demonetized by the credit card companies, lost all mainstream advertisers. All of that happened.
Yeah. Today they have bank wires that they can pay in crypto is the way that they are monetizing the sites. But enablers is the key word. There are the bad actors and then there are the enablers, those who allow them to continue
And so as much as it's important to hold what I call corporate traffickers, mega pimps accountable for the exploitation, criminal exploitation happening, you also have to hold accountable their enablers.
Showing 161–180 of 585 · page 9 of 30
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