1143: Laila Mickelwait | Exposing Pornhub's Dark Trafficking Empire
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Who is Laila Mickelwait and what is her mission against Pornhub?
This is an important episode with a really great guest. Here we go with Layla Micklewaite. By the way, I read the book. I enjoyed it. That's a weird thing to say, but I did enjoy it. It was well-written and good. The payoffs are satisfying.
Thank you. Yeah.
Let's start from the beginning. So you're on a mission to take down Pornhub. That's a heavy lift. What sparked this?
Yeah. I mean, it wasn't something that 10 years ago I thought in 2025, this is what I'm going to be doing. But at the same time, I had been preparing for it my whole life. So in the context of over 15 years in the fight against sex trafficking, I was paying attention to the headlines and I was noticing that there was a trend that it wasn't just happening offline. It was being filmed. It was being monetized online. And so there was this intersection between what I call the big porn industry, and we can talk about that, and child sexual abuse and trafficking. And at the end of 2019, I started to notice some really concerning headlines. One story that I kind of credit to the launch of the trafficking hub movement was a story that
about a 15-year-old girl from Broward County, Florida, and she had been missing for an entire year, and she was finally found when her distraught mother was tipped off by a Pornhub user that he recognized her daughter on the site. Oh, gosh. And she was found in 58 videos being raped on Pornhub, and police actually were able to locate her, and they recognized the guy's face from the assaults in the video, and she was rescued from his apartment. She had been impregnated. It was like this horror story.
So she got kidnapped and then put in videos? Yes.
No, she had been missing. So I think she might have ran away. Nobody could find her for a year. And this is how she was found, that her mom was notified that her daughter was on Pornhub. And she was actually in videos that were being paid to download. So it was a profit-sharing relationship with Pornhub, and they were splitting the profit from the sale of her rape videos.
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