The Jordan Harbinger Show
1143: Laila Mickelwait | Exposing Pornhub's Dark Trafficking Empire
Tue, 22 Apr 2025
Big porn sites enabled trafficking for profit. Here, Takedown author Laila Mickelwait shares how her fight against Pornhub led to industry-wide reform.Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1143What We Discuss with Laila Mickelwait:For over a decade, internet porn content provider Pornhub knowingly profited from illegal content with minimal moderation (10 staff per shift reviewing 700+ videos each) while requiring 15+ flags before review and tracking profits from questionable categories.Sex trafficking includes deception/coercion in monetized sexual acts. For minors, any commercial sexual exploitation automatically constitutes trafficking regardless of consent.Financial pressure proved most effective in Laila Mickelwait's crusade against Porhub's shady practices — credit card companies cutting ties forced the company to remove 80% of content overnight, demonstrating how targeting enablers can be as effective as targeting perpetrators.Third-party age and consent verification for everyone in every video would prevent most exploitation while protecting privacy.Strategic activism works — Laila succeeded by gathering evidence, building coalitions with victims and experts, and applying targeted pressure despite threats and harassment. Her example shows that determined individuals can challenge harmful systems by identifying pressure points and maintaining focus on accountability.And much more...And if you're still game to support us, please leave a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: jordanharbinger.com/dealsSign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course!Subscribe to our once-a-week Wee Bit Wiser newsletter today and start filling your Wednesdays with wisdom!Do you even Reddit, bro? Join us at r/JordanHarbinger!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Chapter 1: 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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Chapter 2: How did Pornhub enable and profit from illegal and trafficked content?
Yeah, that's happened. And yeah, there's been kind of a lot of stress on my family through all of this as well. But it doesn't even compare to some of the stuff that the victims themselves have been attacked and had happened to them. And what they've had to go through in identifying themselves and speaking out has been so much worse.
There was that strange... Possibly not a coincidence that happened where a couple of the victims came out speaking about this and then weren't they attacked somehow?
Yeah, it was at the same time within days of each other in different parts of the world. There were separate victims who had come forward publicly. A lot of the victims were coming forward anonymously and being connected to attorneys. I mean, at the time I had victims coming forward anonymously.
As the petition was going viral and all the news stories and everything, almost on a daily basis, victims were coming forward. But some of them said, I'm going to put my name out there. I'm going to speak publicly about this. And it was three of them. And they were in different parts of the world. Within days of each other, each one of them was physically attacked. And they were just roughed up.
It was an intimidation thing. One of them sent pictures of notes that she was getting on her windshield after work that were talking about her sexual abuse and things like that. And it was frightening.
It cannot be a coincidence. It's not like somebody got mugged in Spain and another person had a threat happen in Baltimore. It's like very specific.
Yeah. And that's the thing is that you think that how could this happen? How could this be a coincidence? But at the same time, you can't prove that it wasn't a coincidence. So you feel like in the sense I felt like I was going crazy. What is happening here is how could this be real? But it was like this was actually happening.
Dealing with organized crime, though, that's the thing. I'm comfortable saying that because it's a company that engages in criminal activity, knowingly or otherwise, depending on who you ask. By the way, you've been a bit of a vigilante in the past as well, yeah? There's the plumber who scammed your sister's car transmission. Tell me a little bit about that. Because this is in your DNA, right?
This is something you do.
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