Victims Say Pornhub Profits From Non-Consensual Videos

The Pornhub website is shown on a computer screen in Toronto on Wednesday, Dec. 16, 2020. (THE CANADIAN PRESS)

Victims whose lives were torn apart when sexually-exposed images and videos of themselves were posted to Pornhub told a House committee last week that the company has profited from videos made without consent.

Victoria Galy told the House of Commons ethics committee on Feb. 19 how she was pitched into tremendous emotional distress, became suicidal, and even suffered from memory loss when she discovered pornographic videos of her had been uploaded without her consent to Pornhub, a privately-owned Canadian pornography site.

“To think of the amount of money that Pornhub has made on my trauma, date rape, and sexual exploitation make me sick to my stomach,” she said.

Galy, who resides in the U.S. state of Tennessee, said she discovered the videos on the site in 2018, with many labeled as “teen” and showing a person being drugged or intoxicated.

In 2018, Galy had reported roughly 30 videos to Pornhub, but only three of them were taken down at the time. To delete the remaining videos, Pornhub requested she submit a “DMCA takedown notice"—a copyright infringement notification.

According to Pornhub’s policy, someone who wishes to remove a video from the website must provide “adequate information by which we, and the uploader(s) of any video(s) you remove, can contact you,” which includes the applicant’s name, postal address, telephone number, and email address.

Pornhub did not respond to a request for comment from The Epoch Times.

Galy said the videos in question had accumulated over 8 million views on Pornhub alone, and because its users are allowed to download materials from the website and re-upload them again and again, they become impossible to remove from the internet.

Galy said the company had ignored her various attempts to prove herself as the person in those videos and refused to respond until she filed a lawsuit against them, an experience shared by two other women—identified as Witness 1 and Witness 2—who also testified at the ethics committee hearing.

The witnesses said their non-consensual videos and material with unlawful acts were “top rated” and encouraged on Pornhub and similar streaming websites.

“Sexual assault is not an anomaly on the porn site, it is a genre,” Witness 1 said. “These leaves little incentive for these sites to moderate such content.”

Galy said Pornhub has not only made it difficult to remove non-consensual videos, but that the company also made it hard for victims to find justice. She told the committee that Pornhub has training articles teaching perpetrators how use editing apps and virtual platforms to make it hard for victims to prove their cases.

“Pornhub to this day has active videos showing this ‘toy’ being used which only educate predators in the ways of avoiding detection by the authorities,” Galy said. “I do feel Pornhub has become my human trafficker, and they have been relentless in doing so.”

“I refuse to be a victim any further, I will advocate for myself, and for all the other victims who may not be able to, or may not want to stand up, or who may have committed suicide as we will never know.”

In December 2020, Pornhub’s Montreal-based parent company, Mindgeek, came under investigation after The New York Times reported about alleged unlawful content hosted on the website.

Pornhub said in a statement that it had banned unverified users from posting new content and had suspended materials that were not created by members of its partner and model programs. The company claimed its innocence and that it was being targeted by organizations that are dedicated to abolishing pornography.

Following the NY Times report, credit card companies MasterCard and Visa had announced in December 2020 that they will no longer allow their services to be used to process payments on Pornhub.