A complaint was filed Thursday, June 17 in California by 34 women who accuse the website Pornhub and its parent company of knowingly uploading videos where they are victims of rape and other sexual abuse, including when they were minors .
"This is a case which concerns rape, not pornography,"
insists this civil complaint, of which AFP has had a copy.
Read also: In the turmoil, the PornHub site deletes more than half of its videos
Lawyers representing the 34 plaintiffs accuse Pornhub and its parent company MindGeek, one of the world's adult internet giants, of being
"a classic criminal enterprise"
whose business model is based on the financial exploitation of non-consensual sexual content. Of the 34 complainants, who reside in the United States or abroad, all but one wished to remain anonymous. Fourteen of them say they were minors at the time of the facts and as such were
"victims of child sex trafficking"
. All blame Pornhub forhave taken advantage of videos that have been uploaded without their knowledge and therefore without their consent - often by boyfriends or attackers - and claim damages for the damages suffered.
Child pornography and rape
Serena Fleites, who has spoken publicly in the press, is the only complainant to be named.
In 2014, she learned that a
"sexually explicit"
video
that her boyfriend forced her to make when she was only 13 had been placed on Pornhub.
Despite the title unambiguously referring to a
"13-year-old brunette
,
"
the video remained online until the teenager, posing as her mother, asked Pornhub to remove it.
The platform had taken several weeks to run, leaving ample time for the video to be broadcast, deplores the complaint.
Read also: Child pornography: Pornhub removes content from “unverified” users
According to the plaintiffs' lawyers, the MindGeek company owns more than a hundred pornographic sites, specialized production houses and various corresponding brands, including Pornhub, RedTube, Tube8 and YouPorn.
According to them, the group has some 3.5 billion visits each month.
Solicited by AFP, MindGeek did not react Thursday evening but refuted its accusations to American media, calling them
"totally absurd"
and
"categorically false"
.
Pornhub had already found itself in turmoil last year after the publication of a
New York Times article
accusing it of hosting child pornography and rape videos, which it had already denied. In the process, the giant of pornography had announced new measures, wanting to be
"at the forefront in the fight and eradication of illegal content"
.
