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MindGeek portal Pornhub: "Classic criminal company"
Photo: picture alliance / empics
Dozens of women in the United States have filed lawsuits against the porn platform Pornhub for recordings of rape and other forms of sexual violence that were available on Pornhub.
The 34 plaintiffs accuse the parent company MindGeek of having created a marketplace for depictions of child abuse and "any other form" of non-consensual sex with Pornhub.
You are demanding compensation.
In their lawsuit, they refer to MindGeek as a "classic criminal company" whose business model is based on the exploitation of recordings showing sexual violence.
"This case is about rape, not pornography," says the lawsuit that AFP has received.
Pornhub is believed to be "the largest unregulated child pornography store in North America and far beyond."
Except for one woman, all applicants want to remain anonymous.
Fourteen of them say they were minors when they were filmed for films later distributed on Pornhub.
One plaintiff posed as her mother to have the clip deleted
Plaintiff Serena Fleites reported that she found out in 2014 that a "sexually explicit nude video", which her boyfriend at the time urged her to do when she was only 13, ended up on Pornhub without her consent.
Pornhub only removed the film after impersonating her mother and demanding the removal.
In the meantime, the recordings have been downloaded and re-uploaded several times by different users, so that she had to request removal each time.
The plaintiffs' lawyers also accuse MindGeek of subjecting victims of sexual violence and exploitation to some form of psychological terror with threats of violence and death.
According to a report in the New York Times, according to which many of the 6.8 million new videos on Pornhub every year show child abuse and non-consensual sex, the payment service providers Visa and Mastercard stopped working with the porn platform in December.
Pornhub, which claims to have 130 million daily users, had rejected the allegations and announced a series of measures to combat illegal content.
pbe / AFP
