Nearly three dozen women have filed a lawsuit in the US against adult video website Pornhub, accusing it and its parent company of knowingly profiting from footage depicting rape and sexual exploitation, including of minors.
Lawyers representing the 34 plaintiffs accuse the online giant - one of the world's largest adult video websites - of creating a teeming marketplace for child pornography and "every other form" of nonconsensual sexual content, and want the company to pay damages.
They accuse MindGeek, the controversial adult entertainment empire that runs Pornhub, of being a "classic criminal enterprise" with a business model based on exploiting non-consensual sexual content.
"This is a case about rape, not pornography," the complaint said, describing the website as "likely the largest non-regulatory repository of child pornography in North America and well beyond".
All but one of the plaintiffs, who reside both in the US and abroad, wished to remain anonymous.
Fourteen said they were minors when they were filmed and should be considered "a victim of child sex trafficking".
Michael Bowe, a lawyer representing the women, told CBS News the court could order MindGeek to pay hundreds of millions to his clients.
Serena Fleites, the only plaintiff to be named, said that in 2014 she learned that "a nude, sexually explicit video" that her boyfriend had coerced her to make when she was only 13 years old had been uploaded to Pornhub without her consent.
The video remained online until the teen, posing as her mother, asked Pornhub to remove it.
Yet the video was not taken down for several weeks, the lawsuit said, and during that time it was downloaded and reuploaded by several different users, with each video requiring a fresh request to remove it.
The plaintiffs' lawyers accuse MindGeek of operating a "gaslighting campaign" online in a bid to discredit the victims, as well as making "threats of physical violence and death" against them.
They are also suing Visa Inc - one of the world's largest payments processing companies - for "knowingly" profiting from trafficking in providing merchant services to MindGeek.
Both Visa and Mastercard suspended processing payments for Pornhub in December, after a New York Times article accused the site of hosting illegal content, including child pornography and rape videos.
According to the suit, MindGeek owns more than 100 pornographic sites, including Pornhub, RedTube, Tube8 and YouPorn, and sees some 3.5 billion visits each month.
Montreal-based MindGeek described the suit's accusation that it is running a "criminal enterprise" as "utterly absurd, completely reckless and categorically false," according to US media.
Pornhub, which claims 130 million visitors a day, has denied allegations of trafficking and announced a series of measures to combat illegal content.
Mindgeek operates four Dublin-based companies including MG Billing Ltd.
In January, Grant Thornton resigned as auditors of the Dublin companies following allegations of unlawful content on the Pornhub website.
MG Billing Ltd generated revenues here of approximately €1.1bn between 2012 and 2018.
The Dublin-based company collects subscriptions from premium users for the Mindgeek global porn empire and revenues for 2018 totaled €185.5m - or a weekly average of €3.5m.
Along with resigning as auditors to MG Billing Ltd, Grant Thornton resigned as auditors to three other Mindgeek companies, Nutaku Publishing Ltd, Mirmay Ltd and Liquidum Ltd.
The bulk of Mindgeek's 1,800 employees are based in Montreal and the company is headquartered in Luxembourg.
Canadian woman says husband uploaded video of sexual assault while she was unconscious
Separately in May, Canada's privacy commissioner announced an investigation into Pornhub over allegations that videos were posted without the consent of the people featured.
It followed complaints from women like Rachel, who for years had no idea she had been sexually assaulted by her own husband as she lay unconscious.
She only made the grim discovery last August when she stumbled across a video of the attack that had been shared all over the internet.
"It was devastating," the 38-year-old Canadian told AFP. "I mean, once it's out there, it's out there forever."
Floored by the revelation, nauseated and frantic, Rachel noticed the footage had been freely available since her husband apparently posted it in 2017 on Pornhub.
She called the police, setting in motion a frustrating battle to get all traces of the footage expunged. Yet nearly a year later, her attack is still being watched online.
Although Pornhub took the video down, it had already spread to countless other sites, the social work student from the western Canadian province of Alberta told AFP.
Rachel, whose real name is being withheld, says her nightmare began when she found photographs on a hard drive that led her to her husband's Pornhub account and the video.
Rachel, who says she is teetotal, believes she was slipped pills that knocked her out as she has no memory of the assault.
The four minutes of footage was tagged with the search term "sleeping pills".
The video was seen more than 40,000 times on Pornhub, Rachel said, and spread to other sites, with the total views spiraling past 200,000.
"After that, I just quit counting because it just kind of went on forever," she said, recalling that a Google search generated at least ten pages of results.
The morning after her discovery, Rachel went to the police, and says the video disappeared from Pornhub days later.
It was eventually removed from other sites operated by MindGeek. But it can still be tracked down via a straightforward internet search.
A spokesman for MindGeek told AFP content providers were not allowed to use the term "sleeping pills" when tagging videos.
Pornhub was accused in December in a New York Times article of posting illegal content online, including child pornography and rape videos.
The site denied the allegations and announced a series of measures to combat illegal content.
Only users whose identity has been verified are able to upload content, Pornhub says in a press release on the site. But downloads are still allowed for paying customers when a verified content provider has given permission.
And neither the age nor the consent of the people filmed is verified, says Rachel. Pornhub did not respond to a request to comment on this specific issue.
In any case, the reforms would have changed "almost nothing," says Rachel, noting that anyone can make a copy of a video without downloading it, simply by filming the computer screen as it plays.
"The fact that people were able to download it from Pornhub means that it's on hard drives and it can just keep coming back. And it does," she said.
Rachel, who had split from her husband before finding the video, told AFP she has struggled with the emotional fallout from her ordeal.
"Watching the video that night, I just felt so sick and that feeling has never gone away," she said, adding that she now suffers from an anxiety disorder.
"It's been hard to sleep," she told AFP, describing frequent disturbing dreams and regularly waking in a panic.
The stress and anxiety are with her "all the time," causing nausea and other stomach problems, she said.
Her case and others like it led Canadian politicians in February to grill MindGeek executives about alleged abuses, while Mastercard and Visa suspended payments on Pornhub following a public outcry.
The country's privacy commissioner also announced an investigation into the allegations.
"We are working to ensure that platforms have a proactive duty to monitor and quickly remove illegal content, before it causes further harm," a spokeswoman for Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault said.
Rachel says the police have arrested her husband and charged him with sexual assault and distributing intimate images without consent.
Meanwhile, she continues to scour the internet for copies of the video, spending a few days each month trying to get them taken down.
"You're on your own for that. There is nobody to call, there's nobody that helps you," she said.
"You can look up who owns these little anonymous porn sites and kind of get the web administrator's address, but you send these emails off ... and nothing changes. There's nothing you can do about that."
