An Alabama mother is suing the parent company of Pornhub — the world’s largest distributor of pornography — after footage of her 12-year-old son being sexually assaulted amassed hundreds of thousands of views on the site.
“Make no mistake — this lawsuit does not concern the voluntary act of consensual sex between adults, with the distribution occurring through their consent,” the lawsuit alleges, according to AL.com. “The victims depicted in these images were obviously children.”
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The legal complaint, filed last month in the U.S. District Court for Alabama’s Middle District, went on to state the footage was disseminated to “millions of viewers across the world” despite law enforcement officers’ consistent “pleas to take them down, because they contained child pornography.”
In addition to naming Pornhub’s parent company, MindGeek, the mother also listed in her lawsuit 36-year-old Rocky Shay Franklin, who was sentenced in May to 40 years in federal prison for the sexual exploitation of a child, advertising child pornography, and distributing child pornography, legally referred to as child sexual abuse material.
The mother alleged in her suit that Franklin lived with her and her kids for four months in 2018, during which time he raped at least two children, including a 12-year-old boy, whom he “overpowered,” drugged, and filmed, per the legal filing.
Later that year, in May and October, Franklin purportedly uploaded multiple videos to Pornhub from Montgomery and Greenville, Alabama. Ultimately, more than 20 videos were listed on the website, generating an “astonishing” 188,000 views and more than 1,100 subscribers to the Pornhub channel, according to the lawsuit. One of the clips amassed more than 50,000 views and another was sold for $15.
“This lawsuit concerns perhaps one of the most disturbing courses of conduct imaginable: the exploitation of child molestation for profit,” the lawsuit states. “The MindGeek defendants are those entities who utilized their platform(s) in collaboration with Defendant Franklin to disseminate obvious images and videos of child molestation, thereby profiting from their dissemination.”
According to The Daily Wire, MindGeek was quoted as saying, “We sympathize with all victims of abuse. We have zero tolerance for illegal material.”
This latest lawsuit against Pornhub and MindGeek further corroborates the allegations leveled against Pornhub by anti-trafficking activist Laila Mickelwait, who told CBN’s Faithwire in early 2020 that the purveyor of pornography has been “profiting off crime scenes.”
“I think it’s something that we’ve known all along, but right now, we have evidence of what is actually taking place,” she said of Pornhub, which draws in more than 110 million unique visitors every single day.
Just a few months before Mickelwait offered her comments, a man from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, was arrested after authorities discovered almost 60 explicit videos on Pornhub of a missing, underage teenager. Additionally, there was an ongoing case involving 22 women who were deceived, coerced, and blackmailed by pornographer Michael Pratt into performing various sexual acts for videos that were subsequently uploaded to the pornography website without their consent for a channel called “Girls Do Porn.”
From 2019 to present day, Pornhub and MindGeek have faced intense scrutiny, leading the platform to scrub millions of videos from its websites — a move that came amid financial pressure caused by credit card companies severing their connections to the pornography provider.
The saga continued over the summer, too, when executives with Pornhub resigned following yet another bombshell report alleging the site published — and maintained “for years” — scores of graphic videos of women and underage girls posted without their consent.
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