An Open Letter from Survivors to the Internet Watch Foundation, the International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children,* and Crime Stoppers International condemning their Public Relations Work for Pornhub
To:
Internet Watch Foundation
Derek Ray-Hill and Kerry Smith, CEO
Heidi Kempster, COO
Catherine Brown, Chair
Sanjit Kaur Gill, Trustee
Alexander Ian Arthur Evans, Trustee
Rachel Sarah Yeomans, Trustee
Nicholas Jeremy Newman, Trustee
Simon Colin Benjamin Staffell, Trustee
Andrew John Campling, Trustee
Supriya Suri Malik, Trustee
Giles Crown, Trustee
Bronagh McCloskey, Trustee
International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (ICMEC)
Stephen Kavanagh, Secretary General
Sandra Marchenko, SVP of Research and Education
Guillermo Galarza, VP of Partnerships
Patricia L Fietz, Executive Director for P.R.
Sally Paull, Chair
Daniel H. Cohen, Vice Chair
Dov Rubinstein, Vice Chair
Tom de Swaan, Secretary
R. Todd Ruppert, Treasurer
Ambassador Ido Aharoni
Anna Maria Corazza Bildt
Professor Ernesto Caffo
Mike DeNoma
Irina Gorbounova
Travis Heneveld
Dr. Paul Horn
Nancy Kelly
Jeff Koons
Rick Li
Per-Olof Loof
Diono Nurjadin
Richard Pursey
Peter Riguardi
Dr. Boghuma Titanji
Dr. Eric Varma
Dr. Yelena Yesha
* NOTE: The International Center for Missing and Exploited Children (ICMEC) is a distinct and separate organization from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). NCMEC has never done PR work for, or engaged in a partnership with Pornhub. On the contrary, the President of NCMEC testified before Canadian Parliament that Pornhub had not reported a single instance of child sexual abuse material they knew about for over 13 years. NCMEC also testified that they have never had a partnership with Pornhub and its parent company.
Crime Stoppers International (CSI)
Shane Britten, CEO
Sharon Hanlon, President
Yusuf Abramjee, VP
Ralph Page, Secretary
K Scott Abrams, Treasurer
Alexander Macdonald
Dawn Trimbell
Dave Forster
Antonina Cuesta
Attie Lamprecht
Chris Cameron
John Aboud
Mick Duthie
TC Mosikili
Vince Hughes
We, survivors of child sexual abuse material (CSAM), filmed rape, trafficking, and all forms of image-based sexual abuse and sexual violence, write this letter in outrage and disbelief at the actions of the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), the International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (ICMEC) and Crime Stoppers International (CSI). In 2021, hundreds of survivors and over 600 organizations[1] from around the world united in a formal denouncement of Pornhub, calling for a full criminal prosecution of the company and its leadership for the intentional distribution and monetization of rape, child sexual abuse, trafficking, and torture since its inception in 2007.[2] The U.S. Federal Government has since criminally charged Pornhub with the crime of intentionally profiting from sex trafficking.[3] It is indisputable and well-documented how Pornhub and its executives have knowingly and deliberately distributed and monetized the criminal abuse of countless victims and continue to do so.[4] Yet today, as tens of thousands of victims[5] — including some of us — battle Pornhub and its parent company MindGeek/Aylo in twenty-seven lawsuits[6] worldwide for justice and needed restitution, we are appalled to see your organizations engaging in public relations efforts alongside the defendants in these cases, helping this predatory company and its owners escape accountability.
CSI chose to take funding from Pornhub, and IWF expressed a desire to take funds[7] from Pornhub and its parent company MindGeek/Aylo. This is not only incomprehensible but deeply unethical. You know full well that the money in Pornhub’s coffers was earned from unverified content and nonconsensual abuse featuring victims like us worldwide. A particularly egregious exchange between the IWF board was recently exposed by longtime IWF board member and child protection advocate John Carr. In it, board members of IWF expressed there was a “financial interest” “that should not be ignored” in taking funds from Pornhub but deliberated about the “high-risk” and damaging optics of doing so. As a proposed solution, some board members suggested taking more money from Pornhub to account for the risk of taking funds from a site infested with sexual crime.[8] This sounds disturbingly similar to the calculations hedge funds Redwood Capital and Colbeck Capital were making in deciding to charge higher interest on their loans to Pornhub because their due diligence made it clear that the site was full of sexual crime. Those hedge funds are being sued in over a dozen lawsuits in U.S. courts today[9] for their role in enabling and profiting from the abuse of countless victims.
Your organizations chose to issue press releases[10] and press statements about your partnerships with Pornhub[11] and to even conduct press interviews alongside Pornhub’s media spokespeople[12], helping to whitewash and sanitize its public image as a profiteer of child sexual abuse, rape, and trafficking.[13] Pornhub has likewise used your organization’s names repeatedly in the media and press releases[14] to gaslight victims and whitewash the crimes they have profited from for over 18 years. ICMEC submitted an amicus brief to the U.S. Supreme Court in support of Pornhub’s opposition to age verification laws. IWF has appallingly defended Pornhub in the press since 2020,[15] even amid viral global condemnation by millions of people,[16] exposure of their horrific practices in thousands of media pieces worldwide,[17] dozens of lawsuits filed on behalf of tens of thousands of child victims[18], and indisputable evidence of Pornhub’s complicity in enabling mass sexual crime for profit filed in legal complaints and exposed in legal discovery.[19] Recently unsealed court documents from a class action child trafficking lawsuit in Alabama reveal disturbing email exchanges between Emma Hardy, communications director at the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), and Pornhub executives. The communications reveal that while Pornhub was under intense public scrutiny for hosting rampant child sexual abuse material, IWF was assisting the company with crisis PR. Shockingly, these communications took place as IWF was simultaneously sharing internal data with Pornhub identifying confirmed victims as young as 3 to 6 years old who were victimized on the site.
IWF, ICMEC, and CSI’s actions have helped to paint a veneer of legitimacy over a company steeped in criminality. As entities tasked with protecting children, your duty is clear: to provide tools and support to eradicate sexual crime from the internet, not to polish the reputation of one of its most notorious perpetrators. By aligning yourselves with Pornhub, you betray the very children and victims you claim to protect and call into question the integrity of your organizations.2
The same executives running the operations of Pornhub today are the same men responsible for the intentional global distribution and monetization of criminal abuse for over a decade,[20] ensuring victim’s trauma will live online in perpetuity and causing irreparable and lifelong damage. And even though Pornhub has been forced to take down 91% of the site’s content[21] since it was cut off by Visa, Mastercard, Discover, and PayPal,[22] it continues to distribute and profit from millions of pornographic images and videos that were never verified to ensure the age or consent of the individuals in the user generated content. Thus, to this day, Pornhub and its owners are still profiting from child sexual abuse, rape, trafficking, and all forms of nonconsensual content. You know this, and you aren’t only partnering with the website that immortalizes victims’ pain; you are blatantly and publicly partnering with the very men who made the decisions that enabled them to profit from exploitation and who continue to exploit victims today.
Rather than standing with survivors and advocating for accountability, the IWF, CSI, and ICMEC have chosen to prop up this company, lending it credibility it does not deserve. Pornhub should not be celebrated or rehabilitated — it should be forced to pay significant restitution to every single victim it has harmed, and the company, its owners, and its executives should be held criminally accountable. Your actions undermine the fight for justice and embolden a corporation that has built its empire on the exploitation of the vulnerable.
We demand that you cease all public relations efforts on behalf of Pornhub immediately. Your role as a child protection organization is to dismantle systems of abuse, not to sanitize them. Furthermore, we call on the IWF, CSI, and ICMEC to issue public statements apologizing to survivors for the harm your collaborations with Pornhub have caused — harm that compounds the trauma we have already endured. The world is watching, and history will judge you by the choices you make today. Stand with us, or step aside — but do not dare to stand with our abusers.
2 Your actions stand in stark contrast to credible child protection organizations like Thorn and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) — both of which took clear steps to avoid being misrepresented as allies of Pornhub. Legal discovery documents show that when Thorn provided limited access to its tools to address the rampant child exploitation on Pornhub, it did so under a contract that explicitly prohibited Pornhub/Aylo/MindGeek from using Thorn’s name publicly without prior written permission — precisely to avoid any implication of a “partnership.” Similarly, discovery documents demonstrate that NCMEC issued a formal legal cease and desist letter to Pornhub/Aylo/MindGeek after the company falsely claimed a partnership with the organization.This is the ethical standard: legitimate child protection organizations distance themselves from platforms that have been exposed for knowingly enabling and profiting from child sexual abuse. Anything less is complicity.
Sincerely,
Jerome Elam,
President/CEO Trafficking in America Task Force, Child Sex Trafficking Survivor, Survivor Leader
Victoria Galy
Justine Baker
Christina R.
Rev. Dr. Marian Hatcher
Adrian Moen
Joshua Broome,
Executive Director Walk Worthy, AACC
Jeanette Westbrook MSSW
Social Worker, Survivor of Child Pornography, Trafficking, Incest, and Torture
Felicia I.
Kelly Dore
Executive Director, Sierra Cares Foundation
Ari Lavandula
Terry Forliti
LEE/SME, STSC – Sex Trade Survivor Caucus, Subject Matter Expert
Gelia Bessmertnaia
Co-ordinator of Eurydice, the Feminist Initiative against human trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation
Trisha Baptie
Survivor and founder of EVE (formerly Exploited Voices now Educating)
Jay Benke
Sex Trade Survivor Caucus
Jewell Baraka
Author of Coming of Age On A Porn Set: Trafficked In Porn at 14
Regina Lee Jones
Mia Doring
April Casillas
Lived Experience Expert (CSEC/HT), Sex Trade Survivor Caucus (STSC)
Ashley Faison
CSEC Survivor
Tricia Grant
CEO, Just Love Worldwide, Survivor Leader
Zoe Bellatorre
MAICS, Lived Experience Expert, Founder, You Belong
Rebekah Bailey
Audrey Morrissey
Kelly R Patterson
Founder & Executive Director, Treasured Lives
Small Sample of Evidence and Information Regarding Pornhub/MindGeek/Aylo’s Complicity in Mass Sexual Crime:
• Intentional Policy of Hiring Only One Person to Review Flagged Content: According to evidence uncovered in legal discovery documents in the California child trafficking class action lawsuit, MindGeek/Aylo only hired 1 person, five days a week, out of 1800 employees to review videos flagged by users as terms of service violations including illegal content like child sexual abuse and rape.
• 15+ Flag Policy[23]: Pornhub had a purposeful policy to only place a flagged video in the queue for review by one employee if it was flagged over 15 times.[24] This policy allowed monetized videos depicting illegal activity, abuse, child sexual abuse material (CSAM), or non-consensual content to be exempt from review unless flagged 16 or more times — a standard that prioritized the platform’s financial interests over victim protection.[25] Pornhub/MG/Aylo’s Chief Product Officer Karim El Marazi, who is still the CPO of the company today, is caught in the email exchanges admitting that they were trying to hide the policy from Mastercard. “it’s obvious we are just trying to hide that it’s a minimum number of flags.” [26] It was uncovered through legal discovery in the Alabama child trafficking class action lawsuit that illegal videos of the worst forms of prepubescent child sexual abuse were allowed to remain on the site for years, earning hundreds of thousands and millions of monetized views, even though they were flagged 13 and 14 times.[27] Executives who are still running Pornhub today in Montreal were caught discussing this flagging policy in email exchanges uncovered through legal discovery in the California child sex trafficking class action lawsuit against Pornhub. In the emails, the company’s CEO referred to the policy as “good and reasonable.” [28]
• Backlog of 706,425 Flagged Videos: Because of the intentional decision to hire one person toreview flagged videos and a policy to only review after 15 flags, Pornhub had a backlog of over 706,425 flagged videos that included illegal activities such as child sexual abuse, rape, and trafficking.[29]
• Pornhub Executives Refusal to Remove Terms Indicating CSAM: Legal discovery uncovered evidence that Pornhub’s executives explicitly refused to ban the terms “childhood,” “minor,” and “young girl” from the site, despite their knowledge that these tags and categories contained real child rape and abuse.
• Tracking to the Dollar How Much Money Was Made on Categories and Titles like “Teenager,” “Young,” and “Teen”: Legal discovery uncovered evidence that Pornhub’s executives were tracking to the dollar and to the day how much money they were making on categories and tags indicating CSAM and that they knew were infested with real child sexual abuse such as “Teenager” and “Young,” which were the second and third most profitable tags on the site. An Excel sheet created in December 2020 by an employee of Pornhub shows hundreds of thousands of instances of keywords like “12 yo,” “13 yo,” and “girls under l8” being used in the tag, title, or appearing in search results.[30]
• Continued Monetization of Illegal Content: Despite being aware of the illegal material on the site, Pornhub continued to monetize this content through advertisements, even in 2025, under the guise of “new ownership.” [31] Recent reports mandated by the European Digital Services Act demonstrate that in 4.5 months, between February 17-June 30, 2024, Pornhub had to remove 3,770 child sexual abuse videos and images.[32] This data not only indicates a persistent issue with child exploitation on the site but also suggests, based on 2023 reports,[33] that Pornhub is still not correctly reporting child sexual abuse material to the U.S. National Center for Missing and Exploited Children or the Canadian Centre for Child Protection as required. This deliberate inaction and obfuscation has allowed predators to continue exploiting children without intervention for over thirteen years in violation of the law regarding mandatory reporting in Canada. Furthermore, numerous homemade videos don’t show faces, making consent verification impossible. In an undercover investigation in 2023 by Sound Investigations, a longtime Pornhub manager was filmed (after Ethical Capital took over) and is on the record saying management understands that rape and abuse are being uploaded by accounts that don’t show the faces of the victims. However, when he brought it up to the current CPO, Karim El Marazi, he was told to “Fuck off.” [34]
• Employee Awareness of Policy of Top-Down Non-Enforcement: Further evidence from legal discovery revealed that employees communicated that they understood from management that protective policies put in writing were not meant to be enforced in practice: “The problem is that management doesn’t want the rules enforced as written.[35]” He was referencing the fact that VP Matt Kilicci, who still is a VP of Pornhub today, was resisting taking down content that the moderators thought was illegal.[36] Another employee in messages uncovered in legal discovery speaking of a VP or Manager says “yo sorry man can you make sure you are not ccing him on the csam reports…he doesn’t want to know how much cp we have ignored for the past 5 years?”[37]
• Pornhub’s Parent Company Hid Child Sexual Abuse Material from Authorities from 2007-2020 in Violation of Canadian Law: Parliamentary testimony from the heads of the primary child protection agencies responsible for processing CSAM in Canada and the United States have revealed that Pornhub/MindGeek/Aylo failed to report a single instance of child sexual abuse material for over 13 years, despite its ethical and legal obligation to do so under Canadian law. This was confirmed by depositions[38] taken during the course of legal discovery. Additionally, moderators have testified that they were instructed by management not to report specific instances of highly concerning illegal content to authorities.[39] It is documented that Pornhub management told users not to report child sexual abuse to authorities that they were aware of.[40]
• CEO and Current VPs Specific Knowledge of underage victim Serena Fleites’ Abuse Live on the Site and Maintenance of Child Sexual Abuse Material: Further uncovered evidence revealed that Pornhub’s owners and executives engaged in discussions via email about whether to leave up or take down the abuse content of a particular underage victim, Serena Fleites, when confronted by Mastercard about the existence of this specific child sexual abuse on the site and provided with the link to her abuse video.[41] This is evidence of the particular knowledge of Serena’s abuse on the site and a refusal from the CEO and ownership level to take down her abuse. Serena’s amended lawsuit complaints details that the illegal video the owner/CEO, C-level executives, and VPs (who still run Pornhub today) were aware of wasn’t removed until months later.[42]
• Violation of Canadian Law: Until December 2020, evidence suggests that Pornhub and its parent company violated Canadian criminal code section 163.1 by intentionally placing a download function on every video, thereby enabling the material transfer of contraband child sexual abuse material (CSAM) from their servers to the individual devices of users around the globe. This function was accessible to approximately 170 million users per day by the end of 2020, facilitating the continued transfer and distribution of monetized CSAM and further endangering vulnerable individuals. There is also evidence[43] that Pornhub promoted, suggested, and advertised CSAM in violation of Canada’s criminal code 163.1 on its homepage and by means of suggested search terms indicating illegality to both users and advertisers. By featuring, suggesting, and promoting this contraband material, Pornhub not only enabled its accessibility but also drove more views and ad impressions, thus increasing its revenue at the expense of victims. Evidence also suggests that in violation of Canadian criminal code section 279.01 and subsections subsection 279.02(1) and 279.02(2), Pornhub/MindGeek/Aylo and its executives knowingly benefited from the sex trafficking of both adults and children.
It is important to note that in Canada, it is illegal to distribute both faux/“depicted” and real child sexual abuse, according to Section 163.1 of the Canadian criminal code, enacted in 1993, which defines child sexual abuse material (child pornography) as “a visual representation, whether or not it was made by electronic or mechanical means,” that “shows a person who is or is depicted as being under the age of eighteen years and is engaged in or is depicted as engaged in explicit sexual activity”[44] It is an aggravating factor if the real or depicted CSAM was monetized.
This is also true in other countries like the UK and Australia. Yet such material proliferates across the site.
A multi-year investigation by the Canadian Privacy Commissioner[45] concluded that Pornhub/Mindgeek/Aylo violated Canadian privacy law. Specifically, the investigation determined that Pornhub had violated the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA).
The Canadian Privacy Commissioner is finally aiming to bring a lawsuit against Pornhub and its parent company as of March 2025 to force it into compliance with Canadian law. “Privacy Commissioner Philippe Dufresne is seeking a Federal Court order directing the operator of the Pornhub website to comply with Canadian privacy law. Dufresne’s application comes a year after he concluded Aylo, the Montreal-based firm behind Pornhub and other pornographic sites, broke the law by allowing intimate images to be shared without direct knowledge or consent. The commissioner’s investigation of Aylo, formerly known as MindGeek, followed a complaint from a woman whose ex-boyfriend had uploaded an intimate video and other images of her to Aylo websites without her permission. Dufresne concluded that inadequate privacy protection measures on Pornhub and other Aylo sites had led to devastating consequences for the complainant and other victims.”[46]
• Violation of U.S. Law: Until December 2020, evidence demonstrates that Pornhub violated U.S. § 2252 by intentionally placing a download function on every video, thereby enabling the material transfer of contraband CSAM from their servers to the individual devices of users around the globe. This function was accessible to approximately 170 million users per day by the end of 2020, facilitating the continued transfer and distribution of monetized CSAM and further endangering vulnerable individuals.
There is also evidence[47] that Pornhub promoted, suggested, and advertised child sexual abuse material in violation of U.S. § 2252 on its homepage and by means of suggested search terms indicating illegality to both users and advertisers. By featuring, suggesting, and promoting this material, Pornhub not only enabled its accessibility but also drove more views and ad impressions, thus increasing its revenue at the expense of victims.
Evidence also shows that in violation of U.S. Code § 1591, Pornhub/MindGeek/Aylo and its executives knowingly benefited from sex trafficking. In violation of U.S. Code § 2257, they also engaged via the intentionally placed download function in the transfer of pornographic material without proper documentation and record keeping.
• Ongoing Monetization of Unverified Content: As of today, Pornhub still has monetized content throughout the site that has not been verified to ensure the legal age or consent of the individuals featured in user-generated homemade pornographic content. This ongoing practice continues to put vulnerable individuals at risk, highlighting the site’s persistent failure to adhere to ethical and legal standards. Mandatory reporting under the European Digital Services Act demonstrates that in only 4.5 months, between February 17-June 30, 2024, Pornhub had to remove 3,770 child sexual abuse videos and images, 8,769 nonconsensual image-based sexual abuse videos and images, and 181 animal sexual abuse videos/images.[48] Therefore, even the new ownership continues to profit from unlawful content as every piece of content on the site is monetized with advertisements. Despite this, MindGeek/Aylo has refused to remove all content uploaded before the September 2024 policy change that was never verified to ensure the legal age and consent of the individuals in the images and videos. This is in addition to over 300,000 pieces of content removed for “terms of service” violations that could also include sexual crime. Therefore, even the “new ownership” continues to profit from unlawful content as every piece of content on the site is monetized with advertisements. This data also suggests that Pornhub is still not correctly reporting CSAM to the U.S. National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. This is evidenced by an enormous discrepancy in the amount of CSAM they report to NCMEC versus what they report under the European Digital Services Act.
• Severely Inadequate Moderation as a Policy: Despite employing a staff of 1,800, Pornhub only hired 10 moderators per eight-hour shift, amounting to just 30-31 moderators per day in Cyprus, for all of MindGeek/Aylo’s pornography “tube” sites, including, among others, Redtube, YouPorn, Gaytube, Xtube, and Extremetube. These moderators testified that they were reprimanded if they viewed less than 700 videos per shift and were expected to review at least 1,200 videos.[49] Some experienced moderators reported skipping through up to 2,200 videos per shift with the sound off, clearly highlighting a system designed to maximize uploads over effective moderation.[50] Evidence from moderators’ testimony suggested that their primary focus was not on removing illegal content but instead on allowing as much content as possible to be uploaded to the site, regardless of its legality. They were discouraged from removing content from the site.[51]
• Inability to Accurately Identify Exploitation: As a policy, Pornhub’s parent company MindGeek/Aylo chose not to verify the age or consent of the individuals featured in the homemade user-generated explicit videos uploaded and monetized on the site since 2007. Although they finally began to require verification in September 2024, the company has not removed the millions of unverified videos previously uploaded. Moderators have testified that they understood they were often guessing[52] which videos featured underage children or depicted rape, as it is impossible to reliably distinguish between a 15 or 16-year-old nude body and that of an 18-year-old. Additionally, they indicated that discerning between what constitutes rough sex and what constitutes rape is equally impossible, as is distinguishing what was consensually recorded but nonconsensually uploaded.[53]
Media Inquiries Contact: jerome@traffickinginamericataskforce.org