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Take Down by Laila Mickelwait

Laila Mickelwait’s book Take Down should come with a chin strap, because this is a book about jaw-dropping crimes. Even people who claim to have seen a lot of the seedy side of human nature have got to be shocked. Mickelwait’s book—which is sometimes classified as “true crime” and other times called “autobiography”—is actually a major political work about how one activist went to war with Pornhub and mostly won.

An avid activist in the fight against global human trafficking, Mickelwait sort of stumbles on the horrors of Pornhub. For those who are blessed to not know much about this, Pornhub is a major website—back in 2023, it was averaging 100 million visits a day. It’s a global business that has transformed the pornography industry. The business model is an online “freemium” site. You can go online, join up, and get a bunch of content free; this stuff is subsidized by advertising which makes up roughly 50% of Pornhub’s revenues. But you can also get access to other content and the ability to download some content by paying membership fees. And people who post porn can monetize their content sort of along the lines of YouTube.

The annual revenue of Pornhub is guesstimated to be $97B (yes billion) a year, but it’s hard to know exactly since a lot of it is banked offshore. Pornhub is owned by MindGeek and is based in Montreal. Part of Take Down is a whodunnit story in terms of how Pornhub was able to shield these massive amounts of cash. It reminded me of a movie scene where Pablo Escobar had so much cash, he ended up having to bury some just to hide it—only to return later and find the money had moldered under the earth. Or maybe it’s like the scene in Breaking Bad where Walter White gets a storage locker to store pallets of cash he can’t otherwise hide. Pornhub faced the same problems, but with digital cash.

Human Trafficking

The funny thing about this story is that Laila Mickelwait, an American wife and mother, was not out to fight porn. In fact, she has no objection to pornography within certain parameters. She opposed crime—rapes, assaults, sex with minors.

Her main focus was always with human trafficking. What Mickelwait uncovered was that people were uploading terrible and distinctly illegal things on Pornhub—some of the stuff showed violent assaults. There were rapes. Sometimes one of the people in the video was clearly inebriated or incapacitated. It was hard sometimes to know if one of the participants in a sex video was alive or dead.

And, yes, sometimes they were kids. Little kids. Babies. Little girls. Little boys. Young teens. And sometimes the little kids were doing things with animals or with each other.

Mickelwait soon discovered that when videos were sent to Pornhub, they were supposed to be screened so that criminality and inappropriate activities could be removed. That rarely happened. Pornhub had proper policies in place to weed out child exploitation, rape, and such stuff, they just did not bother to enforce it. Part of the problem was scale—Pornhub was so enormously successful financially that they claimed they could not deal with the volume of material that came in to their offices every day.

Here’s where the chin strap is helpful. The things Mickelwait finds out are shocking.

Let me create a sort of hybrid story typical of what Mickelwait was finding out. A young woman is drugged and raped. Then she finds out that her attack was immortalized on video and uploaded to Pornhub. She goes to Pornhub to ask that the video be taken down. They won’t help her. She goes to the authorities to get Pornhub to take down the video. They have better things to do. (Besides, Pornhub is in Montreal, Canada, complicating legal interventions by citizens of the United States.) Then she seeks legal help. This costs her money and the lawyers just tangle with Pornhub lawyers and the video stays put. It’s ironic, but Pornhub has no money to hire more than a few screeners to prescreen videos to weed out criminal content, but they have extensive and expensive legal representation.

Very few of these people manage to get their rapes offline. Even if an adult contacts Pornhub to get a child rape video pulled off—whether it was them as a kid or their child—the results are abysmal. The videos remain online, making Pornhub and the person posting the videos money every day.

Some people on Pornhub may not realize their sexual assaults or childhood rapes are online and sold to viewers. Some of the people in those videos may be dead now.

Now one could argue—as Pornhub and its creators have sometimes tried—that perhaps some of these rape videos were staged and were just fantasies. But when one of the people in the video says, “I never gave anyone permission to video this encounter or to upload it and I want it taken down,” you would think that would be honored. No chance. When that person comes back and says the video was a non consensual sexual encounter, you would think that would get their attention. Hardly.

You would also think that if one of the people in the video says, “This was rape” or “I was drugged” or “This is me at age 14” that would merit taking down the video. No. Pornhub is literally swimming in porn videos but it fights to keep every one of them monetized and online.

For some of the people in these videos, Pornhub presence meant that their assaults were immortalized, shared around the world, and they had no control or ability to stop others from watching their rapes. In some cases, users could download these videos and then do whatever they wanted. As the victims would tell Mickelwait, it was like being raped over and over.

If you want to understand how dark the porno world is, you need to read this book. This isn’t the happy-slappy porn world of smiling Only Fans girls earning big money or divas who seek to break records with how many men they can sleep with in a day. This is the evil world of predators and vulnerable victims, many of whom are children.

People who traffic children sometimes exploit them in pornography, and Pornhub is just one of their buyers.

Follow the Money

Laila Mickelwait is highly intelligent and after multiple rounds of failures using the conventional tools, like reason, logic, and human decency, she went after Visa and MasterCard. Those two credit card companies were the main payment means for the Pornhub clientele. To be sure, Visa and MasterCard may have had only limited awareness of what was going on at Pornhub—at least before they met Mickelwait.

She told them. She showed them. She tried to shame them and then legally fight them for processing payments for human trafficking. It was a maddening game of cat and mouse. No one is blinder than the credit card company that refuses to see what’s in front of them.

The beautiful thing about this story is that Mickelwait was one woman. This is a brave book about how one woman really can change the world. True, Mickelwait had help along the way. She was constantly summoning help and pleading the cause, and sometimes people chipped in. Sometimes they didn’t. But without Mickelwait, the fight would have been over. It’s an inspirational book but also a frankly realistic one. This was an uphill battle for her. She didn’t always win. Sometimes she got discouraged. But sometimes she won.

The one thing she didn’t do was give up, and that’s why this book is so inspiring. Without offering any spoilers, the book ends with a take down but also with the fact that Pornhub is regrettably still in business.

And, as Mickelwait says in her afterword to Take Down, Pornhub is not the only site doing this kind of thing. They may be the biggest and the boldest but they are far from the only ones making porn out of human trafficking.

One person can really make a difference. She’s an inspiring figure with a noble cause, but don’t read this as a self-improvement book. It’s a book about flaws and missteps and failures as much as triumph, victory, and success. Most of all, it’s a jaw-dropping book about the dirty secrets of the porn industry you never knew about. Some of the things Mickelwait exposes are unimaginable.

Keep the chin strap handy.