Episode 3 - P*rnhub Wasn't Verifying Age Or Consent! | Laila Mickelwait

62 Billion Visits a Year. A Crime Scene Hiding in Plain Sight.

Host Justin Forman sits down with Laila Mickelwait, Co-Founder and CEO of the Justice Defense Fund, for a conversation that exposes how one of the internet's most-visited websites became a global engine of child sexual abuse and trafficking, and how a movement of 2.3 million people helped bring it down.

In 2020, P*rnhub was the fifth-most-trafficked website on Earth. 170 million visits a day, 62 billion a year, enough content uploaded annually to watch nonstop for 169 years. None of it was verified for age or consent. All of it was profitable. Buried inside were tens of millions of images and videos of real children being raped and trafficked on camera.

Laila Mickelwait found out how. She founded the Trafficking Hub movement, forced P*rnhub to remove more than 50 million images and videos, and helped push Visa, Mastercard, and Discover to cut ties with the platform. Today, as Co-Founder and CEO of the Justice Defense Fund, she funds strategic civil litigation that lets trafficking survivors take on billion-dollar corporations in court, and she's just getting started.

Key Topics:

• How a single upload test exposed P*rnhub as "a crime scene, not a p*rn site"
• The multinational corporate structure behind P*rnhub, MindGeek, and a hidden majority shareholder
• Why Justice Defense Fund targeted the credit card companies, not just the platform
• The role of public pressure, journalism, and civil litigation working in tandem
• Survivor stories including Serena Flaitis and the human cost behind the numbers
• How impact investors use charitable dollars to fund justice for trafficking survivors
• Finding common ground across ideological lines to build a coalition big enough to win

This is not one company's problem. It's a business model built on unverified, unaccountable abuse, and it won't end until the financial incentive does. The resources to fight it already exist. The question is who's willing to deploy them.

Watch the full episode on YouTube or continue to stream audio on your favorite podcast platform.