Pornhub execs can’t confirm girl’s video was posted on site

Executives of Pornhub’s parent company, MindGeek, testified on Friday that they have not been able to confirm the account of a woman who says an intimate video of her at the age of 13 was shared on the company’s platform. The House of Commons standing committee on access to information, privacy and ethics has been studying “protection of privacy and reputation on platforms such as Pornhub.”

Earlier in the week, the committee of MPs heard from Serena Fleites, now 19, who said she was pressured into filming an intimate video for her then-boyfriend when she was 13 years old.

It was spread around her school and eventually uploaded to Pornhub, a Montreal-based company, and she spent weeks trying to take it down, notifying the company that it involved an underage person, Fleites told the committee.

The video uploaded to Pornhub was titled “13-year-old brunette shows off for the camera,” she said.

Fleites said she had made the complaint to have it removed under her mother’s name. The company responded and asked her to prove it was her in the video, Fleites testified. Even after the video was removed, it would be consistently re-uploaded by users, she told MPs. But the MindGeek executives who testified on Friday, CEO Feras Antoon and David Tassillo, the chief operating officer, said they hadn’t heard of her until a reporter from the New York Times reached out to their public relations team last year.

Her story was included in a New York Times investigation published in December that accused Pornhub of not doing enough to police the spread of child sexual abuse content and rape videos. Fleites testified that her experience with having the video online led to drug use, depression and issues at school.

Antoon said the company only had her first name and last name and was not able to verify her story.