Pornhub execs defend efforts
MONTREAL • Representatives of Pornhub told a parliamentary committee Friday they didn’t know if they had been contacted by a woman who said she struggled to have a video of her removed from the popular pornography website.
Feras Antoon and David Tassillo of Mindgeek, parent company of Pornhub, told the committee on access to information, privacy and ethics that they couldn’t find records of any correspondence with Serena Fleites.
Fleites, however, told the committee on Monday that she had to ask Pornhub multiple times to remove an explicit video of her — taken when she was 14 years old — that was posted on the site without her consent.
Antoon, Mindgeek partowner and CEO of the company’s Canadian operations said, “We started an investigation and we do not have enough information to see if she ever contacted us at all.
“With the information we have today, we cannot find anything from what Ms. Fleites is saying.”
While Antoon said he didn’t want to suggest Fleites was lying, he said the first time he heard of her was when the company was contacted by a journalist. It was not the only time the executives didn’t have answers.
Antoon and Tassillo were called to testify in front of MPS regarding whether they planned to make reparations for “the company’s failure to prohibit rape videos and other illegal content from its site,” according to a committee motion in December.
The firm is facing a classaction lawsuit in Quebec, alleging it profited off material showing child sexual abuse and non-consensual activity since 2007. It is also being sued by 40 women in California who claim the company continues to profit from pornographic videos of them that were published without their full consent.
Pornhub says it has removed all videos uploaded by non-verified users after the adult website faced accusations it hosted illegal content. The move came after Visa and Mastercard launched investigations and decided in December to stop allowing their cards to be used on Pornhub. Between eight and 10 million videos uploaded by unverified users were removed from the website after the change, Tassillo said.