Woman whose life was scarred by child-porn video testifies
OTTAWA — A young woman whose life was shattered by a video of her posted to Pornhub while she was still in middle school says the trauma of child pornography is unending, and that stricter rules are needed.
Serena Fleites told a parliamentary committee Monday she fell into a spiral of depression, drug use and self-harm after relenting to her boyfriend’s demands she send him a naked video of herself in Grade 7 that ended up on the website Pornhub, material that has proven impossible to scrub from the internet.
“A lot of people in the grades above me — mostly guys — they would try to harass me and blackmail me, saying if I didn’t do stuff with them or I didn’t send more videos to them, then they would send it to my family: my grandma, my mom, my sisters, my brother,” said Fleites, who is now 19 years old.
The California resident says Pornhub took more than a week to respond to her initial request to take down the video, and weeks more to actually remove it, only to let it resurface days later, a traumatic process that played out repeatedly.
“It had already been downloaded by people all across the world basically, and it would always be uploaded over and over and over again. No matter how many times I got it taken down, it’d be right up again,” she said, blaming Pornhub in particular.
Fleites’s lawyer, Michael Bowe, says she is one of many women who have had exploitive material of them as underage children posted to the Montreal-based streaming giant, or who were sexually assaulted or trafficked with accompanying pornographic videos, which Pornhub’s parent company Mindgeek denies.
The testimonies come as MPS on the House of Commons ethics committee weigh concerns around privacy and streaming platforms such as Pornhub.
MPS have also called on Mindgeek CEO Feras Antoon and chief operating officer David Tassillo to come before the committee and answer whether they plan 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 committee clerk confirmed Monday they are set to appear Friday.