ANALYSIS/OPINION:
The bookstore proprietor was named Bootsie Goldstein (yes, his real name) and in the late 1970s, he had become the prime target in Norfolk, Virginia’s, battle to clean up its downtown from pornography. Bootsie had sold a hardcore pornography magazine to an undercover vice cop and stood charged with the crime of distributing an obscene item.
As the most junior prosecutor of this Virginia city, it fell upon me to “takedown” Bootsie, then a well-known 70-year-old scofflaw of Norfolk’s skid row district that had once been a thriving business area.
At trial, it took the jury all of 27 minutes to convict Bootsie and sentence him to jail for six months. In the following three years, I prosecuted ten jury trials against the city’s pornography purveyors, obtaining jail time in most of the cases. By 1980, there was virtually no one left to prosecute. After that, if one wanted a pornography magazine or to watch a “skin flick,” they had to travel to nearby Portsmouth or Hampton.
That was the pornography business of that era — hardcore magazines and films one had to drive miles to access. Cities could successfully confront the pornography industry as Norfolk, Boston, New York, and many other cities did in the 80s and 90s.
Certainly, prostitution and sex trafficking existed, seemingly localized and confined to the bad parts of town where prostituted women were controlled and exploited by pimps.
At the time, no one could imagine this was the prelude to the birthing of a billion-dollar online pornography industry — one that would merge the sex trafficking trade with the pornography industry via a technology yet largely unknown—the Internet.
Today, exponentially wealthy, international companies like MindGeek (which owns Pornhub), XHamster, and Xvideos dominate the online pornography industry and make hundreds of millions in profit. Their online videos are violent, racist, and incest-themed. They also feature actual sexual assaults, sex trafficking, and massive quantities of child pornography.
Investigations by Mastercard and Visa into unlawful content on Pornhub’s site sparked Pornhub to remove 10+ million videos uploaded by unverified users in December 2020.
Criminal charges of sex trafficking were brought by the U.S. government against the individuals behind the online pornography production entity GirlsDoPorn—one of whom was convicted in July 2021. Twenty-two victims of this site had previously sued the company for fraud in a civil lawsuit. They won their case in January 2020. GirlsDoPorn advertised that it was recruiting models and lured numerous young women across the country to San Diego hotels where they were given alcohol and drugged, and then coerced and deceived into signing bogus agreements to make pornography videos for uploading.
Amazingly the GirlsDoPorn videos remained on Pornhub’s website long after the victims filed their civil lawsuit placing Pornhub on actual notice that the women they had been illegally trafficked. Pornhub allowed countless numbers of people to watch the young women’s exploitation while it monetized the videos.
Other lawsuits against the online pornography industry include a class action against Pornhub/MindGeek. In this case, a 16-year-old girl was drugged and raped by an adult male who filmed the rape. The rapist had a profit-sharing relationship with MindGeek under its notorious Modelhub program. Under the terms of that program, MindGeek and the rapist agreed to share profits from the thousands of views and downloads.
As reported by the New York Times piece entitled “Children of Pornhub,” countless children are victimized on these sites. We see this reflected in the explosion of child sexual abuse material (a.k.a. “child pornography”) on the Internet. Another New York Times series entitled, “The Internet is Overrun with Child Sexual Abuse. What went Wrong?” describes the horrific reality of 45 million images of child abuse reported on the Internet in 2019.
There is no meaningful age verification on these pornography sites, so even videos of children can be freely uploaded. No consent is required, so the children or victims filmed usually have no clue their images are online until it’s too late. And anyone for any reason or motive can upload and monetize sex videos.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to comprehend that an immensely profitable criminal enterprise will do nothing but expand unless investigated and prosecuted. Unfortunately, this much-needed intervention has been absent. Unlike the assignment I received as a young city prosecutor, few—if any—U.S. attorney prosecutors have stepped up to stop the rampant criminal abuse and exploitation occurring on these online pornography websites. The U.S. Department of Justice can and should confront this abusive industry.
In the meantime, survivors are speaking up against these human rights abuses and are courageously filing civil and class action lawsuits against MindGeek and Xvideos.
Perhaps as in the cases of other serial exploiters like Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein, civil litigation will precede significant criminal prosecution. For all the victims, let’s hope so.
In a time when we are getting better at listening to cries for justice, it seems unacceptable for any of us to stand idly by as horrible crimes are perpetrated against children and adults alike—or as racism, sexual violence, and misogyny thrive—via the modern online pornography industry.
It’s beyond time for federal law enforcement to step up and do its job.
• Benjamin W. Bull is general counsel and senior vice president of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, the leading national non-partisan organization exposing the links between all forms of sexual exploitation such as child sexual abuse, prostitution, sex trafficking, and the public health harms of pornography. Twitter: @NCOSE
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