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(LifeSiteNews) — Two top executives with Pornhub, which was purchased from MindGeek by Ethical Capital Partners in 2023, recently went on the Patrick Bet David podcast in an attempt to reboot their brand.
For several years, Pornhub has been embroiled in a non-stop series of scandals. Pornhub is the world’s largest porn website, with 33.5 billion visits in 2018 and trillions of clicks per month in 2020. Much of this content features the violent and degrading treatment of women, mainstreaming practices such as “choking” and, as it turned out, criminal sexual assaults. Activist Laila Mickelwait founded the group Traffickinghub to expose these horrors in February 2020.
It rapidly became a movement, with over 600 organizations participating and over 2.2 million people in 192 countries signing the Traffickinghub petition. In December of 2020, the New York Times published a devastating exposé by Nicholas Kristof titled The Children of Pornhub, credit card companies began to cut ties, MindGeek executives were hauled before Canadian parliamentarians to answer questions, and several class action lawsuits by victims of Pornhub were launched against the company (those legal actions are ongoing).
Additionally, a number of states have been passing age verification legislation that has had a severe impact on Pornhub’s traffic.
READ: Pornhub hit with lawsuit over videos victimizing 12-year-old who was drugged and raped
In short, Pornhub badly needs to rebrand – which is why Solomon Friedman, a member of the “ownership group” of Ethical Capital Partners, and Alexandra (her last name was not included in any of the podcast descriptions, and I didn’t want to Google around for obvious reasons) sat down for a conversation with Patrick Bet David of Valuetainment. They needed to present Pornhub as a company that had seen the light and changed.
My main takeaway from the interview is that it is easy to see why they went on Bet David’s podcast. Bet David was badly prepared for the interview and made it clear from the outset that the only aspects of Pornhub’s business that he cares about is content featuring underage people and minors accessing porn. He did not attack pornography itself, and he did not push Friedman or Alexandra on the type of content that Pornhub proudly features as a matter of course. He also allowed them to make assertion after assertion without pushback.
All in all, I’d say that the interview was a big PR success for Pornhub. They got what they wanted. Bet David made them look pretty good.
Friedman started by claiming that porn is “constitutionally protected” in every Western democracy. In fact, pornography could be banned in many countries if the political will to do so existed. I interviewed JD Vance several times during his Ohio senate race, and he noted that an across-the-board ban on porn for those under 18 would be possible, just for starters; in Canada, the legal precedent to ban pornography exists, as I detailed in an article for the Interim (that you can read here). Ross Douthat has also proposed banning porn in the United States. There is no compelling reason that addictive, hardcore pornography that is infecting the minds of multiple generations should be considered protected speech.
Friedman’s intent on the podcast was clear: to draw a bright red line between Pornhub when it was owned by MindGeek, and Pornhub now that is has been acquired by Ethical Capital Partners (he refers to it at one point as “a jewel of an asset”).
READ: Pornography use may now be the most common addiction in America, study suggests
Friedman and Alexandra both insisted that there is no underage content on Pornhub whatsoever, and Friedman claimed that the Times exposé led to “significant reforms,” creating an “opportunity to purchase the company.” Both insisted that it is now impossible to upload content without a government ID; that a person manually reviews every video; that they are a “leader” in this regard. Friedman claimed that no other porn site has the same level of safety, which is an inadvertently damning assessment of the industry at large.
According to Friedman and Alexandra, the previous abuses at Pornhub were merely a result of the “user content revolution” colliding with the adult industry. The technology outstripped the safeguards, but now, they claimed, that has been fixed.
Alexandra has been with Pornhub since 2013, but when Bet David pushed her on what she knew about the sexual violence on the platform, she conveniently claimed that she could not respond to any such questions due to the ongoing litigation. Friedman insisted that every user-generated platform is going to be “exploited” by criminals but did not mention that Pornhub features explicit violence against women as a matter of course.
The Pornhub executives insisted that they now pull videos down on request and “ask questions later,” although Laila Mickelwait states that their claims are a sham:
Victims are reaching out to me and my organization the Justice Defense Fund who have had videos of their abuse on P*rnhub very recently.
The “Ethical” Capital Partners new ownership whitewash is a sham through and through.
— Laila Mickelwait (@LailaMickelwait) October 11, 2024
In an interesting twist, Friedman attempted to portray Pornhub as a great defender of the innocence of children, telling Bet David that it makes no sense to permit children onto porn sites because kids don’t have credit cards and that this devalues the ad buys that fund their company (they wouldn’t disclose numbers, but Bet David noted that online sources estimate an annual revenue of over half a billion dollars). “We don’t want a single minor to access the site,” Friedman insisted. He also claimed that the reason Pornhub’s traffic dropped 80 percent in Louisiana after the state passed age verification was not because of audience age, but because people do not want to give their private info to a porn site.
Friedman and Alexandra insisted that they support “device-based age verification,” which would require Apple, Google, and Microsoft to implement “adult” age settings on all devices as a way of keeping minors away from porn. (For the record, I support any and all methods of keeping kids away from pornography.) Friedman stated that this has already been tested in France and claimed that if porn sites are required to implement age verification, users will simply be driven to “non-compliant sites” and that this will make little difference. He then attempted to play the good guy by adding, sanctimoniously, that in addition to keeping kids out of adult spaces, we also “need to keep kid’s spaces safe from adults.”
Both of the Pornhub executives claimed to be religious. Alexandra wore a conspicuously large cross on a necklace, although Bet David did not ask her about it. He did ask Friedman if it was true that he was a rabbi, and Friedman responded: “I was educated as a rabbi, but never practiced as a rabbi.”
READ: Political elites use pornography to enslave our children, Bishop Schneider tells Candace Owens
Bet David then played a clip of a rabbi condemning pornography because it degrades women and rewires the male brain to see women as objects, and Friedman responded by defending pornography. He did not mount any religious defence of pornography, and Alexandra swiftly jumped in to insist that women also love porn and make up 30 percent of Pornhub’s users.
For the rest, the interview consisted of the buzz words and phrases progressives usually use to defend their vile practices. Friedman insisted that “sex work” was included in the right to bodily autonomy. Alexandra insisted that “sex work” and sex trafficking “don’t even exist on a spectrum,” and said that their “core values” are “consent” and “freedom of expression.”
The duo successfully parried virtually all of Bet David’s questions about the scandals that have rocked Pornhub and Bet David did not push them on any fundamental issues with pornography, the degradation of women, or any of the current research on porn-inspired sexual violence.
If Pornhub was hoping that they could use the interview to make the case for their “rebrand” by agreeing to (or requesting) an interview with Patrick Bet David and Valuetainment, they are probably very happy with the result. I’d like to see them sit down with an interviewer who is actually prepared and willing to challenge them.
Tell Congress to shut down Pornhub Send a message today
