FACTS

In 2014, Plaintiff was around 13 years old, and a sexually explicit video featuring Plaintiff was available on Pornhub.com. Now, MindGeek happens to be the parent company of the Pornhub website. “Plaintiff’s then-boyfriend pressured her into making the video and posted it without her knowledge or consent. MindGeek also took the video and posted it to its other pornography websites. The video garnered 400,000 views by the time Plaintiff discovered it. MindGeek earned revenue from advertisements that appeared alongside the video. Impersonating her mother, Plaintiff contacted MindGeek to inform it that the video qualified as child pornography. MindGeek seems to have acknowledged as much but took a few weeks to remove the video. In this internet age, a week might as well be an eternity because content constantly and instantaneously proliferates and disseminates. The video was downloaded by users and re-uploaded several times, and Plaintiff regularly received messages from strangers containing hyperlinks to the video in the years following the original posting.” Lawsuit on Pornhub

MindGeek earned revenue from these reuploads and posted the same on its other websites too. As such, Plaintiff continued to request Defendant to remove the reposts but to no avail and was instead told by Defendant “to provide photographic proof that she was the child depicted in the video before removing [the videos].”

“If Visa was aware that there was a substantial amount of child porn on MindGeek’s sites, which the Court must accept as true at this stage of the proceedings, then it was aware that it was processing the monetization of child porn, moving money from advertisers to MindGeek for advertisements playing alongside child porn like Plaintiff’s videos,” Judge Carney wrote.

Plaintiff was constantly bullied and forced to attend online classes, with time eventually her relationship with her family turned bitter as well. She eventually left home, and stayed at a friend’s house, where she was introduced to heroin and turned into an addict. “To fund her heroin addiction, Plaintiff—still a minor at this point—created sexually explicit videos at the older man’s behest, who in turn sold the videos on Craigslist. Some of the videos were uploaded to Pornhub and were still available on the website as recently as June 2020. MindGeek uploaded these videos to its other pornographic websites and earned ad revenue from the videos. While MindGeek profited from the child porn featuring Plaintiff, Plaintiff was intermittently homeless or living in her car, addicted to heroin, depressed and suicidal, and without the support of her family.” 

The plaintiff is therefore suing MindGeek and Visa, among others, for benefiting financially from the child porn featuring her.

Is Visa helping others make money from illegal images? “The court says it may have, allowing certain claims against Visa to proceed, based on its role in processing payments for MindGeek. The suit was filed by a woman who says MindGeek profited from naked videos taken when she was an underage teen that was posted on Pornhub. This weekend, Judge Cormac J. Carney of the U.S. District Court of Central California refused Visa’s request to be dismissed from a case that claims it conspired to help MindGeek, the parent company of the website Pornhub, profit from images of child sexual abuse.”

“Visa condemns sex trafficking, sexual exploitation, and child sexual abuse materials as repugnant to our values and purpose as a company,” the San Francisco-based firm said in an emailed statement. “This pre-trial ruling is disappointing and mischaracterizes Visa’s role and its policies and practices. Visa will not tolerate the use of our network for illegal activity.”

Why does this matter? By holding Visa liable, this ruling suggests that companies might not be able to distance themselves from the illegal activities carried out by their clients just because they have not committed the crime. It sends a signal to payment companies, web hosting providers, and other intermediaries to be more careful about whom they cater to. This could, however, pose a significant challenge to these companies because they serve tens of thousands of customers, and keeping tabs on the activities of all of the customers is no mean feat.”

Visa, naturally dismisses the claims of the Petitioner. It further stated that if the case continued it would destroy the financial and payment industry. “The firm said the suit would encourage misdirected litigation since it can’t investigate the circumstances of each of the billions of transactions it processes every year. Future litigants could apply this lawsuit’s “reasoning to injuries caused by guns, prescription drugs, tobacco, soda, furs, and myriad other products — all on the theory that a Visa card was used somewhere along the way and that Visa should have somehow stopped conduct by unrelated actors, stated by Visa.”

Lawsuit on Pornhub

1. 031138281455.pdf (pershingsquarefoundation.org)
2. Ibid. 
3. Supra 1. 
4. Judge Refuses Visa’s Request to Escape Pornhub-Related Lawsuit - The New York Times (nytimes.com)
5. Ibid. 
6. Visa Must Face Claim It Profited From Pornhub Video of Child - Bloomberg
7. Why Visa is being held liable for PornHub's illegal child porn (medianama.com)
8. Visa Must Face Claim It Profited From Pornhub Video of Child - Bloomberg