This article is taken from the October 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

In December 2020, Pornhub, the world’s largest provider of free pornography and the tenth most visited website in the world, was effectively castrated by a middle-aged American mum. Armed with nothing but a laptop and a working moral compass, activist Laila Mickelwait forced the site to remove 80 per cent of its content. Takedown is the story of how she did it.

Part memoir, part gripping crime thriller, Takedown describes in forensic detail how Micklewait forced Pornhub to admit it had been knowingly profiting — along with some of the world’s biggest payment providers including Mastercard and Visa — from child abuse, rape and human trafficking.

Mickelwait’s crusade against Pornhub was not sparked by reading Andrea Dworkin; she is no strident women’s liberationist. A Christian, she recalls wanting to follow in the footsteps of her late father, a man with a commitment to human rights. Accordingly, the target of her campaign is the abolition of illegal trafficking rather than an ideological objection to pornography.

This approach might make the book less interesting to the minority of radical feminist readers like me, but it is also undoubtedly the key to her extraordinary success. With savvy pragmatism, Mickelwait tapped into the disgust of mainstream America, starting a petition which gained over two million signatures. This launched the Traffickinghub movement.

Traffickinghub brought multi-billion-dollar Pornhub, whose parent company MindGeek (now called Aylo) owned more than 100 “tube” sites, to its knees. What Mickelwait exposed eventually forced the company to delete 80 per cent of its entire website as it removed 10.6 million videos and over 30 million images.

Through tip-offs from Pornhub insiders and her own research, Mickelwait, who has worked for the anti-trafficking organisation Exodus Cry and is now CEO of the Justice Defense Fund, succeeded where lawyers, politicians and journalists had failed. She made Pornhub admit that it had stored all videos of child sexual abuse ever to have been on the site. Furthermore, her work exposed a shoddy system whereby content could be uploaded without meaningful checks; the result was that footage of crimes against both adults and children flooded the site.

Those charged with removing illegal content were expected to review 700 videos during each shift. A Pornhub insider revealed to her the “process of reviewing everything was to fast-forward through them with the audio off”. Videos of real crimes would resurface as uploaders of content would simply set up new accounts.

As the Traffickinghub campaign took off, survivors contacted Mickelwait, asking for help with having videos of the crimes committed against them removed. In a particularly devastating chapter, she describes how three courageous young women were each attacked in different parts of the world within a short timeframe.

Sofia, a 16-year-old girl in Guatemala, got in touch to say she had been sold into prostitution by her family at the age of nine and videos of her abuse were posted to Pornhub. A few months after she began to raise awareness of the crimes facilitated by Pornhub, she was beaten whilst walking through a park. This was the third physical assault committed against a vocal victim that Mickelwait documented within a few days. Yet despite intimidation and attempts to discredit them online, Pornhub’s victims gave testimonies which were vital to the campaign.

Later, Mickelwait heard that Sofia had been trafficked into a brothel in Honduras. This points to the much larger social ill that props up all pornography: the industrial scale of sexual exploitation of women and girls across the world.

As Traffickinghub gained momentum it began to attract the attention of serious heavy hitters. Journalist Nick Kristoff wrote about what Mickelwait had uncovered for the New York Times. His article, “The Children of Pornhub”, attracted the attention of activist investor and billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman. When Ackman intervened, credit card companies slunk away from the site.

Today, Pornhub is facing legal action from nearly 300 victims in 26 cases across the USA, Canada and the UK, as well as multiple class-action lawsuits on behalf of thousands of child victims. The potential damages will be measured in billions. Yet, despite this reckoning, Mickelwait is realistic: “The site is still online, its executives are still at large, and laws to prevent copycat websites are lacking.”

Takedown is a testament to Mickelwait’s tenacity and the bravery of Pornhub’s victims. But the extraordinary struggle she documents is also a reminder that people with disparate belief systems and agendas can be brought together on moral causes. The book, and Mickelwait’s work more widely, serve as a powerful reminder of the basic human decency that binds us all.