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The Mikhaila Peterson Podcast

It’s Way Worse Than You Think: P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait EP 225

The Mikhaila Peterson Podcast

Mikhaila Peterson

Society & Culture

4.62.1K Ratings

🗓️ 28 March 2025

⏱️ 65 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In this disturbing episode, I was joined by Laila Mickelwait (@laila). She’s the founder of the Justice Defense Fund and the global #TraffickingHub movement.


Laila broke down real cases, including a missing 15-year-old girl found in 58 videos on the site, and detailed how P*rnhub’s parent company, MindGeek, failed to moderate content responsibly.


Laila has spent nearly 20 years fighting trafficking, and she shared how her discovery of unmoderated, illegal content on P*rnhub led to a global campaign for accountability.


We explored how early p*rn exposure affects children, the rise of sextortion, why age and consent verification must become the industry standard, and how to help protect kids in an unregulated digital world. 


Laila’s book about the fight to shut down P*rnhub (100% of author proceeds are donated to the cause): https://takedownbook.com/ 


Sign the petition to shut down p*rnhub : Traffickinghubpetition.com


—Folllow Laila—

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—Chapters—00:00 – Introduction

01:22 – Who Is Laila Mickelwait?

02:45 – The Story That Changed Laila’s Life Forever

05:30 – How Easy It Was to Upload Crime to P*rnhub

09:50– Launching the #TraffickingHub Movement

11:30 – The Global Petition and Media Firestorm

13:00 – Credit Card Companies Cut Ties with P*rnhub

14:10 – 91% of P*rnhub Content Deleted

15:30 – Why Verifying Uploaders Doesn’t Fix the Problem

17:30 – Victims and Consequences 21:15 – Inside MindGeek and How the System Enabled Abuse

24:30 – What Allowed This to Go On for So Long

27:30 – Shocking Content That Was Monetized and Ignored

29:30 – The Need for Age and Consent Verification

32:30 – How Laws Are Finally Catching Up

35:30 – The Long-Term Trauma for Victims

39:30 – Laila’s Origin Story

43:30 – Parenting, Prevention, and Shame-Free Communication

47:30 – Early Exposure to Porn: The Stats and Impact

50:30 – Age Verification Laws and Industry Pushback

53:30 – Supreme Court Battle: States vs. P*rnhub

55:30 – P*rn Addiction and Its Neurological Effects

58:30 – Why This Fight Is Far from Over

#TraffickingHub

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Pornhub is Jeffrey Epstein times a thousand.

0:03.0

Could you please give us your name?

0:04.0

Jeffrey Epstein.

0:06.0

Hornhub had done an amazing job at spending millions of dollars, making it sell this household,

0:12.0

mainstream brand name for porn, where people were wearing their apparel in public,

0:17.0

you know, we're walking New York Fashion Week, and there's faux commercials on Saturday Night Live.

0:21.4

The site makes most of its money by selling 4.6 billion ad impressions on Pornhub every single day.

0:28.4

So they call it the underage guessing game where they're just playing Russian roulette with people's lives.

0:33.4

They're trying to guess who's 16 and who's 18.

0:36.4

What's rough sex and what's rape?

0:38.4

The solution at scale to this problem is age and consent verification for every single person in every video.

0:45.5

Well, duh.

0:46.5

Yeah, like, duh, right?

0:47.6

Like, how is that not already the standard?

0:49.8

And it's not just a free-for-all on the side of uploading.

0:52.5

They're not verifying the ages of those

0:54.5

who are accessing the free point sites either. Kids are being exploited in front of the screen

0:58.4

and they're being exploited in back of the screen. Lila Micklewaite, welcome to my podcast.

1:08.0

Thank you for having me. I'm so glad to be here. Yeah. Thanks for coming out.

1:11.6

This is a horrifying topic, but we should get into it.

1:15.6

So I'm going to ask a bunch of questions.

1:17.6

First off, can you give a brief background about who you are and how you got into what you do?

...

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