Pornhub, parent company MindGeek, sued by child trafficking survivors

Two child trafficking survivors have filed a lawsuit against porn company MindGeek and its popular adult video-sharing website, Pornhub, for victimizing and exploiting "child sex abuse material for profit."

The victims identified as Jane Doe No. 1 and Jane Doe No. 2 are "victims and survivors of childhood sex trafficking who had videos and images of their childhood sex trafficking sold and/or distributed on websites" that MindGeek owns and operates.

"MindGeek's business model facilitated a massive surge in child pornography by making it easy to access and distribute these horrific crime scenes throughout the world," Gregory Zarzaur, founder of The Zarzaur Law Firm, who is representing the plaintiffs, said in a statement.

He added that the survivors "are proud to stand up for themselves and the multitude of other victims."

Kimberly Adams, a partner at Levin Papantonio Rafferty, who is also representing the plaintiffs, said the lawsuit aims to "fix" the internet rather than "break it" by "eliminating MindGeek's haven and marketplace for child rapists and pedophiles."

Neither Pornhub nor MindGeek responded to inquiries from FOX Business.

The plaintiffs were under 18 when videos of their abuse were "made available" on websites linked to MindGeek, the complaint states.

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Jane Doe No. 1 was 16 years old when she was "drugged and raped by a man in Tuscaloosa, Alabama," who then made a "business deal" with MindGeek under its Modelhub program to profit from videos of Jane Doe No. 1 shared on MindGeek's websites, the lawsuit says.

In September, a petition to "shut down Pornhub" reached more than 2.1 million signatures after a Tuscaloosa man was charged with producing and posting porn with a minor on the website through its Modelhub platform. The Tuscaloosa County Sheriff's Office told Fox News at the time that the suspect had been released on bond.

Pornhub makes a 35% sales commission on videos posted through Modelhub, which allows users to sell videos directly from their Pornhub accounts, according to the website's help center.

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"At no time did MindGeek or PornHub attempt to verify Jane Doe [No. 1]'s identity, age, inquire about her status as a victim of trafficking, or otherwise protect or warn against her traffickers before or while the video of her being drugged and raped was sold, downloaded, viewed and otherwise advertised on PornHub," the complaint states.

Jane Doe No. 2 was also a minor when a sex trafficker forced her to participate in sexually explicit videos involving other adults that appeared on Pornhub and other websites MindGeek owns and operates, according to the complaint.

The complaint similarly alleges that neither Pornhub nor MindGeek took action to verify Jane Doe No. 2's age or identity.

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A Pornhub spokesperson told Fox News in September that "Pornhub has a steadfast commitment to eradicating any and all illegal content, including under-age material, and actively works to employ state of the art, comprehensive measures to protect its platform from such content.

He added those measures include a team of human moderators that manually reviews "every single upload;" a system for flagging, reviewing and removing "all illegal material;" age-verification tools and various automated technologies, including "CSAI Match, YouTube's proprietary technology for combating Child Sexual Abuse Imagery content online," as well as a number of others.

The lawsuit, however, alleges that approximately 10 individuals who work on MindGeek's "moderation team" at "any given time throughout the day" were "each tasked by MindGeek to review approximately 800-900 pornographic videos per 8-hour shift, or about 100 videos per hour."

"According to PornHub, there are approximately 18,000 videos uploaded daily, with an average length of approximately 11 minutes per video. Hence, each moderator is tasked with reviewing approximately 1,100 minutes of video each hour. This is an impossible task, and MindGeek knows that," the complaint reads.

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Credit card giants Visa and Mastercard announced in December that they were looking into their respective business relationships with Pornhub after The New York Times' Nicholas Kristof published a Dec. 4 report accusing the site of monetizing "child rapes, revenge pornography, spycam videos of women showing, racist and misogynist content, and footage of women being asphyxiated in plastic bags."

In a statement to The Associated Press at the time, Pornhub said it is "irresponsible and flagrantly untrue" to suggest that it allows images of the sexual abuse of children on its site. Pornhub added that it employs moderators to screen every upload and that it removes illegal material.

Pornhub then purged the majority of its user-submitted content -- largely from unverified accounts -- ahead of implementing a more strict verification process in the New Year.

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"As part of our policy to ban unverified uploaders, we have now also suspended all previously uploaded content that was not created by content partners or members of the Model Program," Pornhub announced in a statement on its website.

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"This means every piece of Pornhub content is from verified uploaders, a requirement that platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat and Twitter have yet to institute," the company said.