Conservatives often claim the “mainstream media” carries water for leftist special interest groups. Based on the latest issue of The New Yorker, it turns out that prestige magazines are more than happy with publishing far-right evangelicals’ propaganda about the porn industry.
This week, staff writer Sheelah Kolhatkar wrote a lengthy feature detailing horrific allegations of child sexual abuse material allegedly uploaded to Pornhub—all of which should be condemned—but she also spends thousands of words praising #Traffickinghub creator and Justice Defense Fund founder Laila Mickelwait for helping women. She describes Mickelwait researching sex trafficking as a college student and saying, “I just felt like from an early age I had it in me to care about this.” Kolhatkar then describes Mickelwait designating Pornhub a sex-trafficking ring before highlighting her supposed mission: holding Pornhub’s parent company MindGeek “accountable.” The problem is that despite Mickelwait’s protestations, her goal isn’t to save victims. It’s to abolish the porn industry. (Mickelwait, through her attorney, sent a letter to The Daily Beast following publication alleging that is not her aim.)
Spend five minutes analyzing Mickelwait’s tactics, and it becomes clear that her plan has nothing to do with ending sex trafficking. For one, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children reported last year that Facebook hosted 20.3 million reported incidents of child sexual abuse material—or 95 percent of the 21.7 million total reported incidents across all platforms. Google was responsible for 546,704 reported incidents; Snapchat 144,095; Twitter 65,062; and TikTok 22,692. MindGeek, a Canadian company that controls a constellation of porn sites including Pornhub, YouPorn and RedTube, had a total of 13,229 reported incidents. If you’re truly worried about the children, perhaps consider starting a #TraffickingBook campaign?
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Unlike Facebook and other social media giants, Pornhub has taken measures to clean house. Once upon a time, Pornhub was like Napster. It allowed Joe Schmo to upload stolen content—and trust me, professional, legal, consenting adult performers hated the company for repeatedly violating our copyright. Pornhub also failed to verify the ages of performers in videos, a policy that the entire legal adult porn industry despised. But since these issues emerged, Pornhub has changed owners, policies, and employees more times than I can count. Today, the company requires identity and age verification before videos go live, and it allows consenting adult performers to sell our content. Pornhub’s evolution is akin to Napster becoming Spotify. Yet Mickelwait and her allies continue to attack and mischaracterize Pornhub as though it’s the same company from a decade ago.
The New Yorker is effectively punishing Pornhub for trying to do the right thing. To see what the wrong thing looks like, Kolhatkar should cover the many tube sites that still operate like Pornhub did in 2008. Countless porn streamers operate outside of North America, where you have zero chance of getting them to comply with age-verification or copyright laws. Even more fringe sites allow users to upload absolutely anything. These companies’ very existences defeat the argument that abolishing Pornhub would solve the problem Mickelwait and Kolhatkar describe. Criminals will continue to commit crimes because, guess what, they’re criminals! And good luck serving a lawsuit to a mobster based in another country.
But you can’t tie these shady foreign tube sites to the legal porn business, and Kolhatkar latches onto Mickelwait’s narrative because her point is to critique America’s legal porn industry. Take her description of “Porn Valley,” the San Fernando Valley area in Southern California where the legitimate adult porn business flourishes. Kolhatkar spends paragraphs discussing Porn Valley, but it has nothing to do with Pornhub (MindGeek is based in Canada). Even worse, Kolhatkar relitigates how 30-plus years ago Traci Lords appeared in underage porn for major adult studios, without mentioning how this was a historical anomaly in the legal porn business and that new reporting alleges producers were given false verification documents showing that Lords was an adult.
Worst of all, Kolhatkar paints all consenting porn stars as victims. Guess what, Sheelah? Thanks to OnlyFans, clip stores, and, yes, MindGeek, adult performers like me own our content which we sell as independent business owners. And I know Kolhatkar knows this because she quotes my writing in the op-ed without mentioning the fact that I’m, yes, a porn star. But why would Kolhatkar acknowledge a middle-aged porn star? That would contradict her narrative that most porn stars are poor little child sex trafficking victims.
Kolhatkar insinuates the porn business is one big child sex trafficking ring without once mentioning her conspiracy comes from far-right evangelical Christians. Mickelwait started gaining notice for her advocacy at an evangelical porn abolitionist organization called Exodus Cry. The group began as a prayer group at Kansas City’s International House of Prayer (IHOPKC), which, until Mickelwait started grabbing all the attention, was most famous for being featured doing missionary work in the 2013 film God Loves Uganda that the film contends helped lead to the passage of Uganda’s notorious Anti-Homosexuality Act. Kolhatkar in her piece cites Exodus Cry’s founder, Benjamin Nolot, who claims that “Exodus Cry and IHOPKC were not the same.” But she fails to acknowledge that, as Tarpley Hitt wrote in the Daily Beast, “In 2018, Open Democracy reported that Exodus Cry had been listed as a ‘related tax-exempt organization’ on IHOP’s tax filings in their most recent returns, that both groups shared a director, and that Nolot was listed as a ‘prayer leader’ until 2017.”
You can bet that if Jane Meyer were covering a Trump-supporting non-profit, she’d mention every single tax form in her New Yorker article. Unfortunately, for law-abiding, legal adult performers like myself, Kolhatkar is not Jane Meyer. She’s a gullible reporter who’s been duped by Mickelwait. The piece is riddled with laughable figures, like the claim that MindGeek’s sites received “4.5 trillion visits each month in 2020”—or 150 billion visits a day.
On top of everything else, adult actors who participated in Kolhatkar’s piece have come forward to accuse her of misrepresenting the nature of her story to them and taking their quotes out of context:
Ever since she launched #Traffickinghub, Mickelwait has sought fame. Her campaign has done precious little to help victims, women, or children—Pornhub could go bankrupt tomorrow, and Facebook would still host many, many times more child exploitation videos than Pornhub ever did—but it’s made Mickelwait a star. With her fawning New Yorker profile, she has more clout than ever before. And she’ll keep using it to both boost her own celebrity and continue her obsessive anti-porn crusade.
Corrections: A previous version of this story described Exodus Cry as a “‘related tax-exempt organization’ on IHOPKC’s tax forms as recently as 2018.” It should have clarified that the revelation was discovered in 2018 by Open Democracy. The piece also misidentified Benjamin Nolot as the founder of IHOPKC, when he is the founder of Exodus Cry. Nolot, according to the aforementioned tax forms, was listed as a “prayer leader” at IHOPKC.
