Laila Mickelwait hates porn. And after reading her new book, Takedown: Inside the Fight to Shut Down Pornhub for Abuse, Rape, and Sex Trafficking, I can’t help but think she might hate me, one of the adult industry’s favorite stepmoms, too.
Before Mickelwait launched her #Traffickinghub campaign, alleging Pornhub was responsible for sex trafficking children and was the world’s biggest child porn streamer, she was another starry-eyed twenty-something with dyed blonde hair. As she reveals in the book, she spent those years partying with Bill Maher and Andy Dick at the Playboy Mansion, jumping on a trampoline on Jimmy Kimmel’s The Man Show for a few hundred bucks and giving her minivan a makeover on MTV’s Pimp My Ride.
But real stardom came when Mickelwait learned about allegations that users uploaded rape videos, child porn, and other illegal content on Pornhub. Takedown details how she went to work at Exodus Cry, an anti-porn group that masqueraded as an anti-trafficking network, and operated inside IHOP—the International House of Prayer, not pancakes—which fought to make homosexuality a death sentence crime in Uganda.
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With Exodus Cry’s support, she launched the Traffickinghub campaign, which was featured in The New York Times and led to Mastercard refusing to process payments on Pornhub.
Mickelwait insists she just wants to stop child pornography and rape. Still, legal adult entertainers have long argued that her mission is a Trojan Horse to end the law-abiding porn industry and that Mickelwait couldn’t care less about victims. She writes the word “victim” 194 times in Takedown, but when you Google “Traffickinghub,” many of the headlines seem to focus on Mickelwait, not the victims of these heinous crimes.
The book succeeds when Mickelwait gets out of her own way and she treats her story like a real-life Sound of Freedom. But too often, she focuses on her own role in the story, including tedious minutiae about Zoom meetings and her various press appearances.
Aware that the public wouldn’t support an outright ban, Mickelwait claims she supports legal porn. She’s just out to take down child predators and rapists, she insists. To back up her claim, she mentions vague off-the-record calls with anonymous porn stars who support her cause.
When she does quote porn stars, it’s only to paint porn in a negative light. She highlights porn actress Asa Akira’s jokes about sleeping with an underage boy and quotes Jenna Jameson as an expert on the porn industry. But Jameson left the industry when VHS tapes were still king. Quoting Jameson on Pornhub is like quoting the founder of Blockbuster on Netflix’s streaming strategy.
I doubt Mickelwait wants to hear from experts in the modern adult industry. And she repeatedly misrepresents how porn’s business model works. Early in the book, she describes going on her Pornhub homepage and seeing child-themed videos without acknowledging that the algorithm shows her that because she’s actively searching for criminal material. Later, she writes about watching a “rape” video and then experiencing how the algorithm pushes more scenes in that genre. She only acknowledges the algorithm when it helps her argument.
This selective approach continues when she describes the way Pornhub handles legal complaints. She reports that Pornhub retained a criminal defense attorney who had defended alleged child pornographers but fails to mention that the site also retained Democrat lawyer Roberta Kaplan, who defended gay marriage in the Supreme Court.
The author denies IHOP’s homophobia and insists she loves gay people. It’s Pornhub that hates gays, she claims. After all, she writes, the site hosted a video called “Young twink gets slapped and spit on.” In an attempt to make her point, she slips into an old homophobic trope: Correlating the term twink with child porn suggests that gay men are pedophiles. It seems you can take the girl out of Exodus Cry, but you can’t take the Exodus Cry out of the girl.
Mickelwait paints her campaign as ultimately victorious, but that all depends on how she measures her goal. Pornhub’s owners sold the company, but it still stands. Now, the company—as adult performers have demanded for years—requires users to verify their IDs before they upload videos.
But Pornhub is one company, and it’s not even the worst actor. Mickelwait claims she wants to end child porn, but she refuses to take on Facebook’s parent company Meta, which, as The Daily Beast has reported, hosts far more child porn than Pornhub ever did.
In the end, Mickelwait’s crusade puts the livelihoods of legal porn actors like me in jeopardy. She brags in the book about Pornhub execs losing their home insurance and bank access without acknowledging that her campaign also led banks to cancel legitimate porn performers’ accounts. She expresses shock that anyone would claim her campaign to get Mastercard to stop processing payments on Pornhub led directly to OnlyFans briefly banning porn. But when they did, tens of thousands of performers who depended on that platform lost their primary income source overnight.
After reading her book, I doubt Mickelwait would care. If I learned one thing from Takedown, it’s that she only cares about herself.
