WHEN a 24-year-old British woman received a message from her ex’s new partner with links to two videos on Pornhub showing them having sex, she immediately reported him to the police.
The videos, which she claims she did not know existed, had tags including “f****** my ex” and showed her having sex with a man she had dated for a year previously.
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The victim said: “When I watched the videos I felt sick. I knew straight away it was me.
“I felt dirty and ashamed, even though I had done nothing wrong. I thought I was in love with him at the time. I had no idea the videos had been filmed.”
She subsequently discovered that multiple women had reported her ex to the police for secretly making sex tapes and uploading them to Pornhub, seemingly to make a profit.
But when the Derbyshire police requested a statement from Pornhub they never responded and, this week the CPS dropped the case as a result.
Now, the internet porn giant has been accused of sinking the investigation into the incident by failing to respond to requests for information. Pornhub claims it did not receive any requests.
The case has now been closed because of lack of evidence.
Sadly this scenario – and the police failings – are all too familiar to me.
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Women are killing themselves over this
In May, I set up a campaign to highlight the issue of revenge porn after a close friend had her iCloud account hacked and explicit sexual videos uploaded to Pornhub.
Since then I’ve been dealing with at least one woman a week who has been devastated and humiliated by this modern form of sexual assault – often to the point of feeling suicidal.
In June 2017, 26-year-old Damilya Jossipalenya jumped to her death from her flat when boyfriend Alessio Bianchi, 26 threatened to send footage of a sex act to her family.
And earlier this year Spanish mum Veronica Rubio, 32, took her own life after a jealous ex threatened shared a five-year-old sex tape online.
Yet the police and the courts are not taking it seriously.
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Men discussed what they would do to her
Although revenge porn – the distribution of a private sexual image of someone without their consent and with the intention of causing them distress – was made illegal in 2015, the laws don’t apply to commercialised porn companies.
This means the likes of Pornhub can – and do – profit from videos, which are published without permission from the people in them.
When my friend Rachel had her sex tapes stolen it was horrific.
Before she could even report it to the police, her videos were in the top five on the site.
I will never be able to fully understand how abused she felt in that moment or during the horror that unfolded afterwards.
Before long the Twitter commentary rolled in and the tone of entitlement was deafening – men commenting on her body, openly publishing what they would do to her if she was in a room with them.
It made me feel sick. I felt violated on her behalf.
The feeling of total lack of control and being invaded was like sexual assault.
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Virtual sex abuse
Then came the victim-blaming.
Phrases like “you reap what you sow” and “if you don’t want to be on a porn site, don’t record it in the first place’ dominated the conversation.
This was “you shouldn’t have worn that if you weren’t asking for it” for the digital age.
Rachel contacted Pornhub to tell them that the videos were stolen from her iCloud account.
Three days later, Pornhub had removed the videos – but they popped back up just a day later.
The cycle of find, report, take it down, continue followed – until it hit us that this video was never leaving Pornhub, her name was never leaving that “search suggestion” in the search bar.
This video needed a mere few hours to cement itself within the porn industry forever.
Rachel fell into depression, with suicidal thoughts followed by suicidal actions – she felt overwhelmed with complete despair and humiliation.
At a particularly vulnerable point, she told me that she had been sexually abused before, and for her this felt much worse.
Many of us have experienced sexual abuse but how many have experienced it virtually and so publicly?
Mum tells how revenge porn video of her remained on Pornhub months after she complained as owners are accused of profiting from practice
Ex-husband’s revenge
Pornhub and other porn tube websites work in the same way as YouTube – users are able to make money from uploading content based on the number of clicks.
Parent company MindGeek own around 80 per cent of the commercialised porn industry globally.
And while the technology exists to digitally fingerprint this content to avoid it from being uploaded again, Pornhub only offers this to victims who have the original video via a third party website.
The police failings in these types of investigations are also painful to hear.
Sophie told me how she wanted to ‘spice up her sex life’ with her then-husband of 10 years.
In this case, Sophie and her husband used a physical hard drive to keep the videos, which they kept hidden away for their own personal viewing.
After a nasty divorce she kept the hard-drive, afraid he would use it against her but police came to Sophie’s house and demanded she hand it over the hard-drive, as her husband claimed it his own personal property.
Sophie explained the situation but it fell on deaf ears. Her worst nightmare came true when her husband then sent her threatening messages saying he’d upload these videos to Pornhub, and he did.
Pornhub: the multi-billion business
Pornhub was founded in Canada by web developer Matt Keezer in 2007 and also now has bases in San Francisco, New Orleans, Houston and London.
It was bought by Canadian company Mindgeek in 2010 as part of a porn empire which also includes RedTube and YouPorn as well as four adult production companies.
In 2018, 4.79 million new videos were uploaded to Pornhub and the site was visited 30.3 billion times — that’s 962 a minute.
According to the site Worth of Web, the site is worth £2.6billion with an estimated annual revenue of £300million, globally.
Companies need to be held to account
If I’ve learnt anything over the past six months listening to these brave women, it’s that the UK government has to start recognising the porn industry as an actual industry.
With offices operating with the UK, and companies like Unilever having advertised on Pornhub very recently, it’s time we take them seriously and hold them to account, putting laws in place to prevent them using sexual abuse for profit.
In 2017 alone, Pornhub had 28.5 billion visits – to put that into context that’s nearly 1,000 visits per second.
In 2018 more than 5,517,747,800 hours of porn were watched on Pornhub.
They’re now a global multi-billion dollar company which has no will to comply with British law…because they don’t have to.
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The law on revenge porn
The Criminal Justice and Courts Act, which became law in April 2015, created a specific offence of distributing a private sexual image of someone without their consent and with the intention of causing them distress – known as revenge porn.
The maximum sentence is two years.
The number of reported cases of revenge porn has nearly doubled since records began, from 1,861 offences in 2015-16 to 3,307 in 2017-2018, according to BBC reports.
However just 7 per cent cases resulted in charges and approximately a third of victims choose not to prosecute, usually citing a lack of anonymity or lack of police support.
BBC research found that most victims are in their 20s but a third of victims were teenagers but in August an 11-year-old became the youngest victim of the crime.
In 2015, Paige Mitchel, from Stevenage, was spared jail after becoming the first person convicted under the law, for posting naked pictures of her girlfriend on Facebook.
In August, 22-year-old Josh Potts was given ten months’ detention in a youth offenders institute after sending intimate footage of girlfriend Alisha Sterling to her mother and three friends.
Pornhub’s response to allegations and media coverage of the campaign has been one of complete denial – that they don’t have a sexual abuse problem, and in some cases even accusing victims of making the story up.
Revenge porn is seen as a digital crime but it’s very obvious to anyone who has experienced the effects that it is sexual assault.
Imagine being sexually abused so publicly, to an audience who felt that because you’re on Pornhub, that they have the right to comment on you, your body, and the most intimate and private aspects of your life – all without your consent.
The choruses of “if they didn’t want to be on Pornhub they shouldn’t have recorded it in the first place” have cut through this issue, completely ignoring the fact that these people did not ever give permission to become a porn star.
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However, I can’t help but think those are the same voices that told girls in the 1960s that if they didn’t want to be raped, they shouldn’t have worn such a short skirt.”
Names have been changed to protect identity.
If you have been a victim of Revenge Porn please visit www.notyourporn.com/victimsupport or contact the Revenge Porn Helpline.