- A mother is taking MindGeek, who owns Pornhub, to court after a man was convicted of raping her son, filming the content, and uploading it to the site.
- Her lawyer told Insider that the videos uploaded to the site were “clearly” of a minor.
- The damage from this case, the lawyer said, is “like a permanent injury” to the child involved.
A “traumatized” mother is taking MindGeek, who owns Pornhub, to court after a man was convicted of raping her son, filming the content, and uploading it to the site.
Rocky Franklin, 36, was imprisoned earlier this year on two counts of sexual exploitation of a child, one count of advertising child pornography, and two counts of the distribution of child pornography, after months of abusing children for content in 2019.
With him in jail for 480 months, the mother of one of Franklin’s victims is taking MindGeek to court for hosting videos of her child being raped repeatedly.
In the initial criminal suit against Franklin, the complaint details how Franklin drugged and raped the 14-year-old — known only under the pseudonym CV1 — filming the entire ordeal and uploading the footage to Pornhub.
The suit states that an account confirmed to belong to Franklin had multiple videos of CV1 available for sale for $15 to $20 per download, with some videos receiving over 150,000 views.
The video titles make it clear that Franklin was capitalizing on CV1 being a young boy, with titles such as "my favorite nephew" and "An Uncle's Secret." Other titles are too graphic for Insider to report.
Franklin knew the plaintiff's family but was not related.
In the civil suit against MindGeek, the plaintiffs allege that MindGeek's Pornhub provided "assistance, platform, content mandates, and edits" to Franklin in order to generate "the maximum amount of views and drove the maximum volume of traffic for the mutual benefit of the Defendants and their unlawful scheme."
The suit also alleges that MindGeek "never informed the authorities about the identity of Defendant Franklin, the fact he posed child sexual violence or the fact that child sexual violence was being utilized on their platforms for profit to their mutual benefit."
Parker Miller from the Alabama-based law firm Beasley Allen Law who represents CV1 and his mother told Insider that CV1 is "clearly" a child in the videos uploaded by Franklin to Pornhub and that there was no debate that the victim was a minor.
In a statement to Insider, MindGeek said, "MindGeek is aware that a lawsuit has been filed in federal court in Alabama. We are sympathetic to any victim who has suffered from a trusted person's abuse, which is why we have zero tolerance for illegal material or the bad actors who attempt to upload it.
"In this case, we cooperated with authorities, leading to this criminal's sentencing of 40 years in federal prison. MindGeek has instituted the most comprehensive safeguards in user-generated platform history in order to mitigate the ability of criminals to successfully upload illegal material," they said.
Miller told Insider that MindGeek needs to accept the "enormous responsibility" of the business that they operate. "It's ripe for abuse. They've known that for years. They know what can happen if they don't do their job," he said.
A permanent injury
Miller told Insider that the victim and his mother are "traumatized" by the events that have taken place.
The damage from this case, Miller said, is "like a permanent injury" to CV1.
Insider contacted CV1's mother, but she decided not to comment at this time.
Miller says the teenager has to "live with the fear that one day, even if [he] gets past it emotionally, at some point, it could reemerge, and then it's like you're gonna get abused again."
Speaking of the uploading of abuse to sites like Pornhub, Miller said: "It's like you have the scar tissue, or a scab, that will get picked or pulled wide open by either its re-emergence or the fear of its re-emergence."
Miller, who has worked on lawsuits against BP for the state of Alabama and the opioid crisis for the state of Georgia, said that this "may not be the biggest case I've ever worked on, but it may be the most important. It's because I think this case reveals the incredible impact these conglomerates like MindGeek have if they don't do what they're supposed to do."
As well as owning Pornhub, MindGeek owns a number of other adult entertainment sites, including RedTube and YouPorn.
Previous allegations of child pornography
MindGeek, formerly known as ManWin, has previously had a number of claims related to videos of child sexual assault and trafficking levied against them.
In December 2020, an allegation that Pornhub hosts videos depicting child pornography sparked both Visa and Mastercard to launch investigations into the site and drop ties with the company.
However, Pornhub has repeatedly denied such accusations.