Judge rules Visa had reason to believe it was helping to facilitate the distribution of child pornography.
U.S. District Judge Cormac Carney of the U.S. District Court of the Central District of California has denied Visa’s motion to dismiss allegations that it violated California’s Unfair Competition Law. The judge has decided that there was reason to believe the payment processor and its parent company MindGeek helped to facilitate the distribution of child porn on PornHub by allowing payments for the material to go through.
In the ruling, Carney, nominated to his post by former U.S. President George W. Bush (R), there was sufficient evidence that “Visa engaged in a criminal conspiracy with MindGeek to monetize child pornography.” He wrote further, “When MindGeek decides to monetize child porn, and Visa decides to continue to allow its payment network to be used for that goal despite knowledge of MindGeek’s monetization of child porn, it is entirely foreseeable that victims of child porn…will suffer…”
In June of this year, MindGeek CEO Feras Antoon and COO David Tassillo resigned, and the company laid off a number of employees. These changes came immediately following widespread media attention alleging that Pornhub hosted sexually explicit nonconsensual videos involving children.
The plaintiff in the case against MindGeek and Visa was Serena Fleites, who said that when she was 13 she was pressured by her now ex-boyfriend into making a sexually explicit video. He then uploaded the content to Pornhub (with a title clearly showing she was underage: “13-Year-Old Brunette Shows Off For the Camera”) without Fleites’ knowledge or consent. The video allegedly had been viewed millions of times on MindGeek sites. The plaintiff’s attorneys stated in court documents, “While MindGeek profited from the child porn featuring plaintiff, plaintiff was intermittently homeless or living in her car, addicted to heroin, depressed and suicidal, and without the support of her family.”
A Visa spokesperson responded to the latest ruling, “Visa condemns sex trafficking, sexual exploitation and child sexual abuse materials as repugnant to our values and purpose as a company. This pre-trial ruling is disappointing and mischaracterizes Visa’s role and its policies and practices. Visa will not tolerate the use of our network for illegal activity. We continue to believe that Visa is an improper defendant in this case.”
A MindGeek representative added, “At this point in the case, the court has not yet ruled on the veracity of the allegations…MindGeek has zero tolerance for the posting of illegal content on its platforms and has instituted the most comprehensive safeguards in user-generated platform history. We have banned uploads from anyone who has not submitted government-issued ID that passes third-party verification, eliminated the ability to download free content, integrated several leading technological platform and content moderation tools, instituted digital fingerprinting of all videos found to be in violation of our Non-Consensual Content and CSAM [child sexual abuse material] Policies to help protect against removed videos being reposted, expanded our moderation workforce and processes, and partnered with dozens of non-profit organizations around the world. Any insinuation that MindGeek does not take the elimination of illegal material seriously is categorically false.”
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