A David and Goliath battle involving a billion-dollar pornography website

Laila Mickelwait’s Takedown describes in fascinating and often distressing detail both why Pornhub, the Canadian-owned internet pornography video-sharing website, needs to be destroyed and how this might be achieved. It’s not the story of a movement against the porn industry, like the one I have been involved with for decades, but more a woman’s lone, Erin Brockovich-like crusade to shut down a major distributor.

The book relates how, through investigative journalism, Mickelwait discovered that one of the world’s biggest websites was knowingly profiting from sex trafficking, and reveals her subsequent fight to hold Pornhub accountable for its distribution and monetisation of child sexual abuse and rape. She is the founder and CEO of the Justice Defense Fund and the founder of the Traffickinghub movement – but she is no ideologue. Indeed, she is keen to specify that what she seeks to abolish is illegal trafficking, not the legal pornography industry. Her view is that as long as it is ‘lawful and not harming another person’, what happens between consenting adults is their business. She points out that she herself has ‘hardly lived the life of a prude or an enemy of the entertainment business’, and has been known to spend New Year’s Eve at a Playboy mansion party.

But she is a Christian, and looked to prayer for inspiration in tackling the monster of the porn trade; and she eventually succeeded in getting Pornhub to publicly confess to a federal felony, with Katie, a senior staff member, disclosing that the company had access to every single video in their huge collection – dating to pre-2009. In so doing, Katie admitted that Pornhub was storing all videos of child sexual abuse ever to have been on the site.