MindGeek, the parent company of several prominent adult video websites, is being sued by a woman who alleges that her sexual assault was videotaped and published on their platforms. These allegations are not a one-off, either, as other women have made similar claims in the past. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: MindGeek, the parent company of several prominent adult video websites is being sued by a woman who alleges that her sexual assault was videotaped and published on their platform. These allegations are not a one-off. They’re, as you know, we’re handling these cases. We’ve handled these cases against PornHub, we’ve handled against MindGeek. These are serious cases. The reason, the most startling thing about it is the money behind all this is coming directly from Wall Street. Okay. We’re finding that as we look at these cases, MindGeek, for example, MindGeek is a company in Canada tied to the PornHub. Okay. They would collect, they would send out notices to people who they knew were traffickers, knew that they clearly, they were traffickers. They would say, we need a videotape of a 14 year old being sodomized in a hotel room. And the traffickers would go out and do that. They would go to a hotel, rent the hotel, bring in lights, cameras, anybody at the hotel had to see something was wrong there. But while MindGeek was being investigated by Canadian parliament, asked the question, we have it on you. We know you’re doing this. While that was happening, Wall Street was giving ’em more money to finance their operation. That’s how ugly this story is.
Farron Cousins: This whole story here, and it’s tragic what happened to this woman. She says that she was sexually assaulted, basically raped, it was videotaped. And then next thing she knows, it’s up on this website.
Mike Papantonio: They won’t take it down
Farron Cousins: For people to watch for their enjoyment. This horrific thing in her life. But you talk about the Wall Street involvement, the Canadian company involvement. We also have the hotel involvement.
Mike Papantonio: Oh, absolutely.
Farron Cousins: Like you talked about, we have hotels that knew this was taking place. You had every staffer in these hotels say, yeah, everybody kind of knew when you saw the guys moving in with filming equipment for the Red Roof Inn. This isn’t like.
Mike Papantonio: Exactly. They’ve rented a room for two weeks in the biggest suite they have, people bringing in cameras, lights. Go ahead.
Farron Cousins: Exactly. And so, there’s lawsuits against the hotels and we’ve done plenty of segments about that.
Mike Papantonio: We’ve handled those cases.
Farron Cousins: Exactly. And so this industry, this human trafficking industry, this assault industry is alive and well, and it’s not, it’s not the people you see in the movies. Right. You know, Taken. It’s not just a group of people who go out there and they snatch women off the street.
Mike Papantonio: From the Balkans.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. And then they sell ’em overseas. I mean, that happens. But this is much more sophisticated. You have Wall Street involved. You have massive hotel chains. You have these companies that are well organized and well established and very well funded that do this for a living. It’s almost, I recently talked to Chris Paulos from your firm about terrorism. People think, oh, the terrorists are these people, they’re hiding out in their caves. They are not. They are people with connections to Wall Street with the high up banks, with the governments. It’s a sophisticated high tech apparatus. And so is the human trafficking industry. And that’s what we’re seeing here.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. Well, we’ve been handling these cases against the MindGeeks and the PornHubs and all these slithering creeps for a while now. And the bothersome thing is to understand but for Wall Street money, they wouldn’t be alive.
