The Department of Justice recently announced a settlement with the parent company of adult website PornHub, after the company was found to be profiting off of human trafficking. This settlement is a slap on the wrist, at most. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.
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Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: The Department of Justice recently announced a settlement with the parent company of adult website, PornHub, after the company was found to be profiting off of human trafficking. This settlement is an insult. It’s a slap on the face of everybody that’s been a victim. I’ve got Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins with me to talk about it. Farron, when I saw this, I was appalled that the Department of Justice again, drops the ball. Opioids, nobody goes to prison. 32 pharmaceutical cases where there was clear, clear fraud, clear tampering with clinicals, nobody goes to prison. PFAS case, nobody goes to prison and the documents were overwhelming of the intent and the conduct. But this Department of Justice is so frigging useless. And this is another example, isn’t it?
Farron Cousins: And it’s getting worse. A lot of these things that you’re talking about span several different administrations. And now here we are, we’ve got this group, Aylo, used to be called MindGeek. They changed their name as if that solves problems. So they say, okay, you’ve been profiting off human trafficking. It’s pretty obvious you knew what was happening. You just decided to look the other way. Make hundreds of millions of dollars. So give us $1.8 million and we’ll call it good. We’re not gonna prosecute you or send you to jail. I mean, I don’t know that I’ve seen a fine this small for such egregious behavior. This is insane.
Mike Papantonio: It’s like this department, this prosecutor completely was terrified. I promise you this prosecutor was terrified to take these people to trial. I’d take ’em to trial tomorrow. As a matter of fact, I’m taking the deposition of these folks at the end of this.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. You will be taking ’em to trial very soon.
Mike Papantonio: I am taking to trial, but I can’t get ’em to criminal trial. And they need to be criminally prosecuted. Listen, let me give you the how bad this is. My client that I’m representing that represents the entire class, okay, it’s a mass tort case. These cases are taking place all over the country constantly. My client, 15 years old, she became, well, she was trafficked by some cat out of Mobile, Alabama, big trunk dog. Something such as that is what he called himself. Created 58 videos. 58, where she was being sodomized, raped. Every iteration that you can possibly think of, of sexual attack took place on this little 15-year-old girl. Okay. These videos were sent to PornHub. They were sent to MindGeek. The titles on ’em were overwhelming. I mean, a typical title for something like this that we see all the time, that now they say, oh, we’ve stopped doing it.
How about tiny teen is sodomized in a hotel room? Petite teen is gang banged? Or how about virgin teen is crying as she’s raped? Those are the headlines that this company says, oh, yeah, we’re gonna put that out there. They know it’s all about, make it outrageous and we’re gonna attract more money. But in there, these kids that are, they don’t do this voluntarily. Hell, they got videos where some of them are unconscious. They don’t do anything to find out. Once they find out that it’s clearly a teen, they don’t call the police. They don’t take any action to interrupt that process. And this Department of Justice says, yeah, yeah, we’re gonna fine you $1.8 million. Hell, it’s a $600 million a year industry, just this company. It’s just so infuriating, Farron.
Farron Cousins: I did the math on this. When you look at their 2022 profits, this comes out to about 34 to 36 hours of just net, net profit for that company. So you lose a day’s pay, basically. And you still get over $400 million in your pocket at the end of all of this. And one of the things they do here too, is they hide behind section 230.
Mike Papantonio: Yes.
Farron Cousins: You know, section 230, which says, you are not liable for what gets posted on your platform. So these companies, they go to the DOJ, to these idiot lawyers they have working there, and they say, hey, listen, you’re gonna have a hard time coming after us because we didn’t produce the video. We’re just the host. And we will argue all day that section 230 protects us. So if you don’t wanna be embarrassed, maybe we can work out a better deal.
Mike Papantonio: This case is so winnable. If you just had some prosecutors with the Department of Justice that had some guts and did their job, this guy did not. He gave them a deferred prosecution deal. That is, we’re gonna let you go. We’re gonna make you pay $1.8 million. If you mess up again, we might do something. This guy ain’t gonna do anything. Look, here’s what these companies do. They can’t possibly review the material. There’s so much material coming in, millions of videos coming in, in a year. The numbers are staggering. So what they do, rather than spending the money to actually have a good review process, they cut the numbers of reviewers down. Now what happens? It gives ’em deniability, doesn’t it? They say, well, we had people doing it. They just didn’t catch it. You had a fraction of what you needed that you can, there’s no question, they can see the faces. They understand what a 14-year-old looks like.
And they understand really that the big gain for them is that those are the videos that make the most money. And so they keep ’em out there. And once they’re out there, even after they take ’em down, if there’s a video shot of this child, a 15-year-old being raped, sodomized, it’s out there. Now they say, we took it down. Oh, hell no, you don’t take it down. It’s somewhere in the web. It’s never gonna go away. So I don’t know. We’re gonna do, we’re gonna try to do what the Department of Justice fails to do. We do it every time. We did it on opioids. They failed. Nobody prosecuted on opioids. PFAS killing thousands of people all over the globe, no prosecution there. We took the case, we did as much as we could without, we don’t have the right to criminally prosecute. All we can do is take their money away from ’em. And I could go on dozens and dozens of cases where pharmaceutical, where we have documents that are overwhelming, that the pharmaceutical industry is gaming the clinicals, hiding material, destroying documents, overwhelming. Give it to the prosecutors or the Department of Justice. Eh, you know.
Farron Cousins: Seems like a lot of work. We don’t want to do.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. We don’t wanna do the work. We just wanna do the low hanging fruit, whatever the hell that is. I don’t know what they do anymore.
