Woman leading $600m suit against Pornhub speaks out: 'My sexual abuse as a child is immortalized in videos,' she told CityNews

• The woman leading a $600m class action against Pornhub's parent company speaks out.
• She was alerted through a message of a Pornhub video depicting the abuse she faced as a child.

The lead complainant in a class action lawsuit against Mindgeek, the parent company of Pornhub, has said that her child abuse was filmed and uploaded to the site.

The woman, known only as Jane Doe, said that a family member dying was meant to be the end of the sexual abuse she suffered by him.

However, a message on social media from a former high school friend reopened that suffering.

"It was in my "message requests," so I didn't see it right away," Jane Doe told Canadian news site CityNews, for the first time speaking to the media. "When I opened it, I froze." The message was linking to the video on Pornhub.

At the time of the filmed abuse, she was 12 years old.

She told CityNews that she was able to find more videos of herself through the comments section of the footage, all of her as a minor experiencing abuse.

"But even if PornHub takes it down, it'll just resurface somewhere else because there are those download features available. It's always going to be there," she added.

The company has said that they have since removed the download function for most of their content.

"It really sucks to think that it doesn't matter how old I am, that my sexual abuse as a child is immortalized in videos and not just on somebody's private computer, but on the internet, and it's never going to go away," said Jane Doe.

"I feel like it had to have been so incredibly obvious to anybody watching it that this was a child. It's on the dark web where people are intentionally going to look for this," said Jane Doe.

Pornhub has been at the center of a number of legal and journalistic investigations, and the site removed approximately nine million videos in 2020.

The site is now battling a class action lawsuit and being sued for $600m for the hosting of Jane Doe's and other footage, including sexual abuse, pornographic material, and child sex abuse.

In February 2021, Mindgeek stated they would be contesting the suit.

On October 20th, Mindgeek settled another suit brought by 50 women who claimed to have been a part of a sex-trafficking operation by the adult company Girls Do Porn.

They said they were coerced by the site, and that Pornhub knew of the allegations of trafficking and assault, but formed a partnership with Girls Do Porn nonetheless.

In a statement, Pornhub parent company MindGeek said it had zero tolerance over the posting of illegal content on its platforms," reported the BBC.

"The Parties reached a mutual resolution to resolve the dispute and the terms are confidential," Brian Holm, the lawyer who represented the women said in an emailed statement.

The case has been settled, but the terms of the settlement have not been made public.

The original amount Mindgeek was being sued for was $40 million.