The two top executives of Pornhub’s parent company announced they were resigning on Tuesday amid mounting scrutiny of alleged underage and non-consensual videos on the site.
MindGeek chief executive Feras Antoon and chief operating officer David Tassillo are leaving the company but will remain shareholders, MindGeek said in a statement. The company also made an unspecified number of layoffs on Tuesday, according to social media posts from employees.
The news comes after a string of disturbing reports on the alleged proliferation of underage and non-consensual videos on MindGeek’s sites, which also include Brazzers, RedTube and YouPorn.
A New Yorker investigation published earlier in June centered on the plight of a 15-year-old British girl who struggled to have explicit videos of herself removed from Pornhub and other sites after they were uploaded without her consent.
Luxembourg-based MindGeek is also staring down a $600 million class action suit filed last year on behalf of several alleged underage victims whose videos were reportedly shared on Pornhub without their consent.
The class representative in the suit, which was filed in Canada, is a woman who alleges that a video of her rape as a 12-year-old was posted to Pornhub, and who accused the site of being deaf to her pleas to take it down.
The company also took a major hit in 2020 after Visa and MasterCard stopped processing payments for some of its sites due to concerns about illegal content.
MindGeek denied to the Wall Street Journal that the departures of Antoon and Tassillo are related to accusations against the company.
“MindGeek has more comprehensive and effective policies than any other major platform on the internet,” the company said. “MindGeek’s executive leadership team will run day-to-day operations on an interim basis, with a search underway for replacements.”
Pornhub is the 15th most popular website in the entire world, according to SimilarWeb, making the smut site more popular than TikTok and Netflix.
MindGeek, which is privately held, says its sites receive more than 115 million visitors each day. The company has offices in Los Angeles, London, Montreal, Cyprus and Budapest.
With Post wires
[Written in collaboration with other media outlets with information from the following sources]
