Police in Paris arrested three men on Tuesday as part of a sprawling investigation into alleged abuse of vulnerable women in the French pornography industry. In response French senators have proposed a raft of measures including stronger regulations to block under-18s from accessing online porn.
French police arrested three men in Paris on Tuesday, thought to be actors linked to the adult video platform French Bukkake, as part of a sprawling investigation into sexual violence and human trafficking in the French pornography industry.
The investigation, which began in October 2020, has allegedly uncovered widespread abuse of vulnerable women subject to sexual violence and coerced into performing sex acts on and off camera by actors, directors and producers, keen to satisfy consumer demand for an endless stream of new actresses and graphic video content.
Fifteen men who worked in the industry in France are potentially facing prosecution, with most in custody awaiting trial. Two French porn brands, Jackie & Michel and French Bukkake, are also under investigation. More than 40 alleged victims have joined as civil plaintiffs alongside activist groups.
The result is France’s biggest ever sexual violence investigation and a moment of reckoning for the pornography industry.
The French Senate on Thursday released a report entitled “Porn: Hell behind the scenes” listing 23 measures to improve conditions for workers in the pornography industry, introduce stricter controls for platforms hosting adult content and measures to prevent children and teenagers under 18 from viewing porn online.
>> French Senate report denounces sexual and physical abuse in porn industry
“It feels different than before,” says Khadija Azougach, a Paris-based lawyer specialising in violent crime and spokesperson for Lawyers 4 Women, a legal association against violent crime against women.
“It’s like a #MeToo moment for the porn industry. You can feel these young women are being taken seriously when they talk about what they have been through."
'Fed dog food'
Details of the investigation that have emerged in the French media paint a chilling picture of working conditions for women who appeared in explicit videos.
Those arrested face charges of rape, trafficking, torture, pimping, recording and sharing images that violate the right to integrity of the person.
“Some girls have said they were illegally confined, others say they were fed dog food,” Azougach says. “[The perpetrators] did everything they could to make the girls even more vulnerable and to wield power over them.”
Perpetrators are suspected of both trafficking women from Eastern Europe and preying on vulnerable women in France, convincing them first into prostitution and then into filming pornographic videos, dangling the promise that it would help relieve financial worries.
At the heart of the French investigation are two producers, owner of the French Bukkake site Pascal Ollitrault (professionally known as Pascal OP) and Mathieu L. (professionally known as Mat Hadix), now both awaiting trial.
A trove of SMS and Whatsapp messages sent between the two men and their associates were uncovered when police searched Ollitrault’s home in October 2020 and, as reported by French newspaper Le Monde, detailed how they managed a supply chain of women, treating them largely as merchandise.
In messages reportedly punctuated with racist terms, nude photos of the women and memes, the two men appear to repeatedly refer to the illegal nature of their activities. In one exchange, Hadix sends OP a screenshot of messages from an actress complaining about filming conditions. Hadix asks if she signed a contract.
“[The contract] is not the problem,” answers OP, who acted alongside the actress. Instead he appears concerned about a potential evidence trail. “The girl’s saying I forced her to do anal and double vaginal… that’s considered rape and if they look at the rushes… they’ll see if what she is saying is true or not.”
Police investigations found evidence in multiple online videos of women protesting against sex acts that they were then made to perform.
“They were forced to do things without their consent because, it seems, there was a demand for this type of film,” Azougach says. “We can’t describe them as fictional films because the women in them were subjected to rape.”
Both men deny the accusations against them, Le Monde reported.
Yet other messages between them and their associates seem to confirm that actresses were supplied with excessive amounts of drugs and alcohol on sets, frequently used for sex outside of filming, systematically provided with falsified negative tests for sexually transmitted diseases, pimped to other productions for a commission fee and extorted for thousands of euros for the removal of their videos on sites they had not consented to appear on.
Brands Jackie & Michel and Dorcel have sought to distance themselves from the enquiry, saying they were unaware of the conditions in which videos were filmed in.
'About how the internet is regulated'
Revelations about the levels of abuse in the French porn industry have spurred the Senate to tackle the issue by calling for greater accountability for sites that host illegal pornographic videos, improving legal protections for pornography workers and granting them greater image rights.
Yet it has also hardened resolve to address a long-standing deadlock on plans to ban access to online porn for viewers aged under 18.
Out of an average 19.3 million individual visitors to adult sites per month in France, 12 percent are minors, the Senate’s report found.
This comes despite a 2020 vote from French MPs to restrict access to porn sites by obliging platforms to introduce age-verification measures. The vote aimed to replace pop-ups that appear on many sites asking visitors to tick a box to confirm their age in favour of asking them to prove their age by providing identifying information.
Yet the law has proved hard to implement. In 2021, French regulator Arcom called for the right to block international pornography sites such as Pornhub for failing to prevent minors from accessing elicit content, but lawyers for the site have argued that the law is unconstitutional as verifying users’ ages restricts their right to privacy.
Results of the case are expected from French courts in October 2022.
However, new proposals from the Senate would grant Arcom powers to sanction sites directly by imposing large fines on companies who do not restrict access to minors. The report also calls for the implementation of age-verification technologies that comply with data privacy laws – which is possible with ever improving technology.
“The technology is reasonably well advanced,” says Media Professor Neil Thurman from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany. “It's just that porn sites don't want to reduce their numbers by putting on a block on visitors if they don't absolutely have to.”
Action from the French Senate may force use of such technologies through, yet questions of right to access are likely to persist.
“It comes back to an issue about how the internet is regulated,” adds Dr Emily Setty, senior lecturer in Criminology at the University of Surrey, UK. “Is it regulated on the assumption that everybody who declares themselves to be an adult is an adult or is it done on the assumption that everybody is a child until they prove otherwise?”
A 'deeply problematic' industry
There are also questions over how comprehensive a block on minors accessing porn sites could be.
Some would inevitably find ways to circumvent restrictions using widely available technology such as VPNs. Others would not need to – some 30 percent of French 15-17-year-olds source pornographic content through social media, which would not be restricted under current plans.
This figure also only includes older teens who are actively seeking out pornographic content. Many come across it accidentally or are sent it by others.
“The formal porn industry, like Pornhub and all those websites, will have to age verify,” says Setty. “But a lot of the ways that young people are being exposed to sexually explicit content, without any sort of intentional act on their part, won't be captured.”
Restrictions may reduce accidental exposure via pop-ups or intentional exposure through link sharing, but they will not prevent an adult from taking an explicit photo of themselves and sending it to a minor online, for example.
This tension between the professional and amateur porn worlds may ultimately prove the hardest space for regulators to access in order to protect both minors and pornography workers.
As professional platforms have allowed amateurs to upload their own videos, a new genre of “pro-am” content has emerged, entailing small professional production teams posing as producers of amateur content in order to get away with working without contracts or workplace protections.
The Senate report cited such practices as contributing factors to abusive conditions for pornography workers.
Yet for the women at the heart of the abuse scandal uncovered in France, the police investigation and a raft of measures from the Senate aiming to tackle the issue from all sides marks a significant step.
“In some places the thinking goes that it’s not porn that’s the problem, but children's access to it,” says Setty, “Whereas what France is trying to say is there's something deeply problematic about the porn industry itself.”
It has also marked France out as a leader in trying to tackle an issue that many countries are grappling with.
“France is more advanced than some countries in actually trying to get this legislation implemented,” says Thurman. “I can see some countries following France's lead, once we've got some evidence about how effective such legislation is.”
