The CEO of Pornhub has said that his Montreal mansion could have been burned down by a religious group angry at his work.
The home of Feras Antoon, 46, was burned down on 25 April last year in an incident believed to have been an arson attack.
The mansion erupted in flames weeks after Mr Antoon had put the property up for sale for $15.9m.
In an opinion piece in The New York Times in December 2020, Pornhub was accused of being “infested with rape videos” and that the site “monetizes child rapes, revenge pornography, spy cam videos of women showering, racist and misogynist content, and footage of women being asphyxiated in plastic bags”.
The following criticism prompted Mr Antoon’s profits to fall, and he later listed his mansion for sale despite construction not being done.
Weeks after the mansion was listed for sale, security staff noticed two unidentified people entering the construction site. The property was in flames not long after.
The fire lasted for almost three hours with 80 firefighters working to put it out.
“Could the extreme religious groups have incited and encouraged someone to do this? Absolutely,” Mr Antoon told Vanity Fair. “When you use extremist language and QAnon sentiment toward child trafficking, your words are going to attract and mobilize some of the darkest corners of the internet.”
“Any suggestion that we allow or encourage illegal content is completely untrue and defies rational reason, from both a moral and business standpoint,” Mr Antoon told the magazine about the New York Times opinion column.
The reporting prompted credit card companies Mastercard, Visa, and Discover to cease their cooperation with the site leading Pornhub to have to remove 80 per cent of its content in an effort to improve.
Pornhub states on its site that they “have always been committed to eliminating illegal content, including non-consensual material and child sexual abuse material”.
“We are constantly improving our trust and safety policy to better flag, remove, review and report illegal material,” they add.
“Going forward, we will only allow properly identified users to upload content. We have banned downloads. We have made some key expansions to our moderation process, and we recently launched a Trusted Flagger Program with dozens of non-profit organizations,” Pornhub states.
Dozens of women sued Pornhub following The New York Times column, claiming that the company acted as a “classic criminal enterprise”, according to DailyMail.com.
The lawsuit claims that the site profits from rape, child pornography, sex trafficking, and other content made without consent. The legal filing also claims that Pornhub’s parent company, MindGeek, bought content made by traffickers in bulk.
The case was settled outside court in October 2021 between MindGeek and 50 women who said they were victims of trafficking. They alleged that content provider Girls Do Porn coerced them to have sex while being filmed but were dishonest about how the footage would be disseminated.
The settlement terms have not been revealed, but MindGeek said in a statement that the company has “zero tolerance for the posting of illegal content on its platforms, and has instituted a comprehensive, industry-leading trust and safety policy to identify and eradicate any illegal material from its community”.
“We are committed to remaining at the forefront of internet safety, and taking every measure to prevent bad actors from posting illegal content online,” they added.
“The parties reached a mutual resolution to resolve the dispute and the terms are confidential,” the lawyer who represented the women, Brian Holm, told DailyMail.com in a statement.
Mr Antoon added to Vanity Fair that he decided to sell the mansion because “it attracted too much attention. I felt a very negative karma about it. It was supposed to bring joy and I felt it was only bringing negativity, so we decided to sell it”.
Mr Antoon said he and MindGeek’s Chief Operating Officer David Tassillo chose to speak to the magazine because continuing to avoid reporters “could come off as wanting to be dodgy. Now we’re at a place where it’s important to be transparent. I think when you don’t hear people speak on behalf of the company, it’s easy to assume that we’re just ‘shadowy porn guys.’ And that couldn’t be further from the truth”.
