A federal judge ruled Friday that Visa helped Pornhub “monetize child porn” and sex trafficking — a decision that could have long-lasting implications for credit card companies, legal observers say.
The court denied Visa’s motion to be dropped from a lawsuit against porn parent company MindGeek, ruling there was enough evidence to show the company “knowingly provid[ed] the tool used to complete the crime” of distributing child pornography.
The decision was made in connection with a suit filed by a woman who claims Pornhub dragged its heels after she warned it was hosting an explicit video taken of her when she was 13 — at one point requiring photographic evidence that she was the same child in the video.
After several weeks, the clip, entitled “13-Year Old Brunette Shows Off For the Camera,” was taken down but reuploaded on other MindGeek sites in 2014, garnering millions of views and earning the company advertising money facilitated by Visa, the victim alleged. The illicit clip was still on the company’s sites as recently as 2020, according to the suit.
The plaintiff fell into a deep depression, tried to kill herself and became a heroin user after her unwanted infamy, she claimed. Still underage, she began acting in other porn videos produced by an older man to support her habit, the lawsuit said.
In his ruling, US District Court Judge Cormac Carney wrote that there was enough evidence to find that Visa engaged in a criminal conspiracy with the online pornographers.
“Here is Visa, standing at and controlling the valve, insisting that it cannot be blamed for the water spill because someone else is wielding the hose,” Carney wrote.
“When MindGeek decides to monetize child porn, and Visa decides to continue to allow its payment network to be used for that goal despite knowledge of MindGeek’s monetization of child porn, it is entirely foreseeable that victims of child porn like Plaintiff will suffer the harms that Plaintiff alleges,” the ruling said.
The Central District of California court also ordered MindGeek to undergo jurisdictional discovery and shine a light on its shadowy operations, which the judge said ensures “a hopeless whack-a-mole situation for victims.”
It also shot down Visa’s argument that it was an innocent third party, saying the credit card company briefly suspended its ties to Pornhub in 2020 amid allegations it housed thousands of illegal videos before joining forces again.
The plaintiff’s lead attorney Michael Bowe spoke exclusively to The Post about the verdict Saturday night.
“The Court’s holding that our detailed complaint adequately pleads Visa was engaged in a criminal conspiracy to monetize child porn means Visa and other credit card companies are finally going to face the civil and perhaps criminal consequences of this unconscionable and illegal activity,” said Bowe, a partner at Brown Rudick.
The news came a month after two Pornhub executives resigned amid widening inquiries of purported underage and non-consensual videos on the site.
MindGeek, which is based in Montreal and also owns Brazzers, RedTube and YouPorn, claims to have 115 million daily visitors and 3 billion daily ad impressions.
Pornhub was the ninth most popular webpage in the US last month, according to Semrush, a search engine marketing company.
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children said it investigated some 5 million suspected child pornography videos in 2021.
Visa did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Post.