NEW YORK — Sheelah Kolhatkar, a staff writer for the Pulitzer Prize-winning New Yorker, embarked on a story presumably intending to do a public service by exposing cases of abuse and child sex abuse material (CSAM) in the adult entertainment industry. 

But critics, including some of those quoted in her report, “The Fight to Hold Pornhub Accountable,” say Kolhatkar failed to deliver a balanced and nuanced representation of events related to the industry’s work to counter non-consensual content and CSAM on platforms like Pornhub that are otherwise legally compliant, protected by free speech laws, and visited by billions of users annually. 

Kolhatkar’s report was published online on June 13 and was a part of a recent print edition of the New Yorker. Almost immediately, adult entertainment industry figures and reps for sex workers’ rights groups were up in arms, calling for the story to be corrected or retracted for misrepresenting or misreporting the views expressed by several interviewed sources. Just over a week after New Yorker’s report was released, MindGeek, the parent company of Pornhub, announced that chief executive officer Feras Antoon and chief operations officer David Tassillo have resigned.  

The Free Speech Coalition (FSC), a 501(c)6 trade membership association representing the adult entertainment industry, issued a lively rebuke to Kolhatkar’s report calling her work “disgraceful.” 

“We are shocked but not surprised by the New Yorker’s misleading and misguided attack on Pornhub,” the statement reads. “Rather than engage in a nuanced look at the challenges of moderation on an internet comprised of limitless user-generated content — from Twitter to Snapchat to Facebook — journalist Sheelah Kolhatkar set her sites almost exclusively on one adult website, adopting the rhetoric of religious extremists.” 

The coalition’s response to the New Yorker piece was partly a response to how Kolhatkar featured the remarks of Mike Stabile, the Free Speech Coalition’s director of public affairs and a critically-acclaimed documentarian. Stabile was asked by Kolhatkar about the financial discrimination challenges that accompany doing business in the adult industry.

Responding to a line of questioning related to Pornhub’s financial challenges with credit card processors like Mastercard and Visa, Stabile laid out clearly the challenges faced by adult content businesses of varying size and reach. However, upon publication of the story, Stabile issued a statement over Twitter criticizing the New Yorker for essentially recycling the talking points of anti-porn groups interested in banning porn content. On Twitter, Stabile accused the publication of “a PR-level account of the work of evangelicals working to shut down the porn industry — allowing ample opportunity for them to whitewash their true motivations and barely challenging their most absurd claims.”

Reached by email, Stabile said he wasn’t surprised that Kolhatkar signed her byline to an overtly slanted article against porn but he was concerned that she “believed, as many ‘antis’ still claim, that age and consent verification is not required for people in porn —  videos or that it’s only required for the uploader, and not the performers.”

“In their fight to shut down adult sites and sex work, the antis continue to misrepresent facts and it’s critical for journalists to question everything they claim,” Stabile added. “I told her to be cautious, and to vet everything. I told her I’d be happy to explain the reality behind some of their claims.”

Stabile wasn’t the only one interviewed for the article who felt his feedback had been misrepresented. Kolhatkar reached out to a variety of prominent sources both inside and outside the adult industry and appears to have squandered the opportunity to report their comments in a balanced manner. This is evidenced by the reaction of Kate D’Adamo, a partner at Reframing Health and Justice Consulting.

D’Adamo replied to Kolhatkar’s article on Twitter by reaffirming that she doesn’t work to identify the motives of extremist anti-porn groups like Exodus Cry (EC), which was featured in the article with significant prominence. D’Adamo is a sex workers’ rights activist and maintains a very clear position that she doesn’t “spend time reading tweets from hate groups to figure out their motives,” alluding to EC. 

“I talked about the ongoing work to organize around demands re: platforms. I said I don’t think much about EC bc *no one* in the field takes them seriously,” D’Adamo wrote as it relates to the scope and impact of her work and the ongoing adult entertainment industry debate related to the ethics and compliance of adult tube and streaming platforms like Pornhub. 

“I also want to clarify that my quotes were real – I’m just not an expert on Exodus Cry, because they’re not relevant to actual anti-trafficking work,” D’Adamo told YNOT in an interview following up on her tweets. “It’s like asking someone who runs a program at a LGBTQ center to give the personal motivations and mental inner workings of a specific Proud Boy and then saying ‘well, we’ve done all the research we need to!’” 

D’Adamo explained that Kolhatkar misrepresented the remarks she provided, which essentially were cherry-picked to further the argument of the report. 

“I was very clear that I didn’t know because that’s not my area of focus and Exodus Cry is not a relevant actor in the work that I do,” D’Adamo reiterated. 

Adult performer Allie Eve Knox also was interviewed by Kolhatkar. In her segment of the report, Kolhatkar cited Allie as a porn star who essentially “agreed” with Laila Micklewait, formerly of the Exodus Cry group who is profiled extensively throughout the report, now the CEO of the Justice Defense Fund, who wrote a viral anti-Pornhub op-ed. 

Mickelwait, via Kolhatkar, said that adult performers agree with her that platforms like Pornhub are quite controversial in the adult entertainment industry. While this is true, Kolhatkar’s placement of Allie’s comments immediately after the mention of Micklewait has been construed as an indirect endorsement of such thinking. Allie said that she, like D’Adamo and Stabile, was misrepresented. 

“I think she used the tiny amount of quotes she could from all of us to further her agenda,” Allie told YNOT.

When asked whether she felt concerned about her comments in the article, Allie said she was blindsided when she was contacted by a fact-checker confirming her quotes. 

“I wasn’t concerned until the fact checker asked if my quotes were correct around three questions, and they were and I realized that they would not be using any of the other things that we discussed and instead were going to be using my quotes out of content for their and let me be very clear, scam of an article,” Allie added.

Adult industry figures not interviewed by Kolhatkar are equally concerned with how this report will impact the industry moving forward. Award winning adult star  Cherie Deville wrote a column for The Daily Beast arguing that “an obsessive porn abolitionist somehow received a fawning profile in the country’s most prestigious magazine.” The Adult Industry Laborers and Artists Association also issued a statement accusing the New Yorker of engaging in “stochastic terrorism” against sex workers, adult performers, and others. 

Adult industry attorney Corey Silverstein told YNOT that articles like the one published by the New Yorker “hurt the adult entertainment industry as a whole because they paint a picture that is simply inaccurate.”

“I’d expect much more from a periodical like the New Yorker,” Silverstein added. “The article lacks an understanding of CSAM across the internet and not just the adult entertainment industry.”

Pornhub and adult tube sites generally are very heated topics. It is commonly held that intellectual property theft and the spread of non-consensual porn content, including CSAM, is rampant on tube sites that don’t require user identity and age verification. Sites like Pornhub and xHamster, as a response to the onslaught of the controversy directly caused by the columns of former New York Times opinion columnist and now-Democratic politician Nicholas Kristof, have adopted a new set of corporate policies that require uploaders of content to have their identities confirmed by a third-party service and that videos uploaded from unverified users will be removed.

On the other hand, tube sites like Pornhub are still tech businesses that do all they can to be compliant with federal law in the United States of America and in jurisdictions all over the world. Adult industry labor unions and sex workers’ rights groups have issued similar sentiments. But, the Free Speech Coalition and Mike Stabile best capture the position of people impacted by the New Yorker and their so-called report. 

“The New Yorker article isn’t just an attack on Pornhub, it’s an attack on the workers and creators who make up the adult industry,” the FSC noted in its statement. “By inaccurately portraying sexual speech online as a wild west where there are no rules, and the adult industry as uniquely culpable, she tees up a ball for the censors to hit — decimating the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of adult creators in the process.”

Addendum: this post has been updated to reflect the fact that Laila Micklewait is now the CEO of the Justice Defense Fund.

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