Radar Online
Two of Pornhub’s top executives resigned after the company was accused of having nonconsensual videos, including ones featuring minors, available on its website, Radar has learned.
The Daily Mail reported that MindGeek, which owns the adult website, stated this week that Chief Executive Officer Feras Antoon and Chief Operating Officer David Tassillo resigned after operating the website for more than a decade.
“Antoon and Tassillo leave MindGeek’s day-to-day operations after more than a decade in leadership positions with the company,” the company said in a statement. “MindGeek’s executive leadership team will run day-to-day operations on an interim basis, with a search underway for replacements.”
The New Yorker recently published an alarming report about the company, saying it allowed videos of underage and non-consenting people to show up on its platforms, including Pornhub, Brazzers, RedTube and YouPorn.
According to the Daily Mail, a spokesperson for MindGeek said Antoon and Tassillo’s departures had been planned since early 2022. Both will remain shareholders of the company, the outlet reported.
Antoon co-founded Brazzers in 2005 and later teamed up with Tassilo to buy Pornhub parent company Manwin in 2012. They renamed the company MindGeek in 2013, when the duo began controlling some of the most popular porn sites on the globe, the Daily Mail reported.
MindGeek blasted the New Yorker story, which detailed a 15-year-old British girl’s attempts to have explicit videos of her removed from the company’s websites.
“The New Yorker had the opportunity to seriously evaluate what works in fighting illegal material on the internet by looking at the facts, comparing the policies of platforms, and studying the results,” MindGeek’s statement said. “Instead, they chose to ignore the fact that MindGeek has more comprehensive and effective policies than any other major platform on the internet, and decided to peddle the same gross mischaracterizations that anti-porn extremists have spewed for decades.”
Alana Evans, president of the Adult Performance Artists Guild, a union for adult pornographers, told The Washington Post that the resignations likely would not have much of an effect on MindGeek’s websites.
“MindGeek is corporate porn,” she said. “Other owners and CEOs are far more involved in porn and the product.”
