A UK woman has admitted in an interview with the BBC that she “felt shocked, embarrassed and violated” after a series of videos featuring her and her ex-partner emerged on the online porn giant Pornhub without her consent.
The woman, who spoke to the BBC's Victoria Derbyshire programme under the pseudonym of Sophie, said that she learned about the videos last year, when her sister’s partner told her that he had found the six clips on the world’s largest porn site.
She discovered that one such clip was in a top 10 chart at the time, with hundreds of thousands of views. Sophie said that she had never given the go-ahead to put them online.
Although the videos were taken down within a week of her becoming aware of them, the appearance of the clips on the porn website “gave someone the opportunity to create about 100 video clips, and these were subsequently re-uploaded” on Pornhub, according to the BBC.
Sophie bemoaned the fact that Pornhub was “not very helpful” in its response to her reporting the situation to the site.
After another company which deals with Pornhub's requests to take down videos also declined to react to Sophie’s complaint, she went to police but no one has yet been charged.
She said that the incident tarnished her new relationship and that her teenage daughter “hasn’t been the same since” she became aware of the videos’ appearance on the porn site.
Pornhub claimed that it could not find “any record of any email" from Sophie, in which she asks the site to take down the videos featuring her. Pornhub added that it was currently in touch with Sophie “looking forward to solving this issue together.”
Pornhub vice-president Corey Price told the BBC that back in 2015, “to further ensure the safety of all our fans, we officially took a hard stance against revenge porn, which we believe is a form of sexual assault, and introduced a submission form for the easy removal of non-consensual content.”
Kate Isaacs of the campaign group #NotYourPorn campaign, was cited by the BBC as saying that revenge porn has been repeatedly labelled on Pornhub as “amateur” or “home-made”, allowing Pornhub owners to gain hefty advertising revenues.