Fabian Thylmann, German programmer and businessman behind the origins of MindGeek.
Pornography, the erotic portrayal of sexually explicit content, has been feeding the base appetites of men since prehistoric times. The internet pornography of today, however, is a far cry from busty Upper Paleolithic Venus figurines and Athenian vases, or even your grandfather's Playboy magazine. What young men have to contend with today is not a bodaciously-carved piece of rock or glossy centerfolds, but millions of free and instantly streamable videos of endless variety at their fingertips accessible at the typing of just four letters into Google.
On any given day, 68 million porn related search queries are generated, 116,000 of which are queries related to child pornography. 40 million Americans are regular visitors of porn sites. 35% of all internet downloads are pornographic. At any given second, over 28,000 people online are watching porn on the internet, and on average $3,000 per second is spent on porn sites. 87.5% of men and 28.5% of women aged 18-35 watch porn at least weekly.
These facts show quite clearly that this $16.9 billion per annum industry has driven its lascivious hooks firmly into young people. But what companies are reaping the profits from getting young people addicted to internet pornography?
Well, a more accurate question would be what company, in the singular. There is one behemoth, hydra-esque company that owns almost every popular porn streaming site: MindGeek. It may not surprise you to learn that MindGeek, being involved in such an industry, has been the subject of multiple lawsuits over the years since their founding in June 2004. Before we dive into the cases levied against MindGeek over the years for hosting non-consensual pornography and being complicit in child sex trafficking, let's take a look at the history of the founding and operation of MindGeek since its inception.
MindGeek - Origins of a porn monopoly
MindGeek, like many early internet startups, came from humble beginnings. Our story begins with Fabian Thylmann, born in Dusseldorf, West Germany in 1978. Thylmann took an interest in computer programming in his teenage years, and in the late 1990s he had his breakthrough with his development of NATS (Next-generation Affiliate Tracking Software). This software, through enabling the tracking of users' clicks on advertisements, expanded the monetization potential of content-hosting websites-- and what was the most fertile ground for content? Internet pornography.
Fabian Thylmann in 2016.
Stephane Manos (Left) and Ouissam Youssef (Right).
Under the Manwin name Thylmann continued buying up several other popular pornographic companies and websites from 2010 to 2013. In 2011, having gotten $130 million in debt from these purchases, Manwin received $362 million in funding from an undisclosed group of investors, with which Manwin acquired the major porn site YouPorn and Carsed Marketing incorporated, an umbrella company holding the domains Twistys, GayTube, Sextube, and TrannyTube.
In a 2012 CNBC article entitled "Meet the New King of Porn", Thylmann is cited as saying in a speech before adult film expo Internext, "In essence, Manwin is a tech company...We're online and we have such big sites that we have to be very, very good at the tech side of this business". Say what you will about Thylmann and Manwin, they certainly were very skilled businessmen, gobbling up all their competitors one after another and adding them to their ever-growing network of sites.
Tax Evasion and Organized Crime Ties
In 2013 however, trouble came to paradise for Manwin and Thylmann. In October of 2013 Thylmann would sell his shares of Manwin for 73 million Euros to two other members of Manwin's senior management Feras Antoon and David Tassillo, for undisclosed reasons. Although the official reason is undisclosed, it should be noted that Thylmann was extradited from Belgium and investigated in Germany in 2012 on tax evasion charges, held in custody for several days, and eventually ordered to pay a seven-figure fine.
Thylmann, who has a reputation for being notoriously private and avoiding interviews which put him into the spotlight, gave an interview to Christian Cohrs and Scott Peterson from omr.com, providing some insight into some of the rumors about the mysterious funding Manwin received in 2011 and about his tax evasion charges in 2012.
At the time, there were rumors floating around that the young German entrepreneur had utilized mafia ties in funding his $362 million acquisition spree. Thylmann denied this accusation on the OMR podcast, saying "It's standard practice in the industry to agree to very strict non-disclosure agreements, because investors are loathe to speak about their investment. That uncertainty leads to a litany of rumors, including involvement of the mafia and the like".
German newspaper Die Welt published their investigatory findings in a 2012 article entitled "The porn empire - A German excites the world". This article sheds further light on Thylmann's past and character, as well as some of the mystery surrounding him and Manwin. Thylmann is no Hugh Hefner, he is described as a "somewhat overweight man with a boyish face and glasses", and apparently made it a habit of wearing hoodies and jeans at all times, even to business appointments.
The 2012 Welt article raises yet another mystery surrounding Manwin during Thylmann's ownership -- apparently no one was working at the company's headquarters in Luxembourg:
"From the office on the fourth floor, Manwin employees can look through large windows at Boulevard Royal and the forty-meter-deep gorge of the Petruss Valley. But apparently nobody enjoys the view. The reception is orphaned behind the glass front door, some cardboard boxes stand around, cables hang from the wall, price tags are still stuck to the desks. The boss, a 34-year-old German, is also not to be found. 'Always nobody there , says a Chinese woman who works for a bank on the ground floor."The business model of Manwin seemed to be primarily that of a central operating office in Luxembourg, which ran a great number of subsidiaries. Manwin would optimize and monetize traffic on their network of websites with advertisements and paywalled content. Manwin management advised their employees to not even mention the word 'pornography' in giving a description of their company, but instead to call Manwin a "technically oriented service company". Somewhat generic, don't you think?
Who made the $362 million investment to the Luxembourg holding company which apparently left its office completely empty? That too, according to the Welt investigation, remains shrouded in mystery. Only a few leads present themselves, including a Cypriot subsidiary, and two American companies, CB Agency Services LLC and Cortland Capital Markets Services LLC.
But little can be gleaned about the trail of money and who provided the funding for Thylmann's meteoric rise beyond the names of these companies. The secrecy could be explained by investors not wanting their name attached to the porn industry because it is seen as unsavory, or there could be a less benign explanation, speculates Welt: black money or organized crime ties.
Although Thylmann is a mysterious figure, and the man largely responsible for the MindGeek monopoly which exists today, his departure from Manwin in 2013 after his extradition on tax evasion charges means we must move on from him, and focus on Manwin and how it rebranded to MindGeek and came under new ownership.
Thylmann sold his shares of Manwin to Feras Antoon and David Tassillo, who became CEO and COO respectively, and promptly renamed Manwin to MindGeek in 2013. Antoon was one of the first investors involved with Thylmann in Montreal, alongside Ouissam Youssef, Matt Keezer (Pornhub founder), and Stephane Manos. Antoon was around in 2005 for the founding of Brazzers with Manos, Youssef, and Keezer. The name 'Brazzers' is attributed to being an allusion to the founders' primarily Middle Eastern origins and their pronunciation of 'brothers'.
Feras Antoon.
It should also be noted that this group was based in Montreal, the four all being Concordia University engineering graduates. This Montreal clique composed the primary senior management from the early days of Mansef, to Thylmann's Manwin, through the MindGeek era starting in 2013, up until Antoon and Tassillo resigned from MindGeek in June of 2022 after accusations of hosting videos on Pornhub showing non-consensual and underage sex.
Antoon and Tassillo both resided in lavish mansions in Montreal. Antoon's 19 million Canadian dollar mansion was in the 'Mafia Row' neighborhood of Montreal, and was burnt down in an alleged arson in 2021. I don't think it requires a huge stretch of the imagination to speculate that a company involved in the production and dissemination of adult films would have at the very least a loose connection to organized crime, primarily the Rizzuto family, who have a history of suspected arson attacks in the Ahuntsic neighborhood of Montreal.
Further evidence of Antoon's criminal ties was revealed in 2016 when financial authorities in Montreal executed search warrants and cease-trade orders on Antoon and 12 others on suspicion of insider trading. Antoon was included in this investigation alongside David Baazov, CEO of Amaya Inc. in Montreal, who at the time was the owner of the world's largest online poker room. Online gambling and online pornography, insider trading, living in 'Mafia Row', suspected arson...this secretive group of Middle Easterners living in Montreal may have had their hands in more than just optimizing ad revenue on porn sites.
But speculation is not necessary to discuss the actually documented and provable history of legal trouble MindGeek and its owners has gotten themselves into over the years. One of the most well documented scandals was the $40 million lawsuit levied against MindGeek on behalf of forty victims of Girls Do Porn, a former partner on the Pornhub network that coerced women into making videos, lied about where they would be distributed, and uploaded the videos without the women's permission.
MindGeek's Long History of Sex Trafficking
The 2020 Vice article "40 Girls Do Porn Victims are Suing Pornhub for $1 million Each" details the lawsuit and the allegations against MindGeek. The suit alleged:
As a proximate result of MindGeek's knowing financial benefit and participation in GirlsDoPorn's sex trafficking venture, Plaintiffs have suffered damages, including, but not limited to, severe emotional distress, significant trauma, attempted suicide, and social and familial ostracizationGirls Do Porn would convince and intimidate vulnerable women, some as young as 18 years old, into having sex on camera, and then would upload the videos to their own website and to Pornhub, where they were monetized as a "content partner". Even after previous lawsuits, some being raised as early as 2009, MindGeek still had not removed the content from their website. According to Vice one of the plaintiffs alleges that she contacted Pornhub and said "I'm going to kill myself if this stays up here...I was scammed and told this was only going to be on dvds in another country. Please I'm begging you please I'll pay!".
As the suit claimed:
Girls Do Porn sex-trafficked hundreds of high school and college-aged women using fraud, coercion and intimidation to get the young women to film pornographic videos under the false pretense that the videos would remain private, off the internet, and never to be seen in North AmericaThe video in question would remain up until Girls Do Porn's owners were arrested after an FBI investigation 2019, and found guilty of coercing and lying to 22 women to get them to make porn films. The plaintiffs in this 2020 lawsuit claimed that there were at least dozens if not hundreds of examples of similar behavior by Girls Do Porn, and that MindGeek remained either complicit or criminally negligent of the illegal content being hosted and monetized on their site. As is often the case with such lawsuits, it was quietly settled in October of 2021 under undisclosed terms.
Two more lawsuits, one a $600 million class action launched in Montreal in January 2021 on the grounds of non-consensual videos and videos depicting underage people being hosted on MindGeek's sites, and another class action suit in Alabama on behalf of child sex trafficking victims finally led to a July 29, 2022 decision by U.S. District Court Judge Cormac Carney, which concluded that MindGeek had indeed knowingly hosted child pornography, and that this was knowingly facilitated by Visa. Visa had, "Intended to help" Pornhub and MindGeek monetize child porn, the Judge wrote in his decision.
All of these lawsuits taken together alongside a brilliant exposé published in the New Yorker in June of 2022 which detailed the many cases of children being featured in non-consensual sexually explicit videos on Pornhub, led to the resignation of Antoon and Tassillo in June 2022, and Visa and payment processor Paypal also finally cut ties with MindGeek. MindGeek then removed all of its unverified content from Pornhub, which had previously made up about 75% of the website's content. Plaintiffs, victims, and law firms such as the National Center on Sexual Exploitation had to fight MindGeek tooth and nail to get the company to stop hosting illegal exploitative content, and to protect the victims of sex trafficking. It took years and years for Visa and Paypal to cut ties with the company, despite being proven as early as 2019 to be complicit in sex trafficking with Girls Do Porn.
From these cases, a clear picture can be painted of MindGeek. MindGeek loves to keep its owners and investors secret, elusive, and outside the public eye and off financial statements, weaving an elaborate network of subsidiary companies to hide their identities and avoid taxes. Thylmann set a standard for opaqueness and tax evasion under his tenure as CEO of Manwin, and it seems that MindGeek under new ownership stayed in line with the founder's modus operandi. I mentioned in a side note earlier Austrian businessman Bernard Bergemar, who was revealed in a 2020 Financial Times report to be the primary owner of MindGeek.
Patricia Nilsson of Financial Times writes:
The opaqueness surrounding the company's financing also covers management. The names of many of the company's senior executives who feature in corporate filings do not appear in internet searches, leaving little or no trace of who they areThe report also alleges that Pornhub maintained a staff of content moderators, whose job was to "find weird excuses" to keep videos on their sites. Pornhub knowingly facilitated and monetized the production and distribution of porn videos showing sex trafficking victims, and hired moderators to make excuses for hosting the content on their site.
Even though now Pornhub has removed its unverified content, one should at this point, given the abundance of evidence that MindGeek has no moral line to draw in the sand when it comes to turning a profit on sexual exploitation, that the internet pornography industry is evil. There is no other way to look at the practice. The fact that MindGeek still can maintain such a huge monopoly over the internet pornography industry, raking in billions of dollars in profit, with such a checkered past and proven collusion with sex traffickers, should be a national public scandal in America.
Should it really take hundreds of millions of dollars in lawsuits and settlements to force banks and payment processors to cut ties with MindGeek? At what point do we say that this industry is rotten through and through, that all pornography is sex trafficking, all pornography is exploitative, all pornography is pedophilia. Many young and vulnerable women enter porn because of financial pressure, or because of sexual abuse and trauma as children. People like Antoon, Thylmann, Youssef, Keezer, Tassillo, and Bergemar could care less about sex trafficking victims, as long as they can make a quick buck off their lives being irrevocably destroyed. They will gladly, with the help of Visa, accept payment from pedophiles who rewatch young women relive their childhood trauma on camera.
It is time to call for more than just transparency in the sex work industry. It is a problem that we don't know exactly who owns MindGeek or its web of subsidiaries, but it is also a problem that we allow this company to exist in the first place. At some point, we must acknowledge that the production of internet pornography cannot be divorced from sex trafficking.
A bipartisan bill has been recently proposed to ban TikTok in the U.S. because of the Chinese app using it to spy on Americans and store user data in China. Is our data being sold to China as serious as children being sex trafficked and videos of their rape being profitted off of on the internet? Surely if we can ban TikTok, we can get bipartisan support to ban internet pornography, or at least to dissolve MindGeek's monopoly, which is hard to see as anything other than a criminal enterprise. De-platforming and demonetization is an incredibly effective strategy. We should not be afraid to use it against porn sites. More payment processors should be cutting ties with child sex traffickers like MindGeek rather than Trump supporters, advertisers should be boycotting Pornhub, not Elon Musk's Twitter.
This should not be a politically contested issue. Sex work is not 'real work'. It is sex trafficking, exploitation, and pedophilia. The fact that this is not a widely recognized truth is a product of lies being told to women about their sexual empowerment. There is nothing empowering about starting an OnlyFans. There is nothing empowering about selling your body. There is nothing empowering about being a part of an industry which knowingly abides child trafficking and rape. You don't need to be a religious zealot to condemn pornography, feminists and Christians alike should be able to come together and demand these sites be shut down. Journalists should do more to expose the crimes of companies like MindGeek and the names of their owners, and our politicians should take legislative action banning or at the very least seriously regulating an industry fraught with criminality.
Comment: See also: