Netflix’s latest documentary takes a closer look at the porn industry, specifically the content shared on adult site Pornhub and the scrutiny it has faced over the past few years.
In December 2020 the New York Times published a comment accusing the website and its parent company MindGeek of sex trafficking and distributing videos about sex and child abuse without consent.
Pornhub denied the allegations made in the article. However, as a result of these allegations, the site changed its policy to only allow verified users to distribute videos and also disabled a number of videos on the site.
Pornhub is owned by MindGeek, a Montreal-based company that also claims to own other pornographic websites like Redtube, Youporn, and XTube among many others.
However, MindGeek has largely kept details of its ownership secret financial times reported in 2020 that businessman Bernard Bergemar is the majority owner of the company.
According to the publication, Bergemar’s identity was known to only a handful of company executives and advisors prior to her investigative report.
The financial times explained that MindGeek was previously known as Manwin and was owned by Fabian Thylmann until he sold the company to Feras Antoon and David Tassillo in 2012 when he was under investigation for tax evasion in Germany.
In June 2022, Chief Executive Officer Antoon and Chief Operating Officer Tassillo resigned from their positions at the adult website company, according to Reuters. It was reported that Antoon and Tassillo would remain shareholders of MindGeek.
In a statement shared with Variety at the time, MindGeek said Antoon and Tassillo had left the day-to-day operations of MindGeek after more than a decade in leadership positions at the company.
“As the company is strategically positioned for long-term growth, MindGeek’s leadership team will temporarily lead day-to-day operations while a replacement is sought,” the statement said.
The Netflix documentary was directed by Suzanne Hillinger, who spoke about the reasons she wanted to investigate the Pornhub scandal and the impact it has had on sex workers.
In an interview with Yahoo Entertainment, Hillinger said, “I think it felt like a huge responsibility to tell a really honest and nuanced story, not to continue the over-simplification or sensationalization of porn performers and porn in general – which is often what happens in movies.” happening across the industry.”
The director added that it was important to her to include real-life sex workers in the documentary so she felt she could present a balanced view of the events New York Times Op-Ed hadn’t done that.
“I just thought that this story about the largest porn platform was missing voices — and it’s the people that the company benefits from,” Hillinger said. “So I really wanted to tell the story of Pornhub, mostly through the lens of people doing consensual pornography, because I just felt like there was a real lack of entertainment.”
Money Shot: The Pornhub Story is now available on Netflix.
