Back at the beginning of the summer, the Litigation Daily highlighted a lawsuit filed against Mindgeek, the parent company behind the porn website Pornhub and various other adult sites, brought by lawyers at Brown Rudnick on behalf of 34 individuals who say they are the victims of sex trafficking. That lawsuit, filed in the Central District of California, claimed the company created “a bustling marketplace for child pornography, rape videos, trafficked videos, and every other form of nonconsensual content.”
What we neglected to tell you at the time was that Mindgeek and some of its affiliates had already been hit with a proposed class action in the Central District that was also backed by significant legal firepower. A Susman Godfrey team led by partners Arun Subramanian, Krysta Kauble Pachman and Davida Brook filed suit in February alongside local counsel at Pollock Cohen on behalf of a Jane Doe plaintiff who alleged an ex-boyfriend surreptitiously recorded the two of them having sex when she was 16 years old and uploaded videos to company websites. It was the Susman Godfrey-backed suit, which seeks to certify a class of anyone who had images or video from when they were under age 18 uploaded to the company’s sites over the past ten years, that generated the first significant ruling allowing sex-trafficking claims against Mindgeek to survive a motion to dismiss.
