Opinion: I’m a Porn Star. This Anti-Pornhub Crusader Is Dead Wrong.
Laila Mickelwait hates porn. And after reading her new book, Takedown: Inside the Fight to Shut Down Pornhub for Abuse, Rape, and Sex Trafficking, I can’t help but think she might hate me, one of the adult industry’s favorite stepmoms, too.
Before Mickelwait launched her #Traffickinghub campaign, alleging Pornhub was responsible for sex trafficking children and was the world’s biggest child porn streamer, she was another starry-eyed twenty-something with dyed blonde hair. As she reveals in the book, she spent those years partying with Bill Maher and Andy Dick at the Playboy Mansion, jumping on a trampoline on Jimmy Kimmel’s The Man Show for a few hundred bucks and giving her minivan a makeover on MTV’s Pimp My Ride.
But real stardom came when Mickelwait learned about allegations that users uploaded rape videos, child porn, and other illegal content on Pornhub. Takedown details how she went to work at Exodus Cry, an anti-porn group that masqueraded as an anti-trafficking network, and operated inside IHOP—the International House of Prayer, not pancakes—which fought to make homosexuality a death sentence crime in Uganda.