Thirty-four women filed a lawsuit against the parent company of Pornhub on Thursday alleging they appeared in videos on the website without their consent.

Many of the videos showed nonconsensual acts or included minors and sex-trafficking victims, the suit alleges.

The suit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, accused MindGeek, which owns Pornhub and more than 100 other adult sites, of violating federal sex-trafficking laws, distributing child pornography and engaging in racketeering, a charge typically associated with financial crimes related to gangs and mobs. The lawsuit in fact compares MindGeek to a criminal enterprise run by “bosses,” much like in the TV series “The Sopranos.”

Fourteen of the defendants say they were underage when videos of them were filmed, and 14 were the victims of convicted sex criminals, the lawsuit says. The women live in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Colombia and Thailand.

“This is a case about rape, not pornography,” the lawsuit says. “It is a case about the rape and sexual exploitation of children. It is a case about the rape and sexual exploitation of men and women. And it is a case about each of these defendants knowingly and intentionally electing to capitalize and profit from the horrendous exploitation and abuse of tens of thousands of other human beings.”

One victim says a sexually explicit video her boyfriend coerced her into making was posted to Pornhub in 2014 when she was just 13 years old and then widely disseminated through her school. She contacted Pornhub to remove it, which the site ultimately did, although the process took weeks, the lawsuit says, but it kept resurfacing on both Pornhub and other sites. One upload received 2.7 million views. 

Now an adult, the woman blames the video for a downward spiral of her not attending school, attempting suicide and becoming addicted to drugs.

Another defendant says that starting at age 7, she was raped, trafficked and exploited by a ring of Hollywood men and New York financiers, including Jeffrey Epstein. The acts were often recorded and ended up on Pornhub, according to the lawsuit.

“Left devastated were the thousands of human being (sic) who were victimized not simply by their original abuser, but then again, and again, and again by MindGeek’s monetization of that exploitation,” the lawsuit says.

The suit alleges that MindGeek intentionally chose not to monitor the videos being uploaded because doing so might have threatened its profit margins.

In a statement to Spectrum News, Pornhub said it is reviewing the lawsuit and investigating. 

“Pornhub has zero tolerance for illegal content and investigates any complaint or allegation made about content on our platforms,” the site said, adding that it stands “resolutely with all victims of internet-related abuse.”

Pornhub, however, called “The Sopranos” comparison “utterly absurd” and accused Michael Bowe, the lead attorney behind the lawsuit, of being “a soldier of the ultra-right wing effort to shut down the adult content industry.”

The lawsuit also names as defendants a number of MindGeek subsidiaries, executives and investors, as well as Visa, which it alleges knowingly profited off the illegal videos and was “uniquely suited to stop this exploitation.”

Visa has not responded to an email from Spectrum News seeking comment.

In December, after The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof wrote a column reporting that Pornhub hosted videos featuring children, rape, revenge pornography and other nonconsenting subjects, Visa and Mastercard announced they were blocking customers from using their credit cards to make purchases on the site while they launched their own investigations.

After The Times report, Pornhub, which says it had 42 billion visits in 2019, announced it was halting unverified users from uploading new videos and suspending videos that were previously uploaded by unverified users. More than 10 million videos — nearly 80% of its content — were removed while awaiting verification. 

Thursday’s lawsuit is at least the fourth filed against MindGeek this year, including class-action suits in Canada and the U.S., that makes similar allegations.

In December of 2020, Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley and Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse introduced the Stop Internet Sexual Exploitation Act, which would mandate that "platforms hosting pornography to verify the identity of users who upload videos, and require a signed consent form from every individual appearing in the video."

“The posting of intimate photos and videos without participants’ consent is a massive invasion of privacy that drives shame, humiliation, and potentially suicide,” Merkley said in a statement unveiling the bill. “While some online platforms have recently announced steps to change some practices, much more needs to be done. We must ensure that not another single life of a child, man, or woman is destroyed by these sites.”

The current status of the bill is unclear.