An Alabama mother has filed a federal lawsuit against the world’s largest distributor of pornography, claiming it knowingly sold porn videos featuring her 12-year-old son.
According to the federal lawsuit, the porn videos, some of which are violent in nature, were made by the woman’s live-in boyfriend without her knowledge and then sold to MindGeek, which offered it as a pay-per-view to customers through its websites including PornHub.
The lawsuit alleges that the global porn supplier continued to offer the videos even after federal agents with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children notified the Canada-based company that they featured a minor child.
J. Parker Miller, attorney for the boy and his mother, said in a statement, that it is “unmistakably clear” that the videos feature a child.
“The public dissemination of sexually violent material of a minor child, for profit is so outrageous in character and so extreme in degree as to go beyond all possible bounds of decency, and to be regarded as atrocious and utterly intolerable in civilized society,” Miller wrote in the lawsuit. Miller is with the Atlanta, Georgia-based Beasley Allen law firm.
Despite the age of the boy, the videos were purchased 188,000 times and are estimated to have been watched by over one million times, according to both civil court and criminal court records.
The transactions from the sale of the videos were also conducted completely online, the lawsuit alleges.
In May, Rocky Shay Franklin, the woman’s boyfriend, was convicted on multiple counts of child sexual exploitation for making the videos. The 36-year-old Greenville man was sentenced to 40 years in prison.
In a statement released to The Epoch Times on Nov. 29 about the lawsuit, MindGeek said that it was “sympathetic to any victim who has suffered from a trusted person’s abuse” and that it has “zero tolerance for illegal material or the bad actors who attempt to upload it.”
MindGeek also has other pending lawsuits against it for peddling pornographic videos of minors including another one filed in Alabama by a mother who, while searching for her missing daughter, discovered 58 videos of the 15-year-old uploaded on Pornhub.
In July, in yet another lawsuit against the company involving allegations the company was knowingly distributing child pornography, a federal court judge in California ruled that credit card giant Visa knowingly engaged in a “criminal conspiracy” with MindGeek to “monetize children pornography.”
