According to information from the Parisian, Guillaume F., better known as an actor and producer in the world of porn under the name Rick Angel, was placed in police custody in the “French Bukkake” case. Passed by Sciences-Po Grenoble, he had also worked as an adviser to the Ministry of the Interior.
The “French Bukkake” affair continues to gain momentum. Since 2020, French justice has been investigating cases of rape in the pornography world for aggravated human trafficking, gang rape or even aggravated pimping. Since the start of the investigations, sixteen men have been indicted, including the producer “Pascal Op”, but also various actors or directors. This Tuesday, November 15, a new personality was arrested by the police.
According to information from our colleagues from Parisian , actor and producer Rick Angel has been taken into custody. While living for several months in South America, Guillaume F. of his real name gave himself up to the authorities. He is accused by several women of ” having imposed on them unplanned violent sexual practices during the shooting of his films “. Another element reproached to Rick Angel: he would have made the alleged victims believe that they were filming sequences which would only be broadcast abroad, when they were actually broadcast in France. Questioned by Le Parisien , a producer is particularly critical of Guillaume F. “I hate him, like Pascal Op, he lacks respect for women, full of gossip, pans. I never wanted to work with him. I don’t want to see it up close or from afar ,” he said.
Guillaume F. had played a role in French politics. Trained in particular at Sciences-Po Grenoble, he had landed a post as adviser to the Ministry of the Interior, while Michèle Alliot-Marie (UMP) was in place. He had to leave his post after colleagues discovered his activities in the pornographic world.
Control, rape and violence: we are far from the bonhomie claimed by the amateur porn site Jacquie et Michel. In the sights of justice, the boss is faced with sordid stories by several women revealed in “Le Parisien” and in “Le Monde”. A name also surfaces, that of Rick Angel, porn actor, formerly ministerial adviser…
Presented as a human-sized business of amateur porn under the sign of good humour, another face of Jacquie and Michel is revealed in this month of June. The details of the charges revealed by Le Parisien paint a very bleak picture of Michel Piron’s success story . In Le Monde , the stories are also shocking. Some plaintiffs have delivered their experience, far from consented debauchery. Corinne’s story is one of them and involves a former UMP adviser who was under the tutelage of Michèle Alliot-Marie, known as Rick Angel…
Recently divorced, Corinne, mother of two children, was manipulated ten years ago by a “lover boy” named Bastien, a recruiter who seduces emotionally fragile women to train them in prostitution or pornographic filming like ” proof of love”. His romantic date turns into a nightmare, reports Le Monde : ” On the platform of Montparnasse station, Michel Piron is waiting for him with Rick Angel, former technical adviser to the Ministry of the Interior at the time of Michèle Alliot-Marie, become a porn producer. As soon as she gets off the train, they film her, make her show her underwear in front of everyone. Arrived at the hotel, Corinne asks to contact Bastien, she wants to wait for him. Michel Piron reassures her,
The situation degenerates in the room, Corinne asks to leave but Michel would have caught up with her. ” Michel’s wife intervenes to tell him that Corinne is in pain” , specifies Le Monde. She stays alone at night, terrified. Then the video is put online without her having been paid, her professional entourage recognizes her in it and she loses permanent custody of her children. “ My brother called Michel Piron to tell him that I had lost everything because of him, that I had suicidal thoughts ,” she says daily.
Who is this Rick Angel? It is the stage name of a former ministerial adviser under Nicolas Sarkozy , a graduate of Sciences-Po Grenoble in 1996, adhering to the RPR. Very careerist, he rose through the ranks until he received a call from Alain Marleix’s chief of staff in 2008 who ” announced to him that they had discovered [his] porn films and that this posed a problem for Michèle Alliot -Marie, [his] supervisory minister [Minister of the Interior from 2007 to 2009]”, we read in The Obs . Which led to his dismissal three days later and the end of all political activity since, to devote himself to porn as an actor and producer.
A report by the French Senate emphasizes that “sexual, physical and verbal abuses are widespread in porn, making them systemic. They are not simulated but very real for the women who are being filmed.”
Trigger warning: The following article contains descriptions of abuse and exploitation that may be disturbing to some. Reader discretion advised.
The porn industry in France is being called out for massively exploitative and abusive business practices—here are the details.
The 150-page report shines a spotlight on the horrific conditions some porn performers are subjected to, the volume of pornographic content accessible to all, as well as the sexual violence perpetrated and conveyed by the mainstream porn industry—particularly its normalization of abuse against women. The senators say the porn industry is “predatory” and linked to “modern slavery.”
The report also calls for action by public authorities, making several recommendations to address the issue (more on that later).
Systemic violence against women
Interviews and testimonies from performers, sociologists, organizations, and numerous others in the report make it clear that since the emergence of widely accessible, mainstream porn sites like Pornhub in the mid-2000s, the vast distribution of porn has “contributed to an upsurge in increasingly violent content, without any control or consideration for the conditions in which this content is produced.”
The report paints a bleak picture, but one that’s important to be more widely known by the public. It calls out a system that “generates systemic violence against women, both those who find themselves in these productions and those who suffer from the sexuality modelled on the norms of violence conveyed by porn.”
As the report describes, there are “absolutely no rules or checks, not even regarding the use of condoms” and mainstream porn sites offer categories that include rape, with unambiguous keywords like “anal surprise,” “unintended facial,” “torture,” and “kidnapping.”
Clair Charles, a spokesperson for Les Effronté.es, says that these categories, and particularly those related to “confinement” aren’t pretend. Referring to videos available online, she said, “When the woman cries, she really cries.”
The report authors emphasize, “Sexual, physical and verbal abuses are widespread in porn, making them systemic. They are not simulated but very real for the women who are being filmed.”
In other words, there are very real rape videos and real videos of abuse on porn sites everywhere.
Ongoing investigations of the The French “amateur” porn industry
The French Senate report is timely with recent buzz over the last two years about France’s biggest ever trial over sexual violence—a moment of reckoning for the French “amateur” porn industry and it’s predatory, abusive practices.
This is the first time that porn performers in France have been charged with rape. Several investigations are ongoing—specifically targeting the “amateur” porn site “Jacquie et Michel” and also the platform “French Bukkake.”
Just last month three actors and a director were taken into custody for aggravated human trafficking, gang rape, and aggravated pimping in the “French Bukkake” investigation which began in October 2022. Authorities have allegedly uncovered evidence of extensive abuse of vulnerable women subject to sexual violence and coerced into performing sex acts on and off camera by actors, directors and producers—in large part, an effort to satisfy consumer demand for an endless supply of new actresses and graphic video content.
A group of gender equality associations in support of the Senate’s report commented on the “French Bukkake” trial, saying, “These legal proceedings reveal the barbarity, violence, sexist and racist hatred of the French pornographic industry.”
Police investigations found evidence in multiple online videos of women protesting against sex acts they were then forced to perform. Khadija Azougach, a Paris-based lawyer specializing in violent crime and spokesperson for Lawyers 4 Women, says, “They were forced to do things without their consent because, it seems, there was a demand for this type of film… We can’t describe them as fictional films because the women in them were subjected to rape.”
He continues, “Some girls have said they were illegally confined, others say they were fed dog food. [The perpetrators] did everything they could to make the girls even more vulnerable and to wield power over them.”
In the “Jacquie et Michel” investigation, four men, including the site owner Michel Piron, are being accused of pimping, organized human trafficking, rape and accessory to rape, and rape-involving torture.
The young victims, many of whom were aspiring actresses, were interviewed by the senators for the French Report. They described being “ideal prey” in a calculated recruitment system by means of false Facebook or Instagram profiles.
One young woman explained, “We are spoken to every day. The person presents herself as an escort, she tells me that it’s wonderful, that it’s magic, that she has money… Behind this false profile of a girl, there was a man.”
“They knew I had money problems. I was the ideal prey for them, that’s how you get in there… I needed the money right away. I had to pay my bills and rent or I’d lose my flat.”
Investigators say the women were lured into participating under false pretences—like being told the videos would only be accessible on private Canadian websites, then later discovering they were viewable in France. Producers demanded large sums of cash (between €3,000 and €5,000) when the women requested the videos be taken down. And for those who did pay, their images continued to circulate online.
One woman described being forced into sex acts that left her in pain, another was allegedly coerced and forced to engage in a sexual act with a man who was not wearing a condom—the man lied about testing negative for sexually transmitted diseases and actually had herpes, the woman said.
The report urges 23 recommendations for public authorities, including ways to help prevent minors from accessing porn like age verification requirements on devices and imposing fines on porn sites accessible to minors, strengthening legal means to better protect performers, and the facilitation of deleting online videos.
The Senate’s report found that out of an average 19.3 million individual visitors to adult sites per month in France, 12% are minors.
Professor Neil Thurman from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany says, “The technology [to keep minors from accessing porn sites] is reasonably well advanced. It’s just that porn sites don’t want to reduce their numbers by putting on a block on visitors if they don’t absolutely have to.”
Report authors said they aim to alert the government and the broader public to the massive scale of this issue, and the “massive, ordinary and toxic” viewing of porn by children despite French law requiring viewers to be at least 18 years old.
Annick Billon, a co-author of the report and president of the senate’s delegation, said, “We must stop having an old, distorted, watered-down view of porn. Porn today includes violent, degrading, humiliating contents… Scenes in which a man, most often several men, up to 50, are inflicting physical and sexual abuse to women have become standard.”
Be part of the solution
Questions arise about how effective attempts to block access to porn sites by minors could be. It can be pretty simple to circumvent restrictions. Plus, 30% of French 15 to 17-year-olds find pornographic content through social media, which would not be restricted.
Dr. Emily Setty, senior lecturer in Criminology at the University of Surrey, UK, emphasizes that requiring age verification on sites like Pornhub isn’t enough, and that a lot of the ways young people are exposed to sexually explicit content without any sort of intentional act on their part won’t be blocked.
What’s happening in France is a reality check that while performers—particularly women—have long been portrayed and assumed as consenting to all of the content they’re in, that this simply isn’t the case.
Sexual exploitation can have many forms, and when you become familiar with the actual definition of sex trafficking by the TVPA— “a commercial sex act induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such act has not attained 18 years of age”—it opens your eyes to just how predatory the porn industry really is.
Presumably consenting performers are too often anything but. Consent can never be assumed. In fact, sex trafficking most commonly happens when performers are coerced, forced, and manipulated to endure more for a scene than they were initially informed about or agreed to. And, as the investigations in France are revealing, performers are even blatantly abused, dehumanized, and degraded to the level of commodities to be consumed.
The fact is, exploitation happens in every country, in every corner of the world—France isn’t the only place where the porn industry needs to be under investigation. This is a global issue that can negatively affect performers, viewers of all ages, society as a whole, and impacts how we as humans interact with one another in various relationships.
Each area of the world is part of the problem, and can also be part of the solution. A great place to start is at the core of the issue: holding the industry accountable. When it comes to sharing the facts and giving a voice to those who have been victimized by the industry, we’re here for it—are you?
For more than 3 years, gendarmerie and police services have been investigating the practices of several companies in the pornographic industry in France. Three investigating judges are carrying out sprawling investigations, and have already indicted around twenty people, for “aggravated pimping”, “money laundering”, “rape in meetings”, “aggravated trafficking in human beings” or “concealed work”. The file, which targets the “French Bukkake” site and the “Jacquie et Michel” site, is also closely followed by Le Monde and Le Parisien, who have published numerous testimonials. A Senate report, presented on September 28, 2022, relays some of this gigantic work to alert people to this industry. Please note that the following testimonials are likely to offend the sensibilities of some readers.
“Burn” girls for money
The various journalistic investigations and the Senate report highlight the financial windfall generated by Internet pornography via advertising and subscriptions. An industry that represents a third of global online traffic. The essential starting point for this lucrative business: finding young women to shoot videos. And some production companies would have developed real systems of predation, attacking young adults who are vulnerable and in a situation of great financial precariousness. “It is a question of exploiting them to the maximum, before they are, according to the term of one of the producers, “burned””, writes Le Monde, which has published several long formats on the subject. “Disguised rape under the pretext of videos. Actors and producers had all the freedoms”, attests to the newspaper a man who would have participated in filming of “French Bukkake”.
Acts without consent and humiliation
This is the common denominator of most of the testimonies collected by the courts and by journalists, on the Jacquie et Michel and French Bukkake cases: the cases of unwanted penetration, of violent and humiliating situations, imposed, are described by the victims presumed. The world relays the testimony of Jessica (her name has been changed), who would have been forced into scenes “in which sodomy and the number of partners are forced”. She says she was conditioned to be an active member of the Jacquie et Michel network, for promotional events in nightclubs. “When we went to these establishments, we were objects. I received 300 euros per evening and, each evening, the owner of the establishment had the right to his fellatio, it was included in the price, it was humiliating “, she says.
Tales of rape and assault by the dozens
The testimonies are legion in the investigation reports and in the investigative work of Le Monde. That of Jessica led justice to indict and remand a director. This one, called “Dorian”, who collaborated with the site “Jacquie and Michel”, would have led the young woman to carry out scenes of “submission” promising her that they were “only fake”. However, Jessica claims to have been tied to a tree, whipped, and very savagely abused. “There, eight men arrived, all hooded. Me, I was in pain and I was trying to push back my attackers and I thought I was going to live my last hour,” she reportedly told the police. And to add: “I even tried to kill myself by hanging, but the cable gave way. I felt dirty and submissive, I no longer wanted to live,” she told journalists from Le Monde.
Recruitment “by trickery” and psychological demolition
The testimonies collected would make it possible to identify operating methods, aimed at conditioning the victims to the sufferings they will endure. One of them tells Le Monde the story of a banal encounter with a lingerie photographer, Jack Wood, before he took her to pornographic shoots: “He threw me on the bed, undressed me by force and penetrated me (…) I was stuck, I was afraid of physical violence, I let myself be done”, indicates the young woman. Jack Wood would have actually worked for Jacquie and Michel. He is now on trial. “The first rape plays a very specific function, that of breaking the defences and resistance of women, it is a psychic explosion for the victims, therefore an acquired submission for pimps”, explains au Monde Me Lorraine Questiaux, lawyer for several plaintiffs.
A bloody mannequin lies on the ground after an action by members of the French feminist collective “Les Amazones” in front of the sex shop “Jacquie et Michel” to denounce the condition of women in the porn industry in Paris, on February 19, 2022. (Photo by JULIEN DE ROSA / AFP)
Shame, amazement and drugs
The main indicted in the case is Pascal Ollitrault, 60, creator of the “French Bukkake” site. A site specializing in videos showing single women, facing many partners, sometimes 8, sometimes 15 or 50. Some actors are actually “subscribers” who paid 29 euros to access content. “Pascal OP” is presented as one of the figures of extreme excesses implanted without industry; He denied any act of rape and replied to the investigators, faced with the statements of around fifty victims, that they never left the filming. But one element is taken into consideration by the judges: fear and amazement. “There is this pressure from (…) all these men in a room, we are the only girl”, indicates a complainant to Le Monde. Young women have also indicated that they have regularly taken narcotics and alcohol to endure the violence, under the orders of the producers.
“More and more trashy and violent”
It is undoubtedly this state of affairs which conditions all the new pornographic practices. In its report on the subject , entitled “Porn: the hell of the décor”, presented on September 28, 2022, the Senate points to a notable evolution of pornography: “The appearance of increasingly “trashy” and violent content” , “the uploading of often pirated videos, without any control or consideration for the conditions under which this content is produced”. Beyond the testimonies of the victims, the parliamentarians point to a global phenomenon that goes beyond the cases observed by recent judicial inquiries. The senators denounce a “new economic and commercial model in which systemic violence against women have become the norm”.
“When the woman cries, she really cries”
The Senate report takes up elements raised by the investigators of the French Bukkake file, but also testimonies from victims. The document also provoked comments from associations familiar with the case and the recurring accusations against the industry. Claire Charlès, spokesperson for the association Les Effronté.es, insists in particular, with BFMTV, on the poorly perceived suffering of victims of “hardcore” filming: “On pornographic sites, you will find videos by category: the rape category, with unambiguous keywords: anal surprise, taken by surprise, unwanted facial … These are incitements to commit crimes. […] There are also categories of kidnapping or forcible confinement […] It’s not fake. When the woman cries, she really cries,” she said.
“Acts of torture and barbarism”
The Senate report also mentions “imposed sexual practices to which the victims had not consented, physical and sexual violence, a quasi process of ‘dehumanization'”. A young woman told the rapporteurs: “No one can suffer this kind of violence. I say it with a lot of hindsight, what I experienced was of the order of torture, I protected myself by putting myself in robot mode”. Scenes of mutilating sexual violence are notably described. “I am held and another person enters me. (…) This scene ends, I go to the toilet and I bleed, it was not in the scenario. A second scene begins, on the floor. I did not know what was going to happen. From the moment the guy takes off his pants, it’s no longer cinema, I’m afraid he’ll come and take me by surprise. The next morning, I undergo another scene”.
“From the start, they tried to dehumanize me”
A harrowing testimony was collected by the senators in the French Bukkake affair. A young woman recounted having had to “eat the same food given to the producer’s dogs, a chicken carcass as the only meal for several days”: “From the start, they tried to dehumanize me, to treat me like an object. Yet I did, I ate the dog’s food. I had no self-esteem anymore,” said the young woman. Another insists: “No one, apart from women who have experienced similar things, knows what is really going on on these shoots, in this environment. […] We are in pain, we are powerless, we are being insulted, the goal is for us to obey. We are in a form of total submission. And we tell ourselves that we have agreed to be there. Then there was a shooting with another man, another rape, forced sodomy, yet this person was aware of everything that I refused”.
“Specifications” on “abominable” practices
In the “Jacquie et Michel” file, which the police are investigating, the testimonies of victims converge on one element: if the producers and managers of the site would have developed a whole imagination around the “ordinary woman” consenting to “wild” libertinism, the stories reported show real constraints. “The videos must meet certain specifications (…), we are imposed these abominable practices, comparable to torture, mockery, insults”, indicates an alleged victim to World. “I wanted to cry, but I had to pretend that everything was fine.” As the Senate report points out, most porn sites feature violent content. On Jacquie and Michel, the “wild sex category” offers videos where “the pain is intensely proportional to the orgasm they reach at the end. The harder it is, the more they love it”.
Fortunes to remove the videos
Another compensation mechanism has emerged as highly developed in the porn industry: people exploiting actresses would demand huge sums of money to remove videos that young women no longer want to see online. “The amount is much higher than the low compensation they received on the set, completing the financial and psychological ruin”, indicate in particular the journalists of Le Monde. The Senate report even indicates that “the victims informed the rapporteurs of the delegation of their virtual impossibility of obtaining, thereafter, the withdrawal of the videos of the scenes shot”. The Senate adds that in exchange for such a withdrawal, “one of the victims was offered to ‘become his sex slave for life’ or to practice in brothels in Brussels for a lifetime annuity”.
Videos broadcast everywhere and blackmail
The operators of the videos know, moreover, the power of nuisance represented by a potential general distribution of the films shot by the actresses. Actresses have clearly mentioned threats of blackmail in the event of requests for the removal of said videos. To stop these requests, operators would have indicated that it was possible for them to send extracts – often degrading and violent – to relatives, colleagues, children’s teachers, parents or family members. A threat taken seriously, especially since the virality of this content is already creating very serious problems. A victim in particular mentioned a video which “was everywhere, on social networks, on Facebook, on Twitter, on sites accessible from France and abroad”: “It went around the world, until in New York and Montreal. I was harassed at the bottom of my house, I received threatening letters“.
Actresses “sold” to other productions
This is an element that is mentioned by the investigative journalists of Le Monde: some young exploited women would have been “sold to other productions, for a commission”. As the media indicates, if this fact is legally established, then these practices could be requalified as “pimping”, “a legal turning point feared by the pornography sector”. Le Monde notably publishes an exchange of SMS between Pascal OP (quoted above) and a collaborator: “Who are we selling it to? Answer: “Celian [another director] will take it on the bank com [commission]. (…). Big tit obliged”. Then comes this confirmation: “G sent big black to Celian we will ask him 100/150 €”. The alleged facts, despite numerous examples are vigorously contested by the defendants’ lawyers.
A “respectful” pornography, but little distributed
The Senate report is very alarming, it specifies that there are several genres of pornography. Sonny Perseil, doctor HDR in political science, questioned by the parliamentarians, estimates for example that one “can speak of plural pornography or pornographies. They are extremely diversified”. And to add: “There are productions without any violence, with only consenting adults who know very well what they are doing, who master the framework of their activity. They refuse or accept roles according to their own choice and negotiate certain benefits or reject them. The situations are multiple.” However, studies show that 90% of the pornography consumed is “hardcore” and violent. “There is ‘ethical’ porn, but it represents 0,001% of the market, it is not what consumers are looking for”, regrets Senator Laurence Rossignol with the world.
Children exposed very early
The Senate report points to the extreme excesses of certain productions, but also insists on a societal phenomenon: pornographic images and videos – even the most violent – have become very easily accessible by the youngest. “Two thirds of children under 15 and a third of those under 12 have already been exposed to pornographic images, voluntarily or involuntarily. Nearly a third of boys under 15 visit a porn site at least once a month”, can we read in the document, which specifies that “certain contents are undoubtedly illicit and their diffusion is reprehensible.” Figures transmitted by the association Dare feminism! in the Senate indicates Pornhub, global online porn giant, lists 71,608 videos praising the incest and pedocrime, as well as 2,462 videos with the keyword “torture”.
Where are the legal proceedings?
What you must remember:
In France, two judicial inquiries are underway concerning pornographic productions:
The one concerning Pascal OP and his French Bukkake site. In this case, 16 people are indicted – actors, directors – producers – and most are in pre-trial detention.
The one concerning the Jacquie et Michel site, the largest French pornography site. In this case, the owner of the site, Michel Piron, is indicted for complicity in rape and trafficking in human beings in an organized gang.
The senators have formulated ways to regulate practices, avoid abuses and provide more support to victims, including:
Make sexual violence committed in the context of pornography an offense of incitement to a criminal offence.
Impose warning messages on sites, concerning violent content, specifying that these are non-simulated sexual acts, which may constitute criminal offences.
Promote the emergence of complaints from victims by improving their reception conditions, by training the police to collect complaints from these specific victims.
Impose fines on broadcasters, platforms such as social networks, for any dissemination of illegal content.
Require platforms to satisfy free of charge requests for the removal of videos made by the people filmed.
Impose on pornographic sites the display of a black screen as long as the age of the Internet user has not been verified.
An investigation for “rape” and “pimping” was opened against the pornographic site Jacquie et Michel and the owner of the site was placed in police custody on Tuesday, June 14. Since then, the testimonies have been linked.
After Nikita Bellucci, it’s Liza Del Sierra’s turn to break the silence. Michel Piron, the owner of the famous pornographic site Jacquie et Michel and four other people were placed in police custody on Tuesday June 14 in an investigation opened in Paris for rape and pimpingin July 2020, indicates BFM TV. Since then, the testimonies of pornographic actresses have emerged to denounce the abuses of the environment.
Of course there is a problem. Under the guise of an amateur, we allow ourselves to do anything while there is profit. And if there’s profit, we’re no longer an amateur
This Wednesday, June 15 on BFM TV, Liza Del Sierra, director, producer and former actress of pornographic films, returned to these abuses. She denounces in particular the absence of rules: “When an actress or a young woman decides to act amateur, inevitably, I think that she is more vulnerable. I sincerely think so because there is no rules”.
If the actresses advise each other, they are also confronted with a sometimes precarious economic reality, details the young woman.
She concludes her interview with our colleagues by saying that she hopes that this case will not harm the “fight led for the recognition of the profession”.
This Tuesday, Nikita Bellucci, actress, producer and activist for “ethical porn” demanded an “apology” from Jacquie and Michel: “The work of justice is going to be very long, but it has to stop,” she warned.
“(Asked about his stance on pornography, in response to perceived endorsement of Hustler, who had tricked Chomsky into giving an interview for the magazine.)
Pornography is humiliation and degradation of women. It’s a disgraceful activity. I don’t want to be associated with it. Just take a look at the pictures. I mean, women are degraded as vulgar sex objects. That’s not what human beings are. I don’t even see anything to discuss.
(Interviewer: But didn’t performers choose to do the job and get paid?)
The fact that people agree to it and are paid, is about as convincing as the fact that we should be in favour of sweatshops in China, where women are locked into a factory and work fifteen hours a day, and then the factory burns down and they all die. Yeah, they were paid and they consented, but it doesn’t make me in favour of it, so that argument we can’t even talk about.
As for the fact that it’s some people’s erotica, well you know that’s their problem, doesn’t mean I have to contribute to it. If they get enjoyment out of humiliation of women, they have a problem, but it’s nothing I want to contribute to.
(Interviewer: How should we improve the production conditions of pornography?)
By eliminating degradation of women, that would improve it. Just like child abuse, you don’t want to make it better child abuse, you want to stop child abuse.
Suppose there’s a starving child in the slums, and you say “well, I’ll give you food if you’ll let me abuse you.” Suppose—well, there happen to be laws against child abuse, fortunately—but suppose someone were to give you an argument. Well, you know, after all a child’s starving otherwise, so you’re taking away their chance to get some food if you ban abuse. I mean, is that an argument?
The answer to that is stop the conditions in which the child is starving, and the same is true here. Eliminate the conditions in which women can’t get decent jobs, not permit abusive and destructive behaviour.”
Belle Knox, the infamous Duke University porn star, is in a documentary where she discusses the realities of her life in porn and her true self, Miriam Weeks, who chose this as her profession to pay her way through college.
It’s a story from last August yet it’s still relevant because the underlying truth of the industry is still the same.
As her alter-ego, Belle Knox, Miriam has spent her first year in the porn industry touting her beliefs that porn is “empowering,” “freeing” and “the way the world should be.” She also portrays her choice in finding a way to fund her tuition and graduate free of debt as something akin to noble in the documentary.
However, the realities of Miriam’s life choice clearly weigh heavy on her.
Weeks did a series of interviews for an upcoming documentary. In them, she paints a much different picture than the freeing, empowering, sex-fueled fantasy world her fans and porn supporters claim she inhabits.
“The sex industry has a way of making you very cynical and very bitter,” a tired-looking Weeks tells an off-camera interviewer, “In a way I’ve started to become kind of a bit bitter and a bit cynical.”
“It teaches you to be street smart and not to trust people…I’m so used to being on the lookout for scammers, people who are going to try pimp me out or traffic me. I think my experiences have aged me. I don’t have the mind of an eighteen-year-old. I have the emotional baggage of someone much, much older than me.”
There is a deeper, darker reason that Miriam entered into the world of porn. She was raped and victims of rape have serious issues with control.
In many interviews, Weeks talks obsessively about how porn gives her control over her own sexual destiny: “In porn, everything is on my terms. I can say no whenever I want to. I am in control.” Later on, we discover why this is so important to her: Weeks reveals that she had been raped. “What porn has done for me,” she says firmly, “is it has given me back my agency.”
Miriam’s thinking is erroneous. She has sold herself into a perverted industry wrought with danger and humiliation for the sake of “control.”
Miriam herself admits that her first scene, shot for a company she refers to as “Facial Abuse,” was “a really, really rough scene. I wasn’t prepared for how rough it was. It was weird having some random photographer watch me have my a** kicked on camera.” She talks about getting literally torn up during porn shoots. She admits that porn shoots in which she was physically beaten up until she sobbed were probably shoots she should have refused. Yet she didn’t.
The truth is the industry controls her. In many cases, if she wants to work, she often must agree to a shoot without knowing the scene and who is in it. Once she agrees she is fined for walking out and the penalty is steep, the risk of not working again.
For one shoot, Miriam recalls almost tearfully, her agent wouldn’t tell her who she had to “work with.” When she arrived at the set, she realized he was fifty years old. She wanted to leave, but then she’d have to pay a 300 dollar “kill fee,” the director would have been furious, and, she says, she could never have worked for that company again. So she did it.
The reality of her choice weighs heavy on her and the consequences are great.
“I felt like crying during the entire scene and afterwards I was really, really upset,” Miriam says tearfully to the camera, looking like nothing more than the hurting 18-year-old girl she is. “I just thought of my mom, who was always there for me and always protected me…I think about my mom a lot when I do porn scenes. Just how sad she would be that her little daughter was doing this.”
Miriam is a lost soul who has been a victim of sexual assault resulting in choices where shame has become her partner leaving scars of self loathing, literally.
One day looking in the mirror, she became so overcome with self-hatred that she smashed the mirror and cut herself, slicing the jagged letters “FAT” into the flesh of her thigh.
While Miriam has her dark moments that hint at unhappiness and regret, she continues down this tragic path.
What is sickening is that there is even a demand in our society that has turned into multi-billion dollar industry that preys on the Miriam’s of the world. As I contemplate Miriam crying wondering what her mom thinks of her doing porn, I wonder what the dad’s of our culture would think of their 18-year-old daughter doing porn.
Detail from Suzzan Blac’s painting entitled ‘Let me entertain you’ which depicts the sexual and physical violence now commonplace in mainstream pornography
This is an edited transcript of the second part of Suzzan Blac’s talk at the ‘An evening with Suzzan Blac’ webinar we held in July 2021 and the subsequent discussion with Ygerne Price-Davies. The transcript of the first part of the talk, which was about her extraordinary paintings, is in a separate article. You can watch the recording of the whole talk on YouTube.
Of all the harms done to girls and women, pornography is the most damaging and far-reaching, affecting not just the victims within the porn industry, but also women and girls outside of it.
I first saw pornography when I was six years old. It was shown to me by one of my mother’s boyfriends as he sexually abused me. Throughout my childhood and teenage years, every older boy and man who sexually abused and raped me had pornography. And that’s not forgetting the sex traffickers who forced me into pornography. [Editor: Suzzan talks about this in the first part of her talk.]
So, I knew that there was a connection between sex offending and pornography. Over the years, and in my obsession with perpetrators and why and how they could so easily abuse and hurt girls and women, I researched sex offending, rapes, kidnapping, torture and sexually motivated murders and noticed that high pornography use was a significant and prime factor in their offending. I began writing about this in my blog, The Violence of Pornography, in 2016, documenting such cases.
I also read about research on the aggression in pornography. Whenever I posted about this on social media, however, I would be attacked by men. Some would laugh and say ‘You’ve never seen any pornography’. Well, yes that was true, I hadn’t seen any pornography – at least not since I was trafficked into it in 1977. I knew I would be traumatised if I accidently came across any.
So, in 2017 I decided that I had to watch it. How could I speak out against porn if I had never seen any recently? I chose Pornhub, because it was the most popular mainstream porn-site, having 115 million hits a day. I watched and took screen-shots of hundreds of videos on it.
Like many women who don’t watch porn, I had no idea about it’s true content. You just assume that much of it is ‘adults having consensual sex’ with maybe a bit of hair pulling and slapping going on. How wrong I was!
Crime scene videos
I could not believe what I was seeing, I thought that these things could only be seen on the dark web. I watched women being sexually and violently abused, humiliated, degraded, raped and tortured.
These were not sex videos. They were crime-scene videos.
There were women being raped when they used their safe words in ‘kink’ videos and when they were sleeping or passed out from alcohol or high on drugs. There were drug addicted prostitutes unaware that they were being filmed. Women being suffocated with plastic bags, water-boarded, strangled manually or with ligatures. Women being really hanged with ropes.
Many are ‘professional videos’, but a significant amount of user-generated content is uploaded onto Pornhub, often with no consent from the women appearing in it.
I watched one man film a woman standing on a chair with her neck in a noose. He would kick the chair, let her hang for a few seconds, then pick her up, place her back on the chair and do it again. And again. And again.
I watched a tied-up naked female being shot continuously for fifteen minutes by a man with an automatic BB rifle. I watched women’s breasts being tortured with needles, cigarettes being stubbed out on their nipples, and breasts already heavily bruised being punched or stood on by men in heavy boots. I watched women having their genitalia whipped with nettles or being sharp whipped, causing deep lacerations, some were ‘live streamed’ with requests from paying males.
Many of these videos have millions of views and endless derogatory comments along the lines of, ‘Loving the torture and seeing women suffer’.
There were tons of ‘domestic violence’ videos, mostly home-made by men who abuse their wives and girlfriends, filmed on their mobiles.
I frequently came across child sexual abuse imagery, some of real children and also CGI child abuse. I only saw these as thumbnails. I never clicked on the videos. Obviously, I couldn’t research this. I reported it to the Internet Watch Foundation, but never heard back.
There is also a lot of extremely disturbing and realistic CGI bestiality videos.
There were a significant number of men sexually offending outside the home, filming their offences with mobile phones and uploading them onto Pornhub. Offences ranged from up-skirting, secret toilet filming, indecent exposure, to masturbating and ejaculating onto unsuspecting females.
There is an incredible amount of criminal activity on Pornhub and I have evidenced much of it in my blog in the form of screen-shots for all to see.
Pornhub is completely unregulated and violates its own uploading terms. I am happy to say at least they are now being held accountable and have many lawsuits against them.
And, there are so many views. You can’t actually ascertain how many views a video has, because one video might have two million views and is then uploaded with a different title that has 600,000 views, and then another, and so on.
Strangulation (aka ‘breath play’)
I’d also like to talk about how common strangulation is on Pornhub. The kink community have changed the language, so it’s no longer called strangulation. They now call it ‘breath play’, which can mean suffocation or strangulation or hanging or choking. Quite often they call it choking when it’s not actually choking.
Choking is the act of having something stuck in the oesophagus. Strangulation is completely different. It can be done manually or with ligatures or with their arms or legs. It’s extremely dangerous because even for a few seconds it can cause a lot of health issues including brain damage – and that is if it’s non-fatal. It really is extremely dangerous. There are thousands of videos of men strangling women until they lose consciousness, either suffocating them, putting things in their mouth, suffocating them with plastic bags and strangling them or hanging, and I mean really hanging, them.
Rape, donkey punch, incest…
There are other disturbing videos like of rape but they don’t call it rape anymore. You can’t type in the word rape. Pornhub removed that term, but other words that mean the same thing are there – for example, unwilling sex or surprise anal.
There’s hate fuck, and donkey punch where men kick and hurt women and then punch them in the back of the head as hard as they can. I’ve seen women’s vaginas being stapled shut. Electric torture, punch fisting. Women being pissed on, either in their mouths or in their vaginas or anuses and they have women licking toilet bowls. Or, their heads being flushed down the toilet while they’re being pummelled from behind.
The most humiliating and degrading stuff.
There are also tons of incest videos with titles such as ‘No Daddy Stop’ or ‘I’m Not Mommy’. They dress 18-year-old girls to make them look like little girls and put them in child-themed rooms with much older men or sometimes elderly men, like it’s a granddad abusing his granddaughter. There’s a lot of incest, an awful lot of incest, brothers and sisters and so forth.
There are also horrible channels called sexually broken where they destroy women in every way possible.
Normalising and eroticising sexual violence against women and girls
I have documented all these types of videos on my website, The Violence Pornography. I have blurred the genitalia and it is very distressing to see, but I put it out there because I think people, especially women, need to see what it’s like without having to watch it themselves.
My research makes it absolutely clear that pornography normalises and eroticises sexual violence against women and reinforces rape myths. It is common for the girls and women who are being abused in these ways to be portrayed as if they are loving it. As if they’re not really saying no. It is made to look as if they say yes because they’re worthless whores and they love it.
This is extremely dangerous – especially knowing that young boys are watching this kind of content.
I believe that pornography should be deemed hate speech and that it is a violation of Article 3 of the Human Rights Act: the right not to be tortured in an inhumane or degrading way.
I could talk a lot more about pornography but most of it, as I said, is on my website.
Gay men’s porn
Ygerne: I just wanted to say thank you so much, Suzzan, for such a powerful and moving talk. And now if it’s OK with you, I’d like to ask about gay men’s porn. Did you research that and what did you find?
Suzzan: Every time you speak out on social media there are people who love to derail you and that’s one of the many things that was said to me. Gay porn! And I realised that I hadn’t actually watched any gay porn. So it was clear I was going to have to. Believe me, I didn’t want to do it, I really didn’t want to, but it was the only way to get answers.
So, one night I sat down with a big glass of wine and I went to Pornhub’s gay porn channels and typed in the same search words that I had for the women – such as rough sex, unwilling sex, torture, strangulation, everything. And I prepared myself…
At first I was confused because when I started watching the videos, they were lovely, absolutely lovely. The men were kissing. I had never seen any kissing on the straight porn channels.
They were also hugging and caressing each other. They were talking to each other; they were wearing condoms; they were respectful.
I thought I’d probably get to the other stuff later. So, I kept watching. I kept typing in the same search terms. There was one that came up under “rough sex”, and it was this huge hairy guy in leather. He was with another guy, a young guy, who was strapped to a cross and I thought, here we go. So, he gets a whip – but it’s a cat-o’-nine tails that has thick, wide pieces of soft leather – and he flogs him very gently so he doesn’t hardly even turn pink. And then he kisses him.
And I’m like, what? So, I type in torture and most of what I see is being tortured with feathers and tickling. Tickling torture! And it was like that in so many videos.
And I realised that this is the polar opposite of how the women are treated in pornography. There was no hate. There was no degradation; no humiliation; no cruelty; no sadism; no pain; nothing.
So then I did the same thing with trans porn. And again, I watched hundreds of videos and took screenshots and it was like the gay porn: caressing, kissing, and respect.
I looked at casting couch porn. You’ve probably heard of that. In the straight porn, it’s nasty: right from the beginning they start calling her names, humiliating and degrading her, and then some guy comes in and literally throws her about the room and pummels her. In the gay men’s porn, he’s asked some questions and then they start kissing and have normal sex.
The difference was astounding, really astounding and I thought that just proves the misogyny on that platform. It is virulent, it is horrific, and I’m glad I’ve documented it because now a lot of it has been taken down, as you know.
Pornhub has a lot of lawsuits against it as we speak and it took down millions of videos. Eighty percent of its unverified videos were taken down. So, that is some good news. We’ll see what happens next.
Wider implications
Ygerne: I saw that the house of Pornhub’s owner was attacked by an arsonist and burned down.
Suzzan: Yes, I saw that too. In the research I did years ago, I found him. I found that MindGeek owns Pornhub and so many other sites. I found a photo of him and put it on Twitter. Of course, nobody took much notice at the time. It wasn’t until, and I’m glad to say this, a male reporter at The New York Times took this story up, that anything actually happened and then Visa and Mastercard and other companies stopped dealing with Pornhub. So, I’m glad of it.
Ygerne: That’s why the work you are doing documenting it is so important.
Suzzan: I think it is important. Without seeing the images, it’s hard to believe. Images are really important to me – as you can see in my paintings. It’s not that people don’t believe exactly, it’s just that if you’re reading text, you’re detached from the reality. But, when you see images… It’s like, no one believed that the holocaust could happen – no one – until they saw the images and videos of what was going on over there.
It’s the same with everything. That’s the reason I took screenshots because I didn’t believe it. I’d read about it, but I didn’t understand the extent of it and how it’s worse than awful. The misogyny is truly horrifying.
As I said, it’s not about adults having consensual sex – as many people claim. They say that it’s consensual and if a woman likes a bit of rough, it’s her choice. But that’s not what it’s actually like.
And of course, a lot of the videos out there are not professionally made. There are millions of mobile phone videos – taken by men – boyfriends, husbands. I documented that too. It is domestic abuse – but it’s not only that because you’ve got men who are abusers, who are not just filming their wives and girlfriends and putting it on Pornhub, they’re also doing live cams and making money from it.
They’re actually making money out of their wives and girlfriends who are not consenting. And that says a lot about consent in pornography. No one can really tell if the person in pornography is consenting or not. Because you can’t tell if they’re a trafficking victim; you can’t tell if they’re a domestic abuse victim; whether it’s secret filming; whether it’s a minor. Simply no one can tell.
Facebook and YouTube have something like 20,000 to 30,000 moderators working on their sites to get rid of illegal content. Do you know how many Pornhub have? And we’re talking millions and millions of videos, I can’t remember the exact number, but millions. They had 20 or 30 moderators!
That’s a joke, isn’t it? I think they said a moderator can look through about 150 videos an hour. They literally fast forward through them. But they aren’t all in English. There’re a lot of foreign videos there, from all over the world. So, often they wouldn’t even know what the title said or what anybody said.
But, 150 videos an hour, how can anyone moderate that? It’s impossible. But, you know, it’s coming to a head now and people are finally understanding what Pornhub’s about and it’s about time.
Ygerne: The comparison you made with YouTube… It’s like when it comes to porn, the attitude is it’s just a bit of fun, and any criticism of it is deemed to be prudish.
Suzzan: Well, it’s free speech, isn’t it? [Laughs.] It’s free speech, but not for the women who are performing in these videos, or not performing, or don’t even know they’re in the videos.
And as I said, there is so much violence on there. It’s not sex! I’ve been called all sorts of names as you can imagine.
You know, we all like sex. But most pornography is not about sex anymore. It’s now about the humiliation, degradation and suffering of women. They love to punish women and there are millions of these videos, with millions of views, and men who are enjoying them.
What is that doing? What is that doing to young boys? What is that doing to their minds when they see that and they’re looking at it everywhere, including in school?
It’s awful and I think they should ban mobile phones in schools because even my own daughter, years ago when she was a teenager, was traumatised. She didn’t tell me at the time, but she was traumatised by boys showing her violent pornography. And it’s still going on and they’re getting younger and younger; we’re talking 10, 11, 12.
We must put the onus on the perpetrators
Ygerne: I remember getting shown porn when I was in primary school.
So now a question from the audience. What would you advise us to use in terms of language in the sense of putting the onus on the perpetrators? Would you use the word prostitutor to define this person?
Suzzan: Yeah, the problem has always been seen in terms of the victim and the perpetrators are hardly mentioned and that needs to change. The onus really needs to be on the perpetrators. We need to ask why they are doing this and make them accountable. Definitely more needs to be done about that.
Even with victims of murder, women who were murdered, the emphasis is always on her: she was drunk, what she was doing? Why was she out on her own? Why was she wearing headphones, why this, why that? But, not the perpetrator. And why is that?
It has to do with misogyny and, and victim blaming. Because it is women too who are doing this. Women can also be misogynistic. I’ve known that first-hand. Yes, it needs to be changed and we all need to collectively keep fighting for these things.
Ygerne: Misogyny is so engrained in all of us, isn’t it.
Suzzan: Yes. And with domestic abusers, it’s always been why doesn’t she do this, why doesn’t she do that. I’ve experienced it. My sister and my mother have experienced it.
Even though you’re married to that person or live with them, they can still terrorise you and no one understands that, unless they’ve been in that situation. Just because you live with that man, it doesn’t mean it will calm down and be okay.
I have been in that situation and my sister has too. The worst time is when you leave them. That’s when he would threaten. He’s broken her bones. He’s kicked her when she was pregnant.
When I was young and this was going on, she was only 17, 18, I was so used to violence it didn’t affect me, it was normal. In the end, when she would threaten to leave, he would say he was going to kill her and the children. When finally she did leave, he followed her and beat her up in a spa shop, and kicked the hell out of her. Nobody, not one person, said anything. Nobody did anything. They just watched or walked out.
When she fled to a women’s refuge, he came and found her and was swearing and throwing stones at the windows. Then they put her in a caravan with her four children. The terror that she went through hasn’t left her. She’s still not right from it now.
This is what people don’t understand. This is why we must concentrate and focus on these perpetrators.
Impact of watching porn
Ygerne: Thank you so much. We’ve got loads of positive comments coming in from the audience. Gratitude to you for your honesty and resilience.
Suzzan: Thank you. You’re so kind. I appreciate that. It’s worth the hard work.
It has been traumatising work, especially the pornography. For a year I’ve had to take a break because just watching it traumatised me and I was having other effects. For example, I would go to the shops or the post office and I would see different women, I would look at different women, young women, elderly women, all kinds of women and think about what genre they would be in. Every time.
If it’s done that to me, and, believe me I’m not masturbating to this material, I’m analysing crime scenes, because that’s what they are, what is it doing to young men in particular, who are masturbating to this kind of material? And then they’re out in the real world looking at women in the real world, what is it doing to them?
Ygerne: It’s terrifying.
Suzzan: It is and there’s so much to talk about.
I’ve researched serial killers and sexually motivated murders because most serial killers kill women. You can see the rise in serial killers, especially in America, since the early 70s, 80s, and 90s which coincided with the increase in violent pornography. You can see, it’s almost like an exact match.
And their prime motivation is fantasy. Sex offenders say that it’s all about the fantasy. Whatever they do, whether they look through a woman’s bedroom window or expose themselves or want to kidnap and rape and murder a woman, it’s all about the fantasy and this escalation.
What happens is, they start watching what they like to call vanilla porn, although there’s not much of that around anymore, I can tell you, except in gay porn. If you don’t want to see violence then watch gay porn.
They start with the vanilla and go on to harder and harder stuff, and then bestiality. And once they’ve covered everything, they can no longer become aroused and that is when they cross the line into real offending. And might actually film it and import it onto Pornhub.
I can’t tell you how dangerous it is and how many rapes there are a year and sexual assaults – but I bet you money they are rising and have been rising since pornography became so available on the internet.
Ygerne: We’ve run out of time now – so I just want to say, if anyone wants to find out more about Suzzan’s research, you can find it on her website, The Violence Pornography. If there are any parents that have been affected by topics we’ve talked about, we provide some links to some good resources below. Thank you for participating and all your questions.
And thank you, Suzzan, for passing on your wisdom. Good night, everyone, and thank you.
In a ten-week long campaign RadicalGirlsss will go through the myths surrounding pornography, trying to uncover the reality behind the glamour. We’ll be hosting a series of webinars, post reality-checks and foster discussion to understand the operation of this multi-million dollar industry.
Have you ever wondered what really goes on in the world of extreme abuse porn?
Meet Theodosia, an ex-porn performer who spent years doing bondage, domination, submission and masochism (BDSM) porn. After surviving childhood abuse, the trauma she endured fed into violent and abusive romantic relationships, and eventually to a boyfriend introducing her to the world of violent pornography. She came to learn that the women who could endure a lot of pain on camera were valued in the BDSM porn world, and she was taught that her primary talent was suffering well.
One day, after years of being abused on camera, Theodosia realized she could no longer stomach the world she was thrown into. See how Theodosia got her start in BDSM porn, and why she eventually left the industry on her own terms.
Fight the New Drug is a non-religious and non-legislative organization that exists to provide individuals the opportunity to make an informed decision regarding pornography by raising awareness on its harmful effects using only science, facts, and personal accounts.
To learn more about how pornography impacts individuals, relationships, and society, visit http://ftnd.org/. This video was made possible by Fighter Club. To help us create more content like this, consider joining Fighter Club at http://ftnd.org/fc.
