David Tassillo & Feras Antoon, Who Are They?
Executives are being let go from PornHub as the issue around underage sex videos rocked the online giant.
However, both of Pornhub’s top executives will continue to possess shares in the corporation that owns Pornhub.
After claims of non-consensual and under-age sex movies, Feras Antoon and David Tassillo resigned from their positions at Mindgeek.
On Tuesday, June 21, the chief executive of MindGeek, Feras Antoon, and the chief operating officer of MindGeek, David Tassillo, announced that they would be resigning from their positions with the company in the wake of mounting allegations that the website hosted underage and non-consensual videos. According to a statement released by MindGeek, the two executives will be leaving the company but will continue to be stockholders. According to remarks made by employees on social media platforms on Tuesday, June 21, the organization was also responsible for an unknown number of layoffs.
“After holding leadership positions with the company for more than a decade, Antoon and Tassillo have decided to step down from their day-to-day responsibilities at MindGeek. MindGeek’s executive leadership team will operate day-to-day operations on an interim basis while a search is ongoing for successors, according to a statement released by the business’s spokesperson. The company is currently strategically positioned for long-term growth. The unsettling claims that have been coming out recently allege that the corporation is responsible for underage and non-consensual videos on MindGeek’s sites, which also include Brazzers, RedTube, and YouPorn. This has caused the news to surface.
Why is the term “Mrs. Claus” so common on adult websites? PornHub has disclosed the most popular searches for the holiday season.
An investigation that was conducted and published by The New Yorker earlier in the month of June focused on the predicament faced by Rachel, a British girl of 15 years of age. Rachel’s explicit videos of herself were uploaded to Pornhub and other websites without her permission, and she fought to have them removed. Rachel made a formal complaint to the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Command, which is a branch of the National Crime Agency in the United Kingdom, but the organization was unable to assist her in any meaningful way.
Following the publication of an article titled “Children of Pornhub” by the New York Times in which allegations of child trafficking were made against the company, Antoon and Tassillo testified in front of the Canadian House of Commons Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics in the month of March 2021. Serena Fleites, now 19 years old, who had been a victim of sexual assault and whose recordings had been placed on Pornhub while she was just 15 years old, also testified. Her video was not removed off Pornhub, and the company continued to make money off of it because it was shared there.
A class action lawsuit seeking $600 million has been filed against MindGeek, based in Luxembourg, on behalf of many alleged minor victims whose recordings were apparently uploaded on Pornhub without their knowledge. The lawsuit was initially filed in the previous year. A woman who believes that a video of her rape when she was 12 years old was put to Pornhub is the class representative in the lawsuit that was filed in Canada. The woman also accused Pornhub of ignoring her request to remove the footage from the website. The lawsuit was filed in Canada.
In addition, the company suffered a significant setback in the year 2020 when Visa and MasterCard decided not to handle payments for some of the company’s websites due to security concerns regarding potentially unlawful content. A representative for MindGeek denied that recent news about the company was the cause of Antoon and Tassillo’s exits and stated that the “transition has been in development since early 2022.” According to a statement made by a representative for MindGeek, “with the company strategically positioned for long-term growth, MindGeek’s executive leadership team will operate day-to-day operations on an interim basis,” while at the same time a search is being conducted to find replacements.
Who is this Feras Antoon?
Feras Antoon is a co-owner of MindGeek. He was born on June 29, 1975 in the city of Damascus, which is located in Syria. To further his education in engineering, Antoon relocated to Montreal. In the early 2000s, he and four other engineering graduates launched the first pornographic website that bore his name, which was called Mansef Productions. In later years, he was a co-founder of the website Brazzers, which features a distinct section devoted to articles on senior citizens. Antoon, Ouissam Youssef, Matt Keezer, and Stephane Manos are responsible for the establishment of Brazzers. The term “Brothers” was spoken in a way that was reminiscent of the Middle Eastern culture, and this is where the name came from.
In April of 2021, his home was burned down in the midst of allegations that Pornhub had information that was inappropriate for minors and included rape. “I can’t even begin to count how many comments I saw where people advocated for the destruction of either the firm or my home. For a while, it was simple to brush off the tweets as nothing more than random individuals chatting it up on the internet. Then, my home was destroyed in the fire, “he mentioned in an earlier interview with Vanity Fair this year.
Who is this David Tassillo?
Pornhub’s parent company has a Chief Operating Officer by the name of David Tassillo. Following the acquisition of MindGeek from successful entrepreneur Fabian Thylmann in 2013, Tassillo and Antoon became co-owners of the company. David Marmorstein Tassillo was mentioned in the Pandora Papers in October 2021, which contained allegations that he had masked his identity in a number of different tax havens. Tassillo stated to The Sun in October 2021 that “the trades and arrangement were perfectly appropriate.” “”To support the business, we established corporations in Delaware, Anguilla, and the British Virgin Islands,” he said. “Like many Fortune 500 organizations, we did this since Delaware is a very business-friendly state.”
The European country of Luxembourg is where MindGeek’s headquarters are located. Although the business has locations in Los Angeles, London, Montreal, Cyprus, and Budapest, the headquarters of the corporation may be found in Montreal. According to a company spokesperson, the company has approximately 1600 employees, and the online platforms that it owns, which include Pornhub, RedTube, YouPorn, and Brazzers, received approximately 4.5 billion visits each month in 2020. This is almost double what Google and Facebook combined receive, and on average, its websites receive more than 115 million visitors each day.