When the CEO of Pornhub’s mega-mansion mysteriously burned to the ground, there was no shortage of possible suspects. Now, for the first time, the site’s shadowy founders tell their story:
April 25, 2021, Pornhub co-owner Feras Antoon lay in bed sleeping when his cell phone started blowing up. The ringer, on silent, didn’t wake him.
Three days later, a security guard monitoring surveillance footage at Pornhub parent company MindGeek’s office in Montreal noticed something unusual. The CCTV feed from Antoon’s uninhabited, nearly completed house showed two trespassers on the premises. Adding to the intrigue, the estate was situated right along so-called Mafia Row, a secluded road where at least a few local Cosa Nostra bosses had resided.
Whatever the cause, Antoon’s inferno was searingly symbolic. It represented not just bad juju befalling the XXX site, but an overheated, inflammatory political climate in the ongoing war against online porn.portrayals of sex acts were the purview of adult magazines and movies. Today, hard-core sex is instantly accessible on mobile devices, social media feeds, and VR headsets.
For a while, it was easy to dismiss the tweets as just people on the internet talking. Then my house burned down.” One might assume that the portal would stringently ensure that its wares involve consenting, grown-up actors and amateurs. Moreover, the site peddles an almost unimaginable diversity of freaky sex, including acts involving cross-eyed elves, nose worshippers giving nasolingus, and furry cosplayers. But it isn’t all innocuous. Some taglines feature keywords like “demolished” and “annihilate” in conjunction with various orifices.
“Since 2004, Brazzers has been the number one name in original adult entertainment, period,” explains the site, now operated by MindGeek. Current COO David Tassillo, another Concordia engineering grad, told me that the company founders got the name from one of their cousins who had such a heavy Middle Eastern accent that when he’d sayManos and Youssef dubbed their holding company Mansef, a portmanteau of their last names.
As the majority owner of MindGeek, Bergmair stayed in the background, effectively shrouding the company in secrecy. MindGeek became “a lot more hidden,” Thylmann said in 2017. “They just went completely under the radar.”though physically based in Montreal, are actually headquartered in the hoary tax haven of Luxembourg, with offices in Cyprus, Romania, London, and L.A.
The day after the arson, the anti-porn organization Traffickinghub tweeted a photo of Antoon’s castle next to a portrait of Fleites, then living in her car. On top of it all, Canada’s government forced Antoon and Tassillo to testify at an ethics committee hearing. At that time, a trafficking survivor named Rose Kalemba, whose underage videos had been previously posted on Pornhub, spoke out about her experiences with Traffickinghub, which she claimed was profiting off victims and treating them as badly as Pornhub did. She called out Mickelwait as being “just one more person who exploited me,” saying that Traffickinghub’s approach made her feel “violated, exploited, used, then discarded.
We came to the ruins. Lacy motes of ash floated over the debris. “No question this was intentional,” he said. “Whoever did it knew what the hell they were doing.” Poletti doubted that Pornhub’s foes—or Antoon himself—arranged the blaze. Instead, he argued, it might well have been a message sent by one or more of Antoon’s neighbors. As Poletti spoke, he couldn’t help noticing how much bigger Antoon’s house was than those around it, how much it encroached on them.
Tassillo had never done an interview with a reporter. Antoon said they’d agreed to cooperate after so many years of silence because continuing to avoid the press “could come off as wanting to be dodgy. Now we’re at a place where it’s important to be transparent. I think when you don’t hear people speak on behalf of the company, it’s easy to assume that we’re just ‘shadowy porn guys.’ And that couldn’t be further from the truth.
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