Shortly before midnight on Sunday, 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.
How, in fact, did he sleep at night, knowing that Pornhub had negatively affected so many people’s lives? He’d been asked that very question two months earlier, while being harangued at a Canadian parliamentary hearing. His response was hardly contrite: “We are very sorry if this has caused any impact on victims.” He went on to say, with an evidently clear conscience, how proud he was “that we built a product that gets 170 million people visiting a day.”
Pornhub, with its undulating ocean of explicit content, is often ranked among the 10 most viewed websites in the world. More Americans use it than use Twitter, Netflix, or Instagram. As a result, in his hometown of Montreal, Antoon is known as “le Roi de la porno”—the King of Porn. And the king’s castle, it turned out, was the cause of those frantic late-night calls.
At the time, Antoon had been finalizing construction on a 21-room mega-mansion: 11 bathrooms, nine-car garage, 6,000-square-foot ballroom and sports wing. “I was building the house of my dreams,” the notoriously press-averse Antoon told me in his first interview in more than a decade. “And everything was going great.” Or so it seemed. With people housebound by the pandemic in early 2020, Pornhub saw a surge in smut-surfing numbers: U.S. traffic increased by up to 41.5 percent in the first month of the lockdown. The brand became ubiquitous in popular culture, appearing in gags on late-night comedy shows and the business pages. (Quoth Fortune: “Should Pornhub Buy Tumblr?”)
But then, starting in December, a series of legal and P.R. scandals slammed the company. First, a New York Times exposé accused the firm of knowingly hosting child sex abuse materials (CSAM). Antoon denied the charges: “Any suggestion that we allow or encourage illegal content is completely untrue and defies rational reason, from both a moral and business standpoint,” he told me. Still, Canadian senators and MPs called for a criminal investigation. In the uproar, credit card processors suspended payments on the site. Lawsuits proceeded on several fronts. An internal memo Antoon wrote about the company missing its year-end financial goals was leaked. Suddenly, attention shifted to his big-ass man cave. “As his dream home gets close to completion,” noted the Daily Mail, Antoon “faces a money crunch nightmare. His empire is in danger of crumbling.” On April 22, he placed his château on the market for nearly $16 million...
