MasterCard Investigating Pornhub Allegations

[2fast2slow]

this story is getting weirder and weirder

 

[CaptRenault]

More details from the Daily Mail:

Montreal mansion of embattled Pornhub founder burns down in arson

Syrian-born Pornhub founder Feras Antoon's, 45, unfinished Montreal home burned down Sunday night.

www.dailymail.co.uk

...Montreal police were called around 11.30 Sunday night and responded to reports of two people breaking into the construction area of the home.

...The property backs on to Montreal's 'Mafia Row' where many crime figures live. On the very spot that Antoon's home is being built, a gunman stood and fired a single bullet through a double-paned window, killing Nicolo Rizzuto — 'The Canadian Godfather' — in his kitchen in 2010.

'It's an area well-known as home to people who, let's say, didn't necessarily make their fortunes legally,' said one long-time Montreal when DailyMail.com visited the site last year. 'You ask anyone in the city about this area and they would say 'Oh, Mafiaville.' [Maybe Antoon didn't take the local Mafia residents seriously when they told him that he needed to pay "homeowner association dues" to live in that neighborhood].

'Antoon's home is very opulent and completely over the top in everything. The front alone has 20 windows.' he added. 'But it fits in perfectly with other homes in the area.'

The previous owners of the site where his palace is being built went to court to win a planning battle to allow 220 trees to be felled to make room for it.

...Antoon, the CEO of Pornhub's parent company MindGeek, faces a money crunch nightmare. His empire is in danger of crumbling following allegations that much of the content on his leading site contains videos of underage girls.

'Its site is infested with rape videos. It monetizes child rapes, revenge pornography, spy cam videos of women showering, racist and misogynist content, and footage of women being asphyxiated in plastic bags,' wrote Nicholas Kristof in a New York Times column that first exposed Pornhub [Those allegations are unsubstantiated but they have had the intended effect of harming Pornhub's business].

'A search for 'girls under18' or '14yo' leads in each case to more than 100,000 videos. Most aren't of children being assaulted, but too many are.'

Already major credit card companies Mastercard, Visa and Discover have cut ties with Pornhub forcing it to delete 80 percent [80% seems like an exaggeration] of its content in a bid to clean up its act. It has also severely curtailed uploading of videos and completely banned downloading.

And lawmakers in both the United States and Canada were drafting legislation to make it easier for child victims to sue companies that post videos of sexual acts...

Artist rendering of completed home:

Under construction in December:

 

[CaptRenault]

The NY Post has some artist renderings of the interior of the now burned down mansion:

Inside Pornhub owner’s $19M mansion, now destroyed in suspicious fire

The huge mansion was destroyed in a fire three days after it hit the market.

nypost.com

This room looks like the inside of a German FKK.

 

[TheBlob]

C'est louche ce feu.

And he was selling the mansion before it was even finished building. Very weird story.

 

[EagerBeaver]

And he was selling the mansion before it was even finished building. Very weird story.

Probably because of all his legal issues. He needed cash to pay his attorneys and sometimes you have to liquidate assets to pay large retainer fees. Now he has nothing to sell and no insurance proceeds either, because of the arson. The insurance company will say, how do we know you did not torch it, Feras baby? It's provable arson by unknown arsonists. He certainly had motive to do so with the Pornhub issues. Although I am more inclined to agree with CR that it was the Mafia that burned it down, due to (1) failure to pay "homeowner's association dues", and (2) you never build a "my dick is bigger than yours" house in the middle of an Italian Mafia neighborhood, when you do not pay up the said dues and are not even Italian.

 

[No_Church_InThe_Wild]

we might never know EB , but #2 sounds plausible

 

[Bbw hunter]

It's definitely not a good way to "fit in" to your new neighborhood, especially now that you have attracted so much media attention as the world's most famous porn entrepreneur. The location is a small island called Ile Paton on the south shore of Laval, between Laval and Montreal.

"So where do you live?" "Uh, on Ile Patron...uh, right next to that house built by that internet entrepreneur guy." "You mean the porn king's mega mansion." "Uh, yeah."

Those woods were private property and the owner had the right to sell them, though there was probably a general understanding that any development of the area would consist of houses similar in size to the houses in the neighborhood (which are already big houses). If the local government really wanted to protect the woods, then it needed to have purchased them before the property was sold to others. It's too bad, but now it's obviously too late.


View attachment 8580

View attachment 8581

Ile Paton isn't actually that small. It's a fully developed upscale area full of high rise condos, so it's easy to live there discretely without having to worry too much about running into neighbors. I know it well. There aren’t many wooded areas there either apart from small slivers at the river's edge.
The former mayor of Laval lives there too. You know, the one who got arrested.

 

[CaptRenault]

Feras Antoon claims that his $16M mansion-under-construction was burned down by "extreme religious groups."

Sorry, Feras, but that's absurd. We don't know who did it, but there are no "extreme religious groups"anywhere near Montreal that would be sufficiently daring and motivated to burn down the mansion. It was either Feras himself who planned and organized the arson or his Mafia neighbors who did it. Or it could have been other enemies that Antoon created in the porn business.

I am sure investigators have their suspicions about the suspects but they haven't said anything. I am not sure that anyone is working overtime to solve the case, because Antoon was not really welcome in that neighborhood. His mansion dwarfed the other big homes in the neighborhood and it was built on a previously wooded site that some residents believed was not destined for development.

The lesson of the story is that: if you are the owner of a controversial but profitable porn site, keep a low profile and don't offend the wrong people.

Pornhub CEO breaks silence on fire that ravaged his $16million mansion

46-year-old Feras Antoon's dream $16million Montreal manor, which backed onto 'Mafia Row', was reduced to ashes in April last year after a suspected arson attack on the property.

www.dailymail.co.uk

Pornhub CEO claims arson attack that destroyed his unfinished $16 million mega-mansion on Montreal's 'Mafia Row' was incited by 'extreme religious groups' after XXX-site was hit with claims it profited off child sexual assaults​

• Pornhub boss Feras Antoon, 46, has finally spoken out about the devastating fire that destroyed his mansion
• His $15.9million-valued Montreal manor burned down in April 2021 in what was a suspected arson attack
• And now, Antoon claims that 'extreme religious groups' could have incited the attack against his property
• Pornhub has previously faced allegations that some of its content includes videos of underage girls

The boss of Pornhub has spoken out for the first time since his unfinished $16million Montreal mansion was burned to rubble last year.

46-year-old Feras Antoon's dream manor was reduced to ashes in April last year after a suspected arson attack on the property.

XXX-Files: Who Torched the Pornhub Palace?

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.

www.vanityfair.com

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...

The blaze on April 25, 2021, reduced the house to nothing more than ashes just weeks after Antoon had put the opulent manor up for sale - at a price of $15.9million...

 

[2fast2slow]

the rise and fall of pornhub...i thought it was kinda cool that the biggest porn streaming service in the world was out of montreal....but alas, it did not last...