In February 2023, Canadian criminal-defense lawyer Solomon Friedman was wrapping up a high-profile terrorism trial. Awso Peshdary had been accused of recruiting and funding two young Canadian men to join ISIS in Syria. One later appeared in a propaganda video encouraging terrorist attacks in Canada; both were presumed dead. Friedman had thrown everything at the case, including forcing Canada’s secret service to hand over its records on a key witness, a highly paid confidential informant. Nevertheless, after his case went on for eight years, Peshdary, then 33, pleaded guilty, made a statement denouncing jihad, and—after Friedman presented expert testimony that he was unlikely to reoffend—was sentenced to 14 years. This was reduced to 21 months plus time served.
After this long and public fight, many people might put their feet up for a bit. But less than a month after the trial wrapped, Friedman and a group of investors announced they were buying the world’s most notorious porn company. Ethical Capital Partners (ECP), as the private-equity firm is somewhat hilariously named, bought MindGeek, the owner of Pornhub, with a stated aim of cleaning up the online adult-entertainment business. They are approaching this task with the same doggedness that Friedman brought to his defense of the terrorist. In this case, that means abiding by every letter of the law that it can, proclaiming how law-abiding it’s trying to be—and using every legal means to get its way. Friedman has become the conscientious public face of Pornhub, a company that has until recently preferred to exist in the shadows. He’s helped in this morally incongruous endeavor by the fact that he’s an ordained rabbi.
“This is an issue that’s emotive, it’s divisive, but it’s one where I find, particularly when I speak to law enforcement, that we have far more in common when it comes to wanting to get this right than simply the issue of porn,” says Friedman, a balding, bespectacled, bearded 39-year-old, during an interview in a Manhattan hotel restaurant with two colleagues.
People who are not into porn tend to underestimate the size of the industry. Through the company now known as Aylo, ECP owns many heavily trafficked sites – free ones like YouPorn and RedTube, as well as subscription sites like Brazzers, Reality Kings, and My Dirty Hobby – but Pornhub is the biggest, the seventh busiest website in the world, according to Semrush, an online visibility management service, above Amazon and X. It got 5.4 billion visits in July, and users stayed for an average of 10 minutes. Its largest competitor, Xvideos, was the ninth busiest with 4 billion visits.
Research on porn-watching is unreliable because it’s based on self-reports, but a 2022 study found almost 60% of Americans said they have watched pornography at least once and more than 25% (or 57% of men) have watched it in the past month. While there are schools of thought that consider porn to be a harmless form of sexual expression, there’s also alarm about overuse. Research is inconclusive on whether obsessive porn use can be considered a behavioral addiction, a compulsion, or a symptom of another underlying disorder, but one study found that more than 10% of American men and 3% of women believe they might be addicted.
School counselors, therapists, and family lawyers report an enormous jump in porn as a topic of discussion. “It is extraordinarily prevalent,” says Brett Ward, a partner specializing in matrimonial law at Blank Rome in New York City, who says he has seen an exponential increase in the issue as a feature of marital disputes in the past 20 years. “Porn has infiltrated marriages and exacerbated a problem and led to the destruction of many marriages. It is a major, major issue that we don’t talk about enough.”
Friedman is not one to shy away from social opprobrium —he successfully defended a policeman accused of manslaughter and a bus driver who crashed into a steel awning, killing three passengers, by radically reframing the public narrative. ECP’s idea, he often says, is “to make porn boring.” It is unclear, however, whether the problems that have bedeviled Pornhub, and online adult content in general, are bugs in the system or inherent to the product. Also unclear is how much Friedman is driven by a desire to bring clarity and a belief in freedom of expression and how much it’s simply about overcoming a challenge, especially when doing so could make him very wealthy. He speaks about his current venture like a prophet. “If a company like Pornhub can’t succeed, doing what we’re doing, expending the resources and really prioritizing trust and safety, if that company gets toppled,” he says, “then what will replace it is a very frightening prospect.”
Almost nobody, as Amy Poehler once joked, actually plans to go into porn, but Friedman did a lot of prep before he went into the business. In 2020, he was asked to give legal advice to a consortium that was looking into buying MindGeek, which in the investment community was known as a “distressed asset,” and in other communities as the most revolting company in the world. MindGeek had been accused of, among other things, distributing Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM), revenge porn, and other nonconsensual porn and of facilitating the sexual trafficking of women and minors.
In 2020, in the face of an onslaught of bad publicity, and in particular a dam buster of a column in the New York Times by Nicholas Kristof, MindGeek reported that it had taken down all the videos that had uncertain provenance—leaving it with a reported 20% of its former content—and banned unverified users from uploading to the site. Pornhub is still so reviled that no credit-card companies will process payments to it, nor its mammoth advertising arm, TrafficJunky; they have to be made via such means as wire transfer or Paxum, a Caribbean-based e-bank. It has been kicked off all social media sites except X. In April 2021, a $16 million mansion belonging to the man reputed to be MindGeek’s CEO was burned down. (Nobody was hurt.) Several employees of one of MindGeek’s most popular content partners, a company called GirlsDoPorn (GDP), are serving long sentences for their involvement in a sex trafficking conspiracy; GDP’s owner was on the FBI’s Most Wanted List until his arrest in Spain in late 2022.
Still, as Friedman, whose official title is VP of compliance, began to look into MindGeek, he became persuaded that the company had potential. Like YouTube, MindGeek has several streams of income: ads that run on the free sites, premium subscription sites, and payments from users’ clicks to another site, among others. If the legal crises it is facing can be averted, the bumper-to-bumper traffic it attracts will generate real money. His law partner Fady Mansour was at first appalled that their firm was consulting on the porn business, says Friedman, but after the deal they were working on fell through, Mansour had seen enough to set about finding a way to structure a new agreement. (While the new owners have pledged more visibility into the company, they declined to name the main creditors on the deal, which was rumored to be in the $475 million range. “We have 100% control of the shares, period,” is all Friedman will say.)
All of the known partners of ECP are intriguing—including the retired chief superintendent of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police force Derek Ogden, former lobbyist and Liberal Party spokesperson Sarah Bain and a couple of cannabis entrepreneurs—but Friedman has been the most public. Whereas MindGeek was secretive, press-averse, and mostly concerned with traffic, ECP presents Aylo as ethical, transparent, and almost finicky in its compliance. “I think we have an opportunity to do something monumental here,” says Friedman. “To take an industry from the gray into the light, and to actually bring all of the lessons that the mainstream world has, whether it’s law enforcement or other technology companies, and do this right.” To that end Friedman and Bain have been asking for—and say they’ve been getting—meetings with politicians, law enforcement officials, and executives from online-safety advocacy organizations. “Previous owners of porn companies couldn’t do that,” says Friedman. “They couldn’t say, ‘Tell us what the issues are. How can we help you develop good legislation? How can we share research with you?’”
Friedman, particularly, has been touting the company’s procedures to ensure that all content that appears on its website is legal. He has a 90-minute presentation on how new videos are vetted before they go live. In it, he assures people that 20% of Aylo’s some 1,400 staff deal with trust and safety issues and that the company has partnerships with 70 NGOs, including those focused on trafficking and sex-worker health. Users who search the site using terms that suggest they’re looking for children are given deterrent messaging and are directed to a website where they can seek help for unwanted sexual urges. He touts the option at the bottom of the homepage where users can flag problematic videos. If a user reports CSAM, nonconsensual, or other illegal content, and provides their full name and email, it is automatically taken down while it’s investigated. (Content reported anonymously is reviewed by moderators first.) Friedman acknowledges that means that activists could take down any video as an act of protest. “When you’re so public and so open, you’re also a massive target,” he says. “But my view and my investment thesis going into this was, this company is already a target–paint a bigger one.”
This did not seem the life Friedman was destined for. One of 10 children, he was raised in a “pretty open-minded” Orthodox Jewish family in Ottawa. His father worked in telecommunications, and Friedman has said that there were more computers in the house than children. “We were a sharp-witted bunch,” he says of his siblings. “The knives come out in a friendly kind of way, but you’ve got to be able to take it and dish it out.” He met his ex-wife Miriam, with whom he has three children, in high school, married her when he was 19, and moved to Israel to pursue rabbinical studies.
Even before his ordination in Jerusalem, however, he knew he wasn’t going to be a rabbi. “I didn’t want to be ministering to people,” he says. “If I wasn’t buying what I was selling, no one else would buy it either.” He decided instead to go to law school, then served as a law clerk at the Supreme Court of Canada for Justice Morris Fish, a former defense lawyer, and fell in love with criminal law. His client roster has been colorful. He tried to get a convicted sex offender off a sex-offender registry and appealed rulings against a 22-year-old who was convicted of having sex with a 13-year-old and a drunk driver who injured three people. One local outlet called him Ottawa’s fifth best DUI attorney. His website boasts of getting the counseling records of an alleged sexual assault victim to show discrepancies between what she told police and what she told a counselor and getting his client acquitted.
Friedman, who has put aside most legal work while he labors over Aylo, points out that he’s represented more than 1,000 people over the years. “I never turn down clients on the basis of what they’re alleged to have done,” he says. “I’m of the view that everybody, no matter what they’re charged with or what they’ve actually done, is deserving of high-quality legal representation.” Friedman has testified regularly at Canadian parliamentary hearings over new legislation, weighing in on such issues as cannabis legalization and gun rights—he’s a favorite of the National Firearms Association and co-authored a book on Canadian gun legislation.
He’s also become well-versed in matters of pornography. At a 2018 criminal-law conference he delivered a training lecture on sentencing guidelines for people convicted of possessing child pornography and concluded with advice on how lawyers could improve their clients’ chances of getting a lighter sentence. “Contact a tenacious child pornography defence lawyer today,” urges the website for his law firm Friedman Mansour, which also does business under the name Affordable Defence, and lists driving offenses, drug charges, robbery, and white collar crimes among its practice areas. “Sometimes, a simple administrative/systemic error, such as lost or destroyed evidence, can be enough to secure your release but it may require the experience of a seasoned criminal lawyer to get to that stage,” the site notes.
“Being a criminal defense lawyer was never a job for me,” Friedman says. “I believed very, very much in the work that I was doing. I believe very much in the work that I’m doing now.” But after 15 years, he got antsy. “I reached a point where I wasn’t learning or being challenged at the rate that I really want to be,” he says. Hence, the allure of running a big local porn company and all the legal difficulties that come with it. “The ability to tackle problems on a much larger scale exists in this role, and I find that exhilarating.”
“The two most pressing issues right now for the company are our outstanding litigation and our compliance—our trust and safety—because we have to turn around the narrative and understanding that people have of this company,” says Bain, the ECP partner responsible for communications. “Sol is really good at that. All of his learnings have been about explaining things. He’s such a great communicator.” Bain compares it to doing improv: “The answer is always yes with Sol. And then he finds a way.”
Friedman says yes to a lot of things other people might find too dicey. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he learned to fly, then got his commercial pilot’s license. If that were not exhilarating enough for him, after several successful stints as a charity auctioneer and a public speaker at conventions, he tried stand-up. It did not go well. “You could have heard a pin drop,” he says. “Boos would have been better.”
But the challenge in front of him is not like open-mike night at Yuk Yuk’s. Pornhub has ruined many lives. For many years, it allowed users to upload or download content with few limitations. The company had some moderators, but not nearly enough, and many women, often alarmingly young, have said they were featured on the site without their consent. If they complained, MindGeek was slow to respond, allowing clips of their videos to be downloaded and uploaded elsewhere endlessly before they were taken down. “MindGeek shattered the lives of these victims,” says Laila Mickelwait, the founder and CEO of the Justice Defense Fund and founder of the Traffickinghub movement, dedicated to closing down Pornhub. “They will never be able to put those pieces back together the way they were.”
Parents also hated Pornhub, because there were very few barriers to entry for their children. Law enforcement officials were not fans because the anonymity for uploaders offered an incentive to traffickers. Women started reporting an increase in pornified expectations from their sexual partners. Some young men hated Pornhub, because it provided a buffet of free anonymous sexual stimulation they found hard to resist and difficult to quit. And porn performers and producers especially hated it because users pirated their videos and uploaded for free what their industry had paid to make. “Pornhub ran a lot of the studios into the ground,” says Charles DeBarber, who runs Phoenix AI, which helps people remove nonconsensual videos from the Internet. “They drove the wages for the industry down to where they don’t really make any money. They’ve been incredibly bad to sex workers.” Pornhub was not the only website that behaved this way; it was just the most famous.
Friedman says the era of anonymous uploading is over. In order to become what Pornhub calls a model or a partner, with a right to upload to the site, contributors have to go through a rigorous process of identifying themselves, using a state ID, a face scan done by a third party, and a sign-off from a human moderator. This change is significant, as few people will upload nonconsensual porn or CSAM if they can be easily identified. And as of September, Aylo isn’t just relying on an honor system in which uploaders say they got consent from participants; it needs proof of that consent. Approved IDs and consent forms have to be submitted for any other person appearing in the videos, even if their face is not shown.
Previously, MindGeek relied on uploaders to maintain the required records from other performers in the video, which it would audit. But its partnership with GirlsDoPorn showed the flaws in that system. According to GDP employees who pleaded guilty to charges brought by the Justice Department, GDP used fraud, coercion, and force to persuade very young women to film pornographic videos, which, these women were told, would not be posted online or released in the U.S. Instead, not only were the videos marketed heavily on Pornhub, hundreds of the women’s real names were made available on a site called PornWikileaks.
“A lot of the GDP victims couldn’t go a week without their work, or their school, or themselves, or their family members being called or contacted or harassed,” says DeBarber. Many of the victims, who were between the ages of 18 and 22 when the videos were made, had to keep a low profile for years. “It’s incredibly heartbreaking,” says DeBarber. “Most of these women lost their 20s.”
Beyond the consent and identification requirements, Friedman says, all videos are now filtered through databases of known CSAM and screened by a human before they’re uploaded. Aylo’s websites also use proprietary technology that he calls “the most advanced content fingerprinting engine on the planet” for identifying child or nonconsensual porn. If a video is found to contain CSAM, its uploader is banned from the site and Aylo reports it to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC).
Last year Aylo’s sites reported only 58 such videos; Facebook and Instagram reported 29 million combined. And the site says it banned 2,680 users between February and May this year. According to Mickelwait, however, it’s too little, too late. “They haven’t even deleted all the videos that were uploaded before they made that policy change,” she says. “So they’re still profiting from millions of potentially illegal and some definitely illegal videos on the site.” Friedman disputes this, pointing to the company’s takedown protocols for dealing with any complaints about videos before ECP took over.
Hany Farid, a professor at UC Berkeley specializing in digital forensics, particularly image and video analysis, joined TIME in May as Friedman presented Aylo’s technologies for detecting CSAM or nonconsensual videos. “This is the floor, not the ceiling,” he said afterward. “I’m glad that this company has got in the game and is starting to think about this stuff, but we could have been having this conversation 15 years ago.” He had kinder words for Aylo’s new regulations for uploaders. “I think that’s smart and a lot of companies don’t do that,” he said. “But you don’t get a standing ovation and an award for being a good citizen.”
Where Friedman and Farid find more common ground is on technological solutions for keeping minors off adult sites. Currently, all users have to do to access one of Aylo’s sites is click a button affirming that they are 18. Nineteen states have passed legislation mandating that adult websites require verified proof of age before allowing access; Aylo now blocks access to its sites in states where these laws are in effect, and instead shows a statement criticizing the laws. According to figures provided to TIME by Semrush, the new restrictions may have delivered a hit. In Utah and North Carolina, Google search traffic for Pornhub dropped by more than 70% within two months of the restrictions going live, which may have contributed to a 30% drop in the site’s U.S. traffic in just one year. (Aylo tells TIME that third-party sites “do not reflect accurate counts of visits or users” and pointed to a March press release stating that it had more than 130 million average daily users across its portfolio.) The adult industry is also striking back: this July, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case out of Texas on the issue.
Friedman insists, and Farid agrees, that there’s a better way to deal with this issue: device-based verification. Rather than requiring users to identify their age using a government ID, manufacturers should build in a setting for parents to turn on as soon as the new product is out of the box. Once the device is registered as belonging to a minor, the website can easily block access. “You provide the lock,” Friedman is fond of saying, “and we’ll provide the key.” TIME’s inquiries to Apple, Samsung, and Google about this went unreturned.
The performer community is not as supportive of the proposal. “It’s a little controversial, this idea that adult content should be blocked at the device level automatically, that the default should be no porn,” admits Friedman. He and the team are trying to rebuild relations with creators after MindGeek hosted their intellectual property without permission for years. In May he and Bain did an Ask Me Anything session at the XBIZ conference in Miami, one of a number of adult-industry functions they’ve attended in the past year.
Among the observers apparently impressed with Aylo’s commitment to change is the Department of Justice’s Eastern District of New York, which in December deferred prosecuting Aylo for profiting from sex trafficking after the company agreed to pay a fine of $1.8 million plus damages to the GDP victims. Aylo also agreed to allow a Toronto-based law firm to monitor its activities for three years.
Whether Friedman will succeed in writing a redemption arc into Pornhub’s narrative remains to be seen. For one thing, the company’s legal troubles are far from over. MindGeek resolved a case with 50 victims connected to GirlsDoPorn in 2021, but Aylo is facing a lawsuit from a further 62 GDP plaintiffs, each of whom is seeking more than $10 million, for alleged racketeering and trafficking. Even worse for Aylo is a class-action lawsuit on behalf of minors who were featured on MindGeek’s sites. It’s being pursued by Davida Brook, who secured a $787 million settlement from Fox News on behalf of Dominion Voting Systems. Should she prevail, the minimum allowable amount for each member of the class is $150,000.
Individual lawsuits are underway too. Serena Fleites, who was interviewed for Kristof’s column, is one of 14 litigants suing MindGeek for knowingly profiting from child pornography, including a video of Fleites from when she was just 13 years old. The site delayed removing it when she put in a request, she claims, and it was continuously reposted, with one of the uploads getting 2.7 million views. The experience led to such horrible bullying that she dropped out of school and tried to kill herself. Her lawyer, Michael Bowe, says he represents 100 other women and will roll out lawsuits on their behalf in the fall. “MindGeek and its new formulation Aylo run a billion-dollar business built by exploiting raped and trafficked children and women,” says Bowe. “It has never taken moral or financial responsibility for this, nor changed its practices sufficiently to ensure it doesn’t continue. The brave victims we represent are committed to changing that.” Damages from these suits could run into the billions. Aylo declined to comment on ongoing litigation, except to say that they “look forward to the facts being fully and fairly aired in that forum.”
Despite its avowed commitment to transparency, Aylo also sought to suppress a report from the Office of the Privacy Commissioner (OPC) of Canada, which found that as of 2022, the company was not in compliance with Canadian privacy regulations, and that it displayed a “lack of accountability for the vast amount of highly sensitive personal information under its control.” Friedman defends the attempt to bar the report’s release. “We did not want an inaccurate picture to emerge,” he says, adding that by the time the report was released in February, Aylo’s practices had been brought in line with its recommendations. The OPC has a slightly different take. “The OPC has been engaged in discussions with Aylo aimed at ensuring that the company implements the recommendations in the Commissioner’s report of findings,” said an OPC spokesman in an emailed statement, adding that the discussions were “ongoing.”
Friedman frequently points out that his company is going above and beyond the law in barring content that shows or even suggests incest or the exploitation of children. But Pornhub users do not have to look far to find videos from channels called Bratty Sis (more than 4 million subscribers) or titles like “I Don’t Think It’s Wrong, Daddy.” Those videos, which feature adults playing randy stepsiblings or stepchildren, are extremely popular: six of the 10 most viewed videos in June, according to the website, fit this category. And for all the site’s professed vigilance against child porn or even depictions of it, the channel known as Exxxtra Small seems to tiptoe into that territory, offering videos featuring actors who are not children but could pass as them. In one video a tiny female performer arrives home in an old-school softball uniform and gets it on with her coach. “We will never be the taste police,” says Friedman of these legal but iffy depictions. “We hear this all the time: What’s degrading to one person is empowering to another.” A Pornhub spokesperson told TIME that none of these channels or videos violate their terms of service.
Critics remain adamant that the Aylo Pornhub is not so different from the MindGeek Pornhub. They note, for instance, that several of the original MindGeek executives still work at Aylo. “I believe that the only way that we’re going to stop these crimes from perpetrating on sites like Pornhub is by ending impunity for those who engage in those practices,” says Mickelwait, whose book, Takedown, on her battle against Pornhub, came out in July. “When they get to rebrand and go on with business as usual, that’s a slap on the wrist for Pornhub and a slap in the face for victims.”
Meanwhile Friedman also appears to be protecting his own reputation. In October, a lawyer representing him threatened to sue one of his ex-girlfriends, whom he accused of being behind an anonymous account besmirching his name on X. In January, the woman, who does not want to be named for fear of reprisal, also got a phone call at her office from a police officer in Cornwall, Ottawa. “The officer explained to me that he was calling because they had received a complaint about me, and he said somebody I had been involved with had made the allegation that I had shared intimate photos of him,” says the woman, adding that the officer warned her that it was against the law. (TIME reviewed a copy of the police report, in which the complaint and the complainant’s name are redacted but the call to the woman is documented; the Cornwall police declined to comment.) The woman says she has not shared any photos. Friedman declined to comment on the woman’s claims.
Then there’s the larger question of whether porn can truly ever be ethical. Some of the videos available on Pornhub celebrate that the positions they’re depicting are painful and the woman is suffering, and in others, the uploader claims the women are addicts trading sex for drug money. TIME sent Aylo several videos that appeared to be shot by a hidden camera, or one of the people seemed impaired by drugs or alcohol, or consent seemed otherwise questionable. A spokesperson said they reviewed the links and none of them violated their terms of service, though “in one instance, we have terminated the uploader’s account, in an abundance of caution.” While many adult performers enter the business voluntarily and find it liberating, plenty, including stars such as Mia Khalifa and Lana Rhoades, have said that they were coerced into the industry or into doing things they regret.
Some studies have suggested a link between global human trafficking and pornographic production. Aylo points to its work with nonprofits such as the Cupcake Girls to keep trafficked women off their sites. “I’m confident that Pornhub is doing a much better job than any other Internet entity at making sure that the videos that they’re showing are safe and the people inside of the videos are safe,” says Amy-Marie Merrell, the co-executive director of the Cupcake Girls, who noted that the organization lost donors when it announced the partnership. In response, Aylo donated, she says, and “figured out how to connect us with different businesses that had little fundraisers for us.”
Some of the partnerships Friedman touts, however, are more robust than others. “Crime Stoppers International is not in a partnership with Ethical Capital Partners or Aylo,” says CEO Shane Britten in an email. “Our organisation has been formally engaged to undertake an independent audit of Aylo’s trust and safety program.”
And finally, there are the consumers. Most users think of porn as a normal leisure activity, but a significant number also wish they could quit watching it. Aylo has partnered with the Lucy Faithfull Foundation in the U.K. to prevent child sex abuse, but that organization has acknowledged that porn might be part of the problem. “We work with Aylo because many of the men in touch with us for help to stop viewing sexual images of children tell us that a heavy legal pornography habit preceded their offending,” says CEO Deborah Denis.
Apart from offering a lightly promoted podcast about sexual wellness, Aylo seems oddly incurious about the effect their product might have on those who view it. When asked if the company was looking at the emergent research into whether porn was habit-forming or bad for mental health, Friedman referred TIME to a researcher at UCLA whose lab has been separated from the university since 2015 and a sex therapist who has long been a defender of porn. “If there’s a study you want me to talk about, you can send it to me, I’ll take a look at it,” says Friedman. Aylo has an advisory board, but there are no consumer health experts on it.
Friedman seems to have an answer for any question thrown at him, except when I ask if he’s stopped believing in God. “I wouldn’t say that at all,” he says. “I don’t know. These are profound questions that are much larger than I am, to God and our place in the world.” He sounds much more assured when he talks about his work, for which the intensity of the battle is clearly a motivating force. Speaking of his almost frantic efforts to defend the terrorist recruiter, he waxes poetic. “I want to live in a society where someone charged with the most heinous offense, if they’re going to take away his liberty, they’re going to have to go through somebody like me, who’s going to ask every question, turn over every rock, raise every possible legal issue and make the prosecution as difficult as possible within the bounds of the law in my ethical responsibilities,” he says. “I saw that as an important challenge. And I see this as an important challenge.”
It’s almost as if the more unpopular the cause, the happier Friedman is to represent it, because those are the only odds he finds interesting. “I know that I have certain abilities, certain qualities,” he says. “I don’t want to waste them.”
–With reporting by Leslie Dickstein