BOMBSHELL Text Message Exonerates Russell Brand? Plus, X CENSORS Undercover Journalist

Liz Wheeler Show episode 429, take one. 

Alright guys, we have a great show for you today. Later in the show we’re going to talk to the investigative journalist behind the Sting on PornHub. We watched the video of this as was released by sound investigations and we saw these PornHub employees admitting that PornHub has a loophole that allows rapists and sex traffickers to upload pornographic content to the website. These employees admitted that PornHub knows that this loophole exists and doesn’t do anything about it. Well, I’m always interested in the actual journalists that conducts these stings. Who is the voice behind the camera? Who are these girls that are able to get dates with these people and get these employees to admit to essentially not just gross immorality, but actually illegality. So we’re going to talk to the investigative journalist that was on those quote dates and got these admissions from these PornHub employees. 

So you want to stick around for that. Before we get to that, I want to add a couple of comments to the discussion around the allegations of sexual abuse that Russell Brand has been subject to. I think a lot of the commentary has been more or less that this was a coordinated attack against Russell Brand because he’s speaking out against the powers that be, and that could be true. But before we get into the allegations themselves, which we will talk about in a second, because a lot of people are saying, well, he was really promiscuous back then, could these things be true? I think it’s really important to note a couple of things. Russell Brand, as of today has been demonetized on YouTube. He has over 6 million followers. This is what the New York Times reported. They said YouTube suspended the comedian and actor Russell Brand on Tuesday from making money from videos posted to the social media platform. 

Three days after British news organizations published an investigation in which several women accused Mr Brand of sexual assault, the channel is a potentially significant source of income from Mr. Brand who was earning money through advertisements and paid promotions. A spokeswoman for YouTube said in an email that Mr. Brand whose channel on the platform has 6.6 million subscribers, was suspended for violating YouTube’s creator responsibility policy. The spokeswoman said, if a creator’s off platform behavior harms our users, employees, or ecosystem, we take action to protect the community. The spokeswoman did not respond to an inquiry about how long the suspension would last, and this is a good place to start unpacking what these allegations are. Are these true what the implications of these allegations should be and what they should not be? Because let me tell you the implications of Russell Brandand being demonetized on YouTube because a news organization published allegations from anonymous sources. 

This is extremely, it’s a frightening situation. I hate to use the word frightening, but the implications that this has for all men. Russell Brand has not been accused by any law enforcement in any country of committing a crime. He’s not even been notified that he’s the subject of an investigation. He’s not been convicted of anything. These are accusations from anonymous sources and based only on these accusations, YouTube has potentially cut off a significant source of income. Now, some people are going to say, well, Russell brand is really wealthy. That doesn’t matter. Okay, that may be the case. It still doesn’t make it right for YouTube to do this. But think about this in the broader context. Think about your husband, your brother, your son. Maybe it’s you, yourself as a man listening to this, think about the implications. Can you imagine being fired from your job, having your salary suspended because an anonymous source went to a news organization and made an allegation against you without even stating their name? 

This is crucifixion in the public square without any due process of law. And to say that this is wrong and immoral and a dangerous, dangerous precedent is the understatement of the year. This has the same tenor as the Brett Kavanaugh allegations, but at least with Brett Kavanaugh, they trotted out some woman, a totally nutty, crazy woman, but at least they put a name to her and a face to her. Even though the left wanted to destroy Kavanaugh’s political and legal career, they wanted him to be removed as a nominee for the Supreme Court before these allegations were ever, even before he was afforded due process, before he had a chance to defend himself. They turned out, of course not to be true, but this is the same playbook. This is the Me Too movement. Believe all women, even if the women don’t have a name, this is incredibly frightening and this should be the primary way that we’re looking at this situation right now. 

It does seem to be a coordinated attack. Again, we’ll get to whether these allegations have any substance in a moment because all of these things can be true regardless of whether the allegations are credible or not credible. But this is the playbook. The playbook that they follow every single time is the leftist. And this of course is the powers that be in a coordination with media outlets. They identify someone they consider to be a traitor, right? Russell Brand used to be a mainstream Hollywood figure. He’s not conservative, he’s kind of red pilled now, but he wasn’t 10 years ago when he was at the height of his fame in Hollywood, but now he’s defected to the bad side. According to the left, he’s red pilled, he’s talking to conservatives. He had Tucker Carlson on his show for goodness sake, and because he has such an enormous audience, because he had such an enormous following in Hollywood, the left views him as a threat. For example, there are people saying that Russell Brand’s appearance on the Bill Marsh Show in which he castigated Big Pharma, is a perfect example of why those in positions of power want to silence Russell Brand. So take a look at this video first, 

Yes, 

Out respect for you in your show. I’ve bought some facts 

If you like. Actually, you just get out of this is not the place you like facts. We do. We love facts. I love 

Facts. I wouldn’t have mentioned it. I’m English and you know that politeness is our fundamental religion, 

But they do pertain to this issue. So may I say something? Please, please, please do. If they inconvenience you, I’ll stop saying them. The pandemic created at least 40 new big pharma billionaires. Pharmaceutical corporations like Moderna and Pfizer made a thousand dollars of profit every second from the C Ovid 19 vaccine. More than two thirds of Congress received campaign funding from pharmaceutical companies in the 2020 election. Pfizer chairman, Alba Baller told Time Magazine in July, 2020, these company was developing a covid vaccine for the good of humanity, not for money. And of course, Pfizer made a hundred billion dollars in profit in 2022. And may I just mention finally, and this is also a fact that you, the American public funded the development of that. The German public funded the BioEnTech vaccine when it came to the profits. They took the profits when it came to the funding, you paid for the funding. All I’m querying is this is if you have an economic system in which pharmaceutical companies benefit hugely from medical emergencies where a military industrial complex benefits from war where energy companies benefit from energy crisis, you are going to generate states of perpetual crisis where the interest 

Of ordinary people separate from the interest of the elite. 

I think that’s a perfect example of Russell Brandand challenging the narratives. Bill Maher was so uncomfortable, you can see that he just couldn’t wait to shut Russell Brandand up. So the question, is there a motivation to silence Russell Brandand? Is there a motivation to ruin his reputation? The answer to that question is obviously yes. He has a show on Rumble. It’s like I said, it’s not necessarily conservative, but I would call it red pilled. He’s been red pilled. He doesn’t act the way that he acted when he was in the height of his fame in Hollywood. So this is the playbook. First, who identify a traitor. They’ve identified Russell brand, someone who is a threat to their agenda. Russell brand is clearly threatening their agenda, and then you rely on anonymous sources because it’s difficult for people who are accused to defend themselves against accusations when they don’t know who’s accusing them. 

How can they provide context? How can they provide exculpatory evidence if they don’t know who their accusers are? Well, these accusations are entirely from women who are anonymous sources, and it’s simply unfair even if allegations are detailed, even if they seem like they might have credibility. We cannot exist in a system where someone who is accused does not have an opportunity to defend himself, especially when the punishment, the cultural and societal punishment is as severe as what they’re trying to do to Russell brand. So we cannot take allegations from anonymous sources with credibility if they’re accepted as a conviction. You’ll also notice that in this playbook by the radical left, they always bring allegations of incidents that again, were alleged to have happened 20 years ago. One of the anonymous sources making this allegation against brand said that whatever happened happened in 2003. That’s 20 years ago. 

That’s two decades ago. How do you expect to have an investigation where you uncovered the truth? You were able to establish what did happen or what didn’t happen when it was 20 years ago? There’s a reason that we have a statute of limitations on many types of crimes, not just in the United States, but Britain has statute of limitations too. It’s not because an amount of time that has elapsed after a crime makes it so that we just want to brush the crime under the rug. It’s not that at all. It’s because we acknowledge that it is not possible to have a fair trial for an individual to give them the due process that they deserve. If so much time has elapsed that it’s impossible to collect evidence to substantiate the charges or the allegations against him. So every single time, these are allegations that happened decades and decades and decades ago, and the purpose of all of this is career destruction. 

The purpose of all of this is social ostracization. The purpose of all of this, by the way, Russell Brand has already suffering this. He’s not only been demonetized on YouTube, his tour has been postponed. His comedy tour, his management agency has completely dropped him and his publisher has put a pause, a pause on his book that was supposed to come out I think next year in 2024, about how to overcome drug addiction. I mean, yes, let’s make sure that we’re not helping people addicted to drugs based on your wanting to virtue signal your moral superiority because of an anonymous allegation against Russell Brand from 20 years ago. That makes a lot of moral sense. But this is the playbook of the left and the reputation damage part of this is perhaps the most important part of all, because if there is even a whisper of an allegation against an individual, even if it’s not a credible allegation, even if it comes from an anonymous source, even if it’s from 20 years ago and it’s impossible to establish the facts, people will still wonder, well, is it true? 

Did he do this? And his reputation will always be tarnished because there will always be a little asterisk next to his name that says, Russell Brand once accused by women of rape and sexual abuse, Russell Brand who faced allegations of sexual misconduct and allegations of criminal sexual misconduct, there will always be this caveat attached to his name. And if you can’t understand how evil this is, then you don’t understand the radical left. And they always hold one thing back. They wait for the first news cycle to end before they drop something else and act like that’s substantiation. Act like that is proof. It’s despicable. Now these allegations themselves are graphic, these allegations themselves. We’re going to read a little bit of what these allegations are, and I’m going to scroll through this article. If you have kids in the room, you might not want to let him read this. 

I’m not going to read the most graphic words out loud, but I want to read what these allegations are. So this was from the Times in the uk. It says, the comedian and actor Russell Brand has been accused of rape, sexual assaults and emotional abuse during a seven year period. At the height of his fame, four women allegedly have alleged sexual assaults between 2006 and 2013, while he was a presenter for B B C Radio two and Channel four, and then an actor in Hollywood film. So I guess by the way, it was 2006, not 2003. So almost 20 years, 17 years, same difference. Others have made a range of accusations about brands controlling, abusive and predatory behavior. Brand denied the allegations and said his relationships have all been consensual. The findings come from a joint investigation by the Sunday Times, the Times, and Channel four dispatches one woman, and this is where it gets graphic. 

I am going to read this, so if you don’t want to hear what the allegations are, then just plug your ears for a second. It’ll take me 10 seconds to read this one woman alleges that brand raped her against a wall in his Los Angeles home. She was treated at a rape crisis center on the same day, according to medical records. Text messages show that in the hours after leaving his house, she told brand that she had been scared by him and felt taken advantage of adding. When a girl says no, it means no brand replied saying he was very sorry. And by the way, guys, we are coming back to that in a moment because this is the biggest hook of the entire article, and they’re lying about what this text message actually said. We’re going to read it in a second. The article goes on to say a second woman alleges the brand assaulted her when he was 31 and she was 16 and still at school. 

She said he referred to her as the child during an emotionally abusive and controlling relationship that lasted for about three months. She said she tried to push him off, she had to punch him in the stomach to make him stop. There’s another graphic allegation that I’m not going to read out loud, by the way, as grotesque as we all find a 31 year old and a 1616 is the age of consent in Britain. So a sexual relationship between a 31 and a 16 year old might be morally repugnant, but it’s not a crime. The article goes on to say a third woman claims that he sexually assaulted her while she worked with him in Los Angeles and that he threatened to take legal action if she told anyone else about her allegations. The force described being sexually assaulted by brand and him being physically and emotionally abusive towards her all said they felt ready to speak. 

Only after being approached by reporters, several said they felt compelled to do so given brand’s newfound prominence as an online wellness influencer with millions of followers on YouTube and other sites, the others have accused him of physical and emotional abuse, sexual harassment and bullying. Most of the women who do not know each other have chosen to remain anonymous. So the anonymous part we’ve talked about, it’s unfair to allow allegations to be taken seriously if the person who’s being accused doesn’t have a chance to defend themselves. You can’t defend yourself if the allegations are anonymous. So that in and of itself is kind of how I would box it up and put it to the side. If you want to make allegations, you put your face and your name on the allegations so that the person can defend themselves. The second part of this is, is obviously politically motivated. 

I mean, even this article said they only felt ready to speak after being approached by reporters and they felt compelled to do so given brand’s newfound prominence as an online wellness influencer with millions of followers on YouTube. So what they mean is because he’s becoming a prominent red pilled voice, that he’s leaning conservative and he is talking to people like Tucker Carlson on his show. That’s what they mean because they disagree with his politics. So they admit it’s a coordinated political hit job and they never in the space of this 17, what is it, 13 to 17 years ago, these allegations were supposed to have happened during, they didn’t speak up about this until they wanted to go public. They never filed a police report. None of this. This smells fishy because it is fishy. Now, the first allegation here about the woman that said text messages show that in the hours after leaving his house, she told brand that she had been scared by him and felt taken advantage of adding. 

When a girl says no, it means no brand replied saying he was very sorry. At first glance, you probably reacted the way that I reacted to that. I was like, well, that doesn’t sound good. That sounds pretty bad, but buried way down at the bottom of this article is a screenshot of this actual text message exchange. Rebecca, if we could bring this up on the screen. I want to read this exactly as it’s written because the way that it’s presented by the times is not what the text message, not the context of the actual text message conversation. So this is what Russell brand texted. He said, I’m sorry that was crazy and selfish. I hope you can forgive me. I know that you’re a lovely person. Then she replied and said, you scared the Ss h i t out of me. You’re right. I am a lovely person and for you to take advantage of me like this is unexpectable, I assume she might’ve meant unexcusable. 

You have a problem. You need help. It’s dangerous that you think you can get your own way all of the time. Do you know how scary you are when that glazed look comes over you? When a girl says no, it means no. So all of that sounds pretty bad, but then she explains what she’s actually talking about, and it’s not sexual assault and it’s not rape. She says, do I have to go and get myself tested? The implication here is tested for STDs. Last time you asked me condom or no condom, when I say condom, that doesn’t mean it’s optional. You don’t have the best reputation. I pride assume she means pride. I pride myself on being safe and trying to make the right decisions. Obviously this was a bad one. I’m so disappointed, and he responds and says, I’m very sorry. You don’t need to get tested. 

I will make this up to you somehow, et cetera, et cetera. So she wasn’t talking about being raped. She wasn’t saying, I said no to having sex with you. She was talking about whether he wore a condom or not in an otherwise consensual sexual encounter. She was mad because she wanted him to wear a condom and he didn’t. And she said, do I need to go get tested? Not with a rape kit. Did she need to go get tested for STDs because he was so promiscuous and she was worried that she caught a venereal disease from having sex with someone so promiscuous. I’m sorry that this is graphic, but this changes the entire context. The times presented this as if she had said no to sex, and he had admitted, I’m very sorry, as if he was somehow admitting culpability for coercing her into some kind of sexual action. That’s not what the text messages said at all. It was about whether he wore a condom or not. 

Again, I know that this is graphic, and I’m sorry we have to talk about this, but this is a serious thing that’s happening in our society where men, especially men of prominence, especially men on the right, are being accused of really awful, egregious, horrible sexual misconduct and sexual crimes. And when you dig into the reality of what the allegations are, it all falls apart. But it doesn’t matter if the allegations fall apart because the left is trying to ostracize and punish and convict these men without ever giving them a chance to defend themselves or giving them any due process. So Russell Brand has lost his tour. He’s lost his book. He’s lost his management team. He’s lost his YouTube based on an article where the times completely misrepresented the biggest claim that they were making. It’s unbelievable. And here’s the other thing. The other part of this is Russell Brand was incredibly promiscuous. 

He admits to this. He actually preemptively launched a video in which he categorically denied all of these allegations. You can find that on his ex account. It’s like two and a half minutes long. We’re not going to play it right now. But he admitted that during the height of his Hollywood fame, he was incredibly promiscuous. And you probably remember that about him because at the time, he was a media darling. Every disgusting thing he said about sex, every disgusting thing he said about women, the media basically laughed and applauded drooled over him. They couldn’t get enough of covering him. They weren’t trying to hold him accountable for his immoral sexual behavior at all. They did not care. And so the point of this is brand was promiscuous. So we have to ask our question, the question, okay, well, if you don’t have the proper sexual boundaries, if you don’t have sexual morals the way that maybe most of us do, what is your line? 

Did you commit these things? And the answer to that is actually better examined through the eyes of the women who were having sex with him. And what I mean by that is there has been a growing pattern of young women in our country who are acting very promiscuously sexually, who feel badly about themselves after they have these casual sexual encounters, which is it’s normal to feel bad about yourself after you have a casual sexual encounter. You have degraded your own body. You have allowed someone else to degrade your body. And what these young women do in the wake of these sexual encounters, which they regret and feel horrible about is they conflate immoral with illegal because they don’t know what immoral means. They don’t have morals. They’ve either never been taught or they’ve rejected morals or they’ve been tricked by feminism into thinking that they are empowered independent women if only they behave sexually promiscuously. 

And so when they feel used and they feel that this immoral sexual behavior has made them feel dirty, they immediately rebrand the immorality that they have rightly identified as being illegality. And it’s not the same thing. So maybe these women did feel terribly about these sexual encounters. Maybe they felt that Russell brand was disrespected, maybe they felt used, maybe they felt like he was objectifying them. All of those things are probably true because that’s inherent to promiscuous sex. But that’s not the same thing as being illegal. And as a culture, we have begun to conflate the two because while we’d like to think that we can erase morality from society and just have these secular guidelines, we can’t because that’s not how we’re made as human beings. So that’s what we’re seeing from some of these women. And it’s also when men choose to be as sexually, as promiscuous, as Russell brand, it does open them up for more of these allegations. 

Not that it makes the allegations true, but the more casual sexual encounters you have, if you are badly behaved, it does open a window to these types of allegations, which is inadvisable to behave the way that Russell brand behaved. He seems to have cleaned up his act both drug wise and sex wise. I hope he did. But I don’t know if these allegations are true or not. Nobody can possibly know because the people making the allegations are anonymous, and there’s no way to establish the facts of what happened 15 years ago in the privacy of somebody’s bedroom. It’s just not possible, which is why our criminal justice system typically does not allow for 20 years to have passed before you first report a crime, a crime, or an alleged crime, an alleged crime that you weren’t comfortable talking about until a reporter came to you and said, Hey, maybe we should talk about this because Russell Brand is now conservative. 

This is a concerted effort to take down Russell Brand. Make no mistake. So with me now is the investigative journalist that actually conducted the sting on the PornHub employee. We watched the video earlier in the week, PornHub employees admitting that they have a loophole on their website where rapists and sex traffickers can upload content. When I say content, I of course mean pornographic content, and there’s a loophole on the PornHub website that allows rapists and sex traffickers to upload their pornographic content, which needless to say is abhorrent. But the woman who actually conducted this sting is with me today. Her name is Arden Young. Arden, thanks so much for joining me. I ask you about, I guess, the procedure of how journalism like this happens. I think a lot of us are interested in that. But before we get to that, I want to ask you on X, formerly known as Twitter, X has removed part one of your investigation. Tell me what happened here, what their reasoning was, the justification that they gave. This seems very strange to me. I mean, we all watch the video. It’s just undercover journalism and what you guys have done about this. 

Yeah, thank you so much for having me, Liz. Last night we received word, well, I was locked out of my Twitter account and turns out that two things were flagged two posts. One was the original story featuring Mike Farley, the PornHub executive talking about the loophole. And the other was a separate video, a shorter video we posted of him, him talking about his credentials, how he’s been there for a long time. He has about 40 people under him. So those are the posts that got flagged, and I’m unable to get in my Twitter account until I acknowledge that those posts are against the rules and delete them. So they’re citing a privacy violation, which I think is ridiculous. Mike Farley was not, we didn’t post his address. We didn’t post his phone number. We don’t believe we violated any Twitter rules. 

Yeah, I found that to be interesting too, because the dinging that you got or the reason it was taken down was a privacy violation. And I understand that Elon changed the rules on Twitter to prevent doxxing and to prevent identification of the location of an individual, especially a public individual without their knowledge. He did this actually in the wake of, there was an account that was tracking his private jet, and it led to a confrontation between some kind of stalker and his child, and I think his child’s nanny, which is terrifying. I understand that he wants to protect their privacy, but if it extends to investigative journalism, I think that’s really problematic, especially because Elon essentially said the reason that he’s going to uphold free speech on x.com is because he wants investigative journalists to thrive. He wants them to use this platform. So I assume you guys filed an appeal, right? 

We filed an appeal, we’re awaiting response, and we’re trying to get in contact with Elon and his team. I feel really confident that if Elon was to review this personally, he would see that we weren’t in violation, and this is not what his policy was created for. So hopefully he’s able to see it and we’re able to get the issue resolved and continue putting out our releases. We have multiple releases we want people to see. 

Yeah, I agree with you. I think that if Elon saw this, he would realize that this was either ideologically driven by some employee inside X or that this was a misapplication of a rule that wasn’t meant to apply to investigative journalism. So I hope he does see it. Everybody watching and listening to the show, send out a post on X tag, Elon Musk, ask him to reinstate Arden Young’s account, ask him to reinstate this video because this is really important stuff. I mean, Elon has done so much good on this platform when it was Twitter. Now that it’s X ridding the platform of child sex abuse material, specifically, you’ve said that this is a priority. We will not tolerate this on x and part two of your investigation, which we’re going to watch in just a moment. Part two of your investigation actually shows that PornHub has a loophole that allows pornography, including that which includes underage girls is being uploaded to that website on a regular basis. 

Yeah, there’s a loophole that it allows uploaders to upload videos that don’t contain the faces of the people in the videos, and PornHub is not verifying the age identities consent of those people. So there’s so much room for error. As Mike Farley says, it makes so much money. PornHub has not wanted to address and fix this loophole because of just the sheer profits they’re receiving. 

It’s despicable. Rebecca, I think we have that clip. If we can pull that clip up. I’d like to show people just a little bit. We played part one almost in its entirety last week, but this is part two. It shows not only Mike Farley, it shows the a senior script writer at Mind Geek, that’s the parent company of PornHub named Dylan Rice, and he’s talking about the moderation policies or lack thereof at PornHub. I mean, these people that are running PornHub are well aware of the intentional deficiencies in the laws that would protect sex abuse victims and underage girls from exploitation. And I mean, we can watch this video for ourselves and you can expand more and give us more context, Arden, but this stuff, this stuff is really disturbing. Let’s take a look at it 

Slow. And they don’t have enough moderators that it stays up for long enough that people can get mad and sue them. And I think that’s what happens. It’s hard because how do you get somebody to prove that they’re above age? Because if they can get a fake id, 

You think there’s videos of underage still getting through. 

You don’t know who that is. We don’t have consent of that person, and we’re running ads as a business. We’re monetizing content that we don’t know where this comes from. We don’t know who’s on that video. We don’t know the age of the person on the video. This used to happen all the time, but we would never say nothing about it. We’d just be like, Hey, whatever. It’s like something that you just shut up. Just don’t say nothing. Just be quiet. It’s always things because of the nature of our never be governed 

Because of the loophole. 

PornHub under the parent company Mind Geek. Now rebranding is alo allows the general public to upload pornographic videos. Activists have criticized PornHub for not requiring IDs for everyone in these uploaded videos as 10 year veteran PornHub product manager Mike Farley explains in our previous video, rapists and traffickers make a lot of money off of verification loophole. Pornhub’s, chief product officer has told him to quote, shut up about today here from Dylan Rice. Rice works for MindGeek as a senior script writer. In fact, he’s worked there over five years. How long 

Have you been there? 

Six years, seven years. 

Rice also tells our undercover reporter about mind geek’s, moderation, failures. They 

Made so much money and they were top of the world, but they fumbled so hard because they didn’t take any of that money and reinvest it into moderation or quality of the site. They just kind of gave it all to executives and then they just made a ton of profit. So then when all these controversies started happening about remove this content, what about this company? Your advertisers are bad. They didn’t have enough background and funding to fight back. They didn’t do enough for their own work. So I think that hurt them really hard. A lot of people got fired. All the people in charge of porno were wiped out. They brought in a whole bunch of new people. 

They were kind of, I wouldn’t say incompetent, but they were kind of very naive. They’re like, oh, we’re like household grants, so nothing bad can ever happen to us. And then it did. And subs go down, views go down, get rid of them. They just didn’t plan for the future a lot really. So I would say there probably was some teen men and women on there and it gets flagged and it sitting down, but the system is so slow and they don’t have enough moderators that it stays up for long enough that people can get mad and sue them. I think that’s what happens. 

Rice says PornHub could operate legally. Alright, 

Let’s stop. Alright, let’s stop here from pornography. Alright, so guys, if you want to watch this full video, as long as X allows it to be posted, it will be available on X. You can also go to sound investigations and see this full video. Arden, you’re the voice that we don’t see in this video. I mean, how do you sit there in this conversation? I know you’re in character, but how do you sit there and hear these men talk about loopholes that allow rapists and sex traffickers to upload pornography of their victims and hear them admit that there are under, I mean, he calls them teen men and women, but that’s a minor. That’s a child that’s against 

The law. 

How do you sit there and hear that without reacting? 

It’s a little bit surreal in the moment. I’m just in a weird zone. It kind of sounds weird to say, but when I do get admissions of that sort in the moment I don’t get mad. I get a little bit of an adrenaline spike and I just start digging for more because that’s what I’m there for. I have a serious hunch and I’m pretty much convinced that these things are happening. So when I know I’m hitting the mark, I actually have a weird form of excitement where I’m like, okay, I’m getting what I am here for and I need to get as much as possible. 

It’s almost like the warrior adrenaline maybe of knowing that it’s successful. So I guess without betraying too many trade secrets, I know a lot of people that watch these undercover investigations wonder, how do you find these individuals? How do you get into a situation where it looks like they believe they’re on a date with you and you’re asking these probing questions about their jobs? So I guess first, how do you set that up? How does that even come to fruition? And when you’re in the moment, do they never suspect that these questions are coming from a journalist and not from a date? 

Well, I think it’s best left up to the imagination on how these people are contacted, but we do find them online and we use publicly available information to make contact with them. And once we are meeting in person, I have found that people are very open and obliging to questions. They work at a very interesting place. So I didn’t feel out of place asking them about their work, and they’re very obliging and very open with me, and I didn’t really feel any weirdness coming from them regarding how curious I seemed. 

It’s funny to think about because when I’m watching the video, obviously I know that you’re an undercover journalist and the questions seem really obvious. They don’t seem like a question, a date would ask. They seem like a question a journalist would ask, and maybe it’s just the context of the thing you can speak to that if they’re not even thinking, oh, this could be a fake date. I could be getting stung right now. Maybe it’s just completely out of their mind and maybe they feel like almost like their ego’s being stroked because you’re so interested in what they do. 

I think they just weren’t on guard. I don’t think it was even a thought in their mind that I could be a journalist. This really isn’t something that we’ve seen the subject matter, the online porn industry. It’s not something that we’ve seen undercover journalism on, and I just don’t think it was a thought in their mind. I also haven’t seen a ton of undercover journalism in Canada, and these videos were recorded in Canada. I just think that they weren’t even thinking about it in the first place. 

I had love to be a fly on the wall right now inside. I guess when I say I’d love to be inside PornHub the last place I’d want to be, but theoretically, I’d love to see their reactions. I guess on the uploading part of the PornHub website, you guys have told me that the name Mike Farley, the guy that was in this video, the project manager, his name has actually been, it’s a band term now, so you can’t upload this video to PornHub, 

Right? I’m sure they just didn’t want people to upload to PornHub and have PornHub users be able to find this. 

So I’m interested in what the next step is here. I know you guys said that you have other videos that are yet to be released, but regarding the legality of the thing or accountability and oversight by the government, what do you hope for? What do you expect? I mean, have you had politicians or law enforcement reach out to you after the release of this? 

We are hoping to have the laws that are in place enforced to the full extent of the law. We believe this violates multiple laws, including us, code 2257, which requires all participants in a pornographic video. If they’re doing this under a traditional porn company, they all need to be identified with 2257 paperwork that identifies their age and consent. We believe that’s one of the laws that are being broken here, and we do hope to work with lawmakers on enforcing this. We’ve spoken with some, we’re in early talks. We’re in the early stages, but we’re hoping as more of the videos come out, people really do begin to see just how many illegal acts are being committed inside PornHub. 

Because it seems to me it can’t get much clearer than what Mike Farley said when he said, yeah, someone can upload their picture of an ID card, driver’s license maybe, but you can’t verify that that’s the actual person in the video, and it could be a fake ID anyway. So if there’s not a form that legally verifies the person’s age, you’d think that would be a violation of the law just automatically. 

Absolutely. He even says it wouldn’t hold up in court. So we really do think there’s going to be lawmakers hoping on both sides of the aisle who are able to agree PornHub needs a full investigation launched into it, and the parent company MindGeek, because they have so many companies under them, it’s not just PornHub. They have different sorts of pornographic production companies and different websites that are sketchy on different levels. 

And by the way, one of the reasons that I believe politicians don’t say a lot about this is because pornography is the proverbial uncomfortable topic. People don’t speak out against this because they are guilty themselves of watching it. So I challenge our viewers. Make sure that you send a post out on acts, ask Elon Musk to reinstate this part. One of this investigation is really important. The pornography business, we covered this last week when we talked about part one of your release. It’s immoral, of course, to commodify sex the way that pornography does. It’s also not just a matter of two consenting adults doing something and selling it on video porn. The porn industry is rife with criminality. It’s rife with trafficking. It’s rife with abuse, and people just look the other way because law enforcement officials and politicians don’t want to engage in this topic because perhaps they themselves are guilty of partaking in this, or perhaps they fear their constituents have partaken in this and don’t want an investigation. 

So I don’t care if it’s uncomfortable, guys. We have to hold people’s feet to the fire if we actually care about human dignity, if we care about human trafficking, if we care about sex abuse victims, what could be more obvious than high level employees at PornHub admitting that their website has a loophole den? Tell everyone how they can support sound investigations. I think conservatives across the board are really, really grateful for operations like yours that expose corruption, evil, and wrongdoing in a way that you really can’t do without this kind of other undercover camera type journalism. 

Yeah, thank you, Liz. We could be supported@soundinvestigations.com slash donate. We’re a 5 0 1 C three so far. We are completely self-funded, so just me and my friend who started this company together, we’ve been completely self-funding this investigation and any contributions are greatly appreciated so that we’re able to keep going through all the censorship and through all the difficult things we have to hurdle in order to get these investigations done. 

Well, I appreciate what you’re doing, guys. That’s sound investigations.com. I’ll post the link below this video wherever it’s airing in hopes that you guys will be able to be able to support this journalism. Arden, thanks so much for being here. I really appreciate it. 

Thank you so much, Liz. Thanks for having me. 

Alright guys, make sure you go to sound investigations.com. You want to watch the whole video. I know I played a piece of it for you, but you got to watch it in its entirety, especially if there’s censorship that sound investigations is facing. You’re going to want to know the truth here. It’s a little bit graphic, but it’s not any kind of graphic that you can’t handle. This is stuff that we need to know. So go to sound investigations.com. Thank you for watching today. Thank you for listening. I’m Liz Wheeler. This is the Liz Wheeler Show.