Noted porn producers BangBros recently announced that they had purchased the notorious Pornstar Doxxing website PornWikiLeaks – responsible for sharing the personal information of more than 15,000 adult performers – for an undisclosed sum.
The personal information shared on the infamous website included their real names, information on their families, and even addresses and phone numbers.
Many reacted with puzzlement to the porn giant’s purchase of a site that has had such a pernicious effect on many of its performers. However, the purpose of their acquisition quickly became clear – to completely erase all of the information collected by the doxxing site.
BangBros even went as far as to completely immolate every single hard drive containing the leaked information.
BangBros altered PornWikiLeaks homepage to display a message from them about the conduct of the doxxing site. In the message, BangBros stated that they had “had enough” and had purchased the site with the sole purpose of shutting it down and removing all traces of their performers’ personal information.
While the message acknowledged that the act might not have erased the information from the larger internet, they asserted that there was “one less place” to harbour the sort of hatred and negativity engendered by the site and its forum.
BangBros even went one step further in ensuring that all traces of PornWikiLeaks were forever removed; they successfully petitioned the Internet Wayback Machine, a popular website used for accessing cached versions of historical websites, to completely remove all stored versions of PWL.
BangBros’ actions were universally acclaimed by the rest of the sex industry. PlayBoy’s official Twitter account applauded them. Several commentators noted that the porn producers had done more to address doxxing threats than social media giants like Facebook and Twitter ever had.
Porn performers themselves were no less vocal in their support and gratitude toward BangBros. One notable porn star, Diamond Foxxx, recounted how she had had to sell her home and move to a new area, as well as being forced to change her phone number repeatedly.
However, some were quick to caution that although BangBros’ closure of the site was unequivocally a good thing, BangBros itself – and its parent company of WGCZ Holding – represented an acquisitive monolith that, along with PornHub owner Mindgeek, was slowly monopolizing the entire industry and crushing the aspirations of independent filmmakers and performers. One such sceptic was Swedish filmmaker Erika Lust, who claimed that WGCZ Holding and Mindgeek had “destroyed” the livelihoods of “creators and performers”.
Whether or not the larger motivations of BangBros and its owners are ultimately pernicious to the industry is, to many, irrelevant in the face of their recent actions. What is relevant is that many adult performers, filmmakers and crew members can now sleep soundly.
Their personal information is, as a result of BangBros’ actions, safe from exploitation by parties who are hostile to the very idea of the adult film industry – and who could potentially seek to do harm to those involved in it.
Take, for example, the recent ordeal that iconic MILF pornstar Lisa Ann had to go through when a doxxing scandal led to her being stalked for over a year and involved armed police storming into her home.
