Laila Mickelwait is the Co-Founder and CEO of the Justice Defense Fund, the Founder and leader of the Traffickinghub movement supported by millions around the world, and the national bestselling author of Takedown: Inside the Fight to Shut Down Pornhub for Child Abuse, Rape, and Sex Trafficking (Penguin Random House, 2024). She has been researching and combating the injustice of sex trafficking since 2006 and is a leading expert in the field.
The Traffickinghub movement is a decentralized and diverse global effort to hold Pornhub accountable for enabling and profiting from mass sexual crime and implement policies that prevent criminal sexual abuse across the Internet. The Traffickinghub petition has been signed by over 2.3 million people from every country in the world. Over 600 organizations and hundreds of survivors have participated in the movement that resulted in Pornhub losing Visa, Mastercard, and Discover payment processing and being forced to take down 91% of the website by removing over 50 million images and videos, in what the Financial Times called “probably the biggest takedown of content in Internet history.”
Laila received her Master of Public Diplomacy degree from the Annenberg School of Communications and the Dornsife School of International Relations at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles in conjunction with the U.S. Department of State. Her work has been featured in hundreds of news articles worldwide, in outlets such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, BBC News, The Times, CNN, Bloomberg, Reuters
