WASHINGTON — Time magazine published on Monday a profile of Ethical Capital Partners (ECP)’s VP of Compliance Solomon Friedman.
The profile — penned by Australian journalist Belinda Luscombe, author of a book on “marriageology” — offers fragments of an interview with Friedman alongside a narrative of the transition between MindGeek and Aylo and issues concerning their platform Pornhub, all contextualized with passages making broad, negative generalizations about the adult industry.
Luscombe begins her profile by comparing the ECP purchase of MindGeek — later renamed Aylo — in early 2023 with a completely unrelated terrorism case Friedman worked on as a criminal defense attorney.
ECP, Luscombe declared, approached the MindGeek purchase “with the same doggedness that Friedman brought to his defense of the terrorist.”
The thesis of Luscombe’s article is that there is something nefarious in that way that Aylo is “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,” in other word, running a lawful business.
Luscombe’s “man-bites-dog” hook, visible right from the headline, is that Friedman is “helped in this morally incongruous endeavor by the fact that he’s an ordained rabbi.”
Among sweeping statements and dubious generalizations Luscombe marshalls in support of her thesis is that “ research on porn-watching is unreliable because it’s based on self-reports;” that “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;” a quote by an NYC divorce lawyer she knows claiming that “porn has infiltrated marriages and exacerbated a problem and led to the destruction of many marriages;” the implication that “the problems that have bedeviled Pornhub, and online adult content in general, are bugs in the system or inherent to the product;” whether there is something suspicious in Friedman — a business person — attempting to run his business in ways that “could make him very wealthy;” quoting as an authority comedian Amy Poehler joking that “almost nobody actually plans to go into porn;” asserting that “Pornhub has ruined many lives;” among several other similarly biased concepts.
Luscombe also interviewed and quotes Laila Mickelwait, only identifying her as “the founder and CEO of the Justice Defense Fund and founder of the Traffickinghub movement, dedicated to closing down Pornhub,” and neglecting to mention her central role as Exodus Cry’s former “Director of Abolition” in the massive, orchestrated religious conservative campaign to eradicate all adult content on the internet.
Luscombe then concludes her article openly questioning “whether porn can truly ever be ethical.”