WASHINGTON — Time magazine published on Monday a profile of Ethical Capital Partners (ECP) 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 touches on issues concerning Pornhub, all punctuated with broad, negative generalizations about the adult industry.
Luscombe begins the profile by comparing ECP’s 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 declares, 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 the 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,” or in other words, 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 the sweeping statements and dubious generalizations Luscombe marshals in support of her thesis are that “research on porn-watching is unreliable because it’s based on self-reports” and 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.”
Luscombe also quotes a New York City divorce lawyer she knows, claiming that “porn has infiltrated marriages and exacerbated a problem and led to the destruction of many marriages” and suggests that “the problems that have bedeviled Pornhub, and online adult content in general, are bugs in the system or inherent to the product.”
Luscombe finds something suspicious about Friedman, a business person, attempting to run his business in ways that “could make him very wealthy,” quotes comedian Amy Poehler joking that “almost nobody actually plans to go into porn” and asserts that “Pornhub has ruined many lives.”
Luscombe also interviewed and quotes Laila Mickelwait, identifying her only as “the founder and CEO of the Justice Defense Fund and founder of the Traffickinghub movement, dedicated to closing down Pornhub” while neglecting to mention her central role as Exodus Cry’s former “director of abolition” in the massive, orchestrated religious conservative campaign to eradicate all online adult content.
Luscombe concludes her article by openly questioning “whether porn can truly ever be ethical.”