Will the Pornhub mansion fire ever be solved?

• On April 25, 2021, a $16 million Montreal mansion belonging to the CEO of Pornhub went up in flames.
• The fire remains under investigation, and no one has been charged. 
• By his own admission, CEO Feras Antoon has scores of enemies—complicating the investigation.

Last April 25, just before midnight, beneath a nearly full moon, two figures were spotted on the construction site of a massive, nearly-completed mansion on the edge of a suburban Montreal nature park.

The hulking structure, two grinding years of construction in the making, was so large that a local newspaper called it "pharaonic." Plans called for eight bedrooms, seven baths, multiple elevators, a piano suite, an art gallery, a spa, and a sports complex that doubled as a grand ballroom.

In minutes, the mansion was ablaze. Neighboring homes in the affluent Ahuntsic-Cartierville community were evacuated, their occupants hustled away in pajamas. Eighty firefighters battled the three-alarm blaze well into dawn. Investigators quickly determined the fire's source and within hours the incident was designated a criminal arson, according to a Montreal Police spokesperson. 

A year later, no one has been charged, and investigators say, in all likelihood, that no one ever will be. ("The investigation into this criminal arson is still ongoing," a spokesman said last week.) Fingers have been pointed in all directions and nearly every element of the crime remains shrouded in mystery. One reason for this comes down to the dizzying array of possible motives. That's because the mansion's owner, Feras Antoon, the CEO of Pornhub, was one of the most despised men in Canada, and beyond. 

Complicating things further is the fact that arson is a notoriously difficult crime to prosecute: because fire often destroys the evidence necessary to prove an ignition source and tie a suspect to the crime. Between 2016 and 2020, only 10.1% of arson investigations in Canada resulted in arrests, according to government statistics. 

"At the end of the day, this is one of the easiest crimes you can commit," said Glenn Corbett, associate professor of fire science at John Jay College in New York. 

Sudden scrutiny 

At the time of the fire, Antoon—who co-founded Pornhub's parent company, Mindgeek, in 2007—was tumbling through a bruising season of public relations disasters, investigations, lawsuits, and death threats. 

"I can't even count how many comments I saw from people saying to burn the company or my house down,"Antoon told Vanity Fair earlier this year. "For a while, it was easy to dismiss the tweets as just people on the internet talking. Then my house burned down."

For nearly two years, victims of child porn, revenge porn, rape and sexual assault had been coming forward to say that Pornhub had ruined their lives. Many described the same harrowing one-two punch: First, learning that their sexual assault (or in some cases their private, consensual sexual encounters) was streaming on Pornhub. Then, being repeatedly ignored or rebuffed when they demanded the videos be taken down. 

Months of social media campaigns, news probes, and civil lawsuits against Pornhub had reached a fever pitch by December 2020, when New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof published a scathing portrait of the company. Kristof charged that Pornhub was "infested with rape videos [and] monetizes child rape, revenge pornography, spy cam videos of women showering, racist and misogynist content, and footage of women being asphyxiated in plastic bags." 

In a statement released in response to the Kristof's reporting, the company said that "Pornhub is unequivocally committed to combating child sexual abuse material, and has instituted a comprehensive, industry-leading trust and safety policy to identify and eradicate illegal material from our community." The company added that any assertion that the company allows child videos on the site "is irresponsible and flagrantly untrue."

Mastercard, Visa and Discover all cut ties, and under enormous public pressure, Pornhub deleted all non-verified user-uploaded content—80% of its library. It also promised it had significantly improved its auditing and moderation software and staffing levels. (Pornhub no longer allows unverified users to upload X-rated content, according to company news releases.)  

In February 2021, Antoon and Pornhub's COO were summoned to testify before the Canadian House of Commons' ethics committee, part of five months of hearings into the business practices of Pornhub and its parent company, MindGeek.

For all Antoon's notoriety and wealth—he reportedly tools around Montreal in a bright yellow Lamborghini with vanity plates—the controversial porn king has gone to great lengths to protect his own privacy. He rarely speaks in public, instead communicating through press releases. The hearings marked the first time many longtime critics of Pornhub had ever seen Antoon's face. 

"We are very proud that we built a product that gets 170 million people visiting a day, four million Canadians, 30% of them women," Antoon said, referring to Pornhub. 

"Don't you believe if those four million Canadians who come to our site every day saw something so heinous and criminal, they would be calling the police?" Antoon continued, according to a transcript of his testimony. "We created a very good product that I and our 1,800 employees who have families and children are proud of. It is not perfect."

Two weeks before the fire, with the Pornhub hearings dominating Canadian headlines, Vice published a piece focused on far-right extremists' calls on alt social platforms like Gab for violence against company executives. The piece was headlined, "The Crusade Against Pornhub is Going to Get Somebody Killed."

On April 22—three days before the fire—the mansion went up for sale for close to $16 million.

Repeated attempts to reach Antoon and other Pornhub executives through Pornhub's public relations liaisons were unsuccessful. A company official who identified himself only as Ian and used a Gmail account did not respond to written questions about the fire or claims made about the company. 

A 'Tube' site revolution

But where did Pornhub come from, and why was it so loved but also so hated? 

Almost immediately after YouTube debuted in 2005, a flurry of knock-offs—then known as "Tube" sites—began popping up. Along with a few friends, Antoon and a few college friends at Montreal's Concordia University launched a series of X-rated Tube sites that encouraged users to upload and share videos. 

"Suddenly porn went from being something people would happily pay an inflated price for to something that people would not pay anything for," said Lux Alptraum, a veteran writer and podcaster on the porn industry.   

As the deluge of pirated porn flooded to Pornhub and other Tube sites, traditional porn sites saw their revenue streams dry up. Once they began to fail, MindGeek eventually became the dominant player, Alptraum said. Pornhub, the most successful of the Tube sites, became the crown jewel. 

"It cannot be stressed enough that these [other tube] sites were built on pirated content," Alptraum said. "It wasn't that they were creating their own content or relying on amateur content. They were allowing users to steal content from other sites and upload it."

While critics contend that Antoon and fellow MindGeek executives built their empire on aggressive tactics, they were also seen, even grudgingly by some, as innovators.  

In 2019, a pair of prominent U.S. law professors published a paper in the New York University Law Review contending that MindGeek was on "the leading edge of data-driven creativity," and had grown more adept at data crunching and fine-tuning user experience algorithms than even Netflix.

'Sick to my stomach'

Around the time construction began on Antoon's mansion in 2018, strange things had begun happening to Vicky Galy, a 34-year-old paralegal more than 11,000 miles away in Hendersonville, Tennessee.

People she met on the street would insist they knew her from somewhere, but from precisely where they could never recall. Strange men sat in parked cars outside her home. A new male friend on Facebook made sudden, indiscreet sexual overtures.

A single mom raising a teenage son and a daughter with Down syndrome, Galy said she had made some bad decisions regarding men she met online. One of them, she said, would often record their sexual encounters, with or without her consent.

"There were three kinds of videos he made of me," she recalled with a sigh when we spoke. "At first, he would pull out his phone on me" during sexual encounters. "The second kind were hidden camera video during our consensual sex. The third kind were made on a trip to Vegas where I was either drugged or intoxicated." 

As she would later testify in February, during the Pornhub hearings, Galy told me she was floored one day to learn that at least 30 of those videos were circulating on Pornhub under some variation of her name "Vicky." (Galy was one of numerous Pornhub victims who testified before Canadian lawmakers earlier this year.) 

"To think of the amount of money that Pornhub has made off my trauma, date rape and sexual exploitation," Galy told lawmakers, "makes me sick to my stomach."

Another was Serena Fleites, who brought several lawmakers to tears when she told them about how she had developed a crush on an older boy in eighth grade and how he begged her to send him a nude video of herself and she ultimately complied, only to learn the boy had uploaded it to Pornhub and shared it with his classmates.

Victim testimony from Fleites, Galy and several women identified as "Jane Does" directly contradicted Pornhub executives' claims that the site responds swiftly to takedown requests and works diligently to remove child pornography. 

For some victims, like Galy, feelings of frustration and embarrassment were compounded by outrage upon learning that both her alleged abuser and Pornhub were profiting from the scheme. She said she went to the police, but that they didn't believe her. She contacted local law firms to help her sue, but each wanted a $10,000 retainer, she said, and besides, she said, "no one wanted to sue him because he was worth nothing anyway." 

She cut five inches from her hair and dyed it brown so she wouldn't look like the woman people recognized from the Pornhub videos, took a leave of absence from work, and she and her children moved in with her mother.  

'Not having people believe me was the hardest part of this whole thing," she said. "I had a sergeant tell me, 'I'm not going to have my detectives sit and watch porn all day.'"

Galy was also contacting Pornhub's legal department to get the videos taken down. "They mostly ignored me, and then kept insisting it wasn't me," she said. 

Two days before the Canadian hearings began, Galy said, she received an email from Pornhub's legal director saying they would delete the account.

"That was the happiest day of my life," Galy said. "I didn't know then that there were hundreds more videos on other sites. With some of them there's not even a way to report [an unauthorized] video like this, so I'll really never be able to get these videos down completely."  

Mafia Row

During the same two years leading up to the hearings, Antoon had been quietly overseeing the construction of a massive mansion for himself and his wife and two children on a prime tract of land that bordered a cherished nature park. According to Vanity Fair, the property was within walking distance from where Antoon grew up.  

Located on the northern edge of Montreal, the spot had a fraught history even before Antoon became involved—first as the site of a notorious Gangland assassination, and then as a front line between environmentalists and developers. 

The Mafia had moved into the neighborhood in the 1970s. Antoine Berthelet Avenue, the road just behind where Antoon would later build his mansion, became known as "Mafia Row." It was there that the Sicilian crime family led by Nicolo Rizzuto would run their operations for the next few decades. 

On November 10, 2010, an assassin crept onto what would later be Antoon's property, and fired a single shot through the double-reinforced pane glass windows of Nicolo Rizzuto's solarium, killing Rizzuto in his kitchen, according to mob author Peter Edwards. 

"This was an extremely good sniper shot," Edwards said, noting that investigators long-suspected the triggerman to be Calabrian soldier Salvatore Calautti, who himself was assassinated in 2013.

The fatal shot effectively ended the Rizzuto family's three-decade long reign. (The hit series 'Bad Blood' was based on a book about Rizzuto's son and successor, Vito Rizzuto.)

The assassination, like the arson fire, remains unsolved to this day—though a source told Insider that while Montreal Police are exploring theories related to Pornhub and Antoon's spectrum of critics, Mafia involvement is not suspected.   

An 'eco-corridor' vs. a development 

Four years after Rizzuto's shooting, a different kind of war broke out on the same spot over a plan to clear 200 trees on the border of the Bois-de-Saraguay nature park.

The community had been trying to create an "eco-corridor" between the river and Bois de Saraguay nature park so that boaters could dock on the riverside and then hike through trails to the nature park. 

While the park itself was protected from development as a national heritage site, sections of the border woodlands remained in private hands. The local government didn't have the funding to purchase and preserve the land, according to Simon Van Vliet, a reporter for Ahuntsic-Cartierville's Neighborhood Journal newspaper, which produced a three-part series on the controversy during the months leading up to the arson fire. 

Local property owner Francesco Lapara had other plans – to cut down the trees and subdivide his land into residential lots. Van Vliet said local officials repeatedly rejected Lapara's development applications, but he went to court and won. 

Antoon and his sister, Dana Antoon, a local real estate agent, purchased all four lots, according to Van Vliet's reporting. Construction began in 2018. Reached by Business Insider, Dana Antoon declined any comment on the land deals. 

Van Vliet described Antoon's compound as a "castle" among mansions.

"People were just kind of baffled by the lavishness of the place, and obviously upset about the ecological loss and the setback to the project of building this eco corridor."  

Jacques LeBlue, a spokesman for Environmental Mobilization Ahuntsic-Cartierville which fought the clearing of trees on Antoon's property, seemed to echo this frustration when he said "the subject of Mr. Antoon has been a tragicomic distraction from our core activities, every time his name gets associated with ours. This only got worse with the fire." LeBleu declined further comment.

Sylvia Oljemark, 81, a neighborhood resident since her birth, said local residents watched in disbelief as the structure rose up over the neighborhood.

"It was enormous," she said. "Enormous."

"To think [local officials] could permit somebody to purchase land and build a huge structure [and] take down all the trees," she said, "it was personally reprehensible to me."

No resolution  

The hearings neither shut Pornhub down nor rehabilitated the public image of Antoon and Pornhub COO David Tassillo, who also testified. 

Arnold Viersen, a conservative MP from Alberta, said the executives' defense, which he saw as "Hey, we're just doing business here, we're just making money," was "very frustrating to us as members of Parliament."

"The Canadian public was outraged at the smugness," he said. 

Viersen said that he has been investigating Pornhub for five years, and noted that lawmakers on both sides of the aisle were equally frustrated in questioning Pornhub executives during the hearing. "It's a fairly non-partisan thing," he said. "While [Liberal MP] Charlie Angus and I don't agree on much we were both fighting on the same side of the war."

Personally, Viersen said he was "incredulous that the fire happened to come in the middle of the ethics committee hearings." 

"I've just got a feeling it's just a masterful sympathy play," he said, though he offered no evidence that Antoon, or anyone Angus has knowledge of, had a hand in torching the mansion. "That's my intuition on it, given what I know about them. They are very good at changing people's perceptions." 

Last week, a Toronto personal injury law firm announced it had filed a $500 million class action lawsuit against Pornhub.