Bang Bros Bought a Huge Porn Doxing Forum and Set Fire to It

Adult film production company Bang Bros announced on Thursday that it bought PornWikiLeaks.com—a website devoted to doxing and harassing porn performers—with the intent to shut it down forever.

In place of the PornWikiLeaks homepage, users see a letter from BangBros, stating that the company has taken possession "of all [PornWikiLeaks'] hard-drives full of sensitive and personal information," and included a link to a video of someone pouring flammable fluid onto a pile of hard drives and lighting it on fire.

"Over 15,000 performers' real names were listed here. Some had phone numbers, addresses, even family members names posted as well. That type of information wasn’t voluntarily submitted. It was stolen from anyone that had it posted," the announcement, addressed to "our industry peers," states. "While shutting this site down doesn’t purge the internet of all possible ties to real names and what not, it does make it one less place to harbor and find these things easily. A forum that had 300,000 posts on it, most of them negative and hate-filled, has now disappeared."

As a database of porn performers that often included legal names, addresses, social media platforms and family connections, PornWikiLeaks is cited in court documents for the Girls Do Porn case that went to trial last week.

In that trial, 22 women claim that production company Girls Do Porn lied to them about how their videos would be distributed, and subsequently ruined their lives when their films were distributed around the internet. Shortly after their videos were posted on hugely-popular websites like Pornhub, viewers started doxing them on PornWikiLeaks.

"If you had anything ever posted on here, it will be removed and deleted forever from here," the statement continues. "Nothing will ever be up here besides this page that you see now. So you don’t have to worry about it coming back either."

Adult Video Network reported that it confirmed the purchase with Bang Bros. Motherboard independently confirmed the statement and purchase with a Bang Bros spokesperson.