Our Work
Through our two strategic programs, Public Pressure Campaigns and Litigation & Survivor Support, JDF is dedicated to ending impunity for abusers and bringing justice to victims of online sexual crime.
Public Pressure Campaigns
JDF brings significant public pressure and accountability to abusers, their enablers, and government officials, compelling them to take action. JDF educates legislators, corporations, and the public to advocate for the adoption of laws and policies that prevent the monetization and distribution of online sex trafficking, child sexual abuse material, and image-based sexual abuse.
Litigation & Survivor Support
JDF supports civil litigation where needed and helps survivors access the costly and historically unequal legal system by supporting their pursuit of justice holistically. Our team of licensed experts in survivor care provide access to support and advocacy services.
Strategic Advisors & Collaboration
JDF understands that collaboration is critical. Building and maintaining strategic partnerships is a core value of JDF. Externally, we work with many survivors, organizations, government officials, and advocates. Internally, we have built strong alliances with lived-experience experts, policy experts, attorneys, and academics who advise the organization’s strategy and actions to achieve success.
Partner Attorneys
JDF partners with skilled attorneys both domestically and internationally who have a passion for eradicating sex trafficking, child sexual abuse material, and image-based sexual abuse in order to support their efforts to bring justice to survivors.
JDF Leadership Team
Each leader at JDF has 15+ years of experience in the anti-trafficking field from backgrounds in public policy, criminal justice, mental health services, nonprofits, advocacy, and mass media. Their wealth of knowledge, experience, and extensive relationships in the field ensure excellence in the programs and services that JDF provides.
Laila Mickelwait
Founder, CEO
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, AP, CNBC, Fox News, The Washington Post, USA Today, Newsweek, The New York Post, The Guardian, Business Insider, and many others.
Morgan Perry
Founder, COO
Morgan Perry is the Co-Founder and COO of JDF. She has been combating the injustice of sex trafficking since 2006 through documentary filmmaking and mass media awareness campaigns, like the Traffickinghub movement. As a producer, Morgan built and optimized the operations of productions and impact campaigns from concept to scale. Her work has been distributed with Netflix and featured in outlets such as CNN, NBC, The New York Times, and The New Yorker. Many of her projects have been used to advocate for the reform and enforcement of laws that reduce and prevent child sex trafficking. They have also been used for training purposes by federal and state law enforcement agencies, hundreds of universities, and nonprofits and viewed online by millions worldwide. In 2012, she received a Certificate of Recognition from the U.S. Department of Justice for her resources developed for front-line responders to sex trafficking victims.
Erik Bauer, Esq.
Executive Director of Litigation Support
Erik Bauer is a veteran attorney with over 35 years of experience. Erik specializes in representing victims of child sex trafficking against Internet corporations and is responsible for landmark lawsuits on behalf of child trafficking victims against the websites Backpage.com and Craigslist.com. In large part due to Erik’s pioneering work, in 2018, the FBI seized and shut down Backpage.com, and federal legislation was adopted to help victims pursue civil justice against Internet corporations that participate in sex trafficking. In 2023, a federal jury criminally convicted three former principles of Backpage.
