When a delivery man and a college student are arguing over the price of pizza in a porn video, people who are deaf shouldn’t feel left out of the discussion.
That’s the argument behind a new lawsuit launched in New York on Thursday, which accuses Canada-based Pornhub and its sister sites of failing to include closed captioning in most of its adult videos.
The suit was filed in the Eastern District of New York on behalf of Yaroslav Suris, who is deaf. Pornhub is named in the suit along with its sister sites, RedTube and YouPorn, and their parent company MindGeek.
The suit claims Pornhub is violating the rights of people who are deaf and hearing-impaired under the Americans with Disabilities Act because many of its videos lack closed captioning.
Suris claims it’s hard for him to enjoy many Pornhub videos because he can’t keep up with the conversation. He couldn’t follow the plot of a police interrogation or a disciplinary moment involving a babysitter, according to the court documents obtained by TMZ. He also saw no point in signing up for Pornhub’s premium subscription service because those videos do not accommodate people who are deaf or hearing-impaired.
Pornhub is the most robust adult video site on the planet, with over 100 million daily visitors and 100 billion video views each year, according to its website.
“We understand that Yaroslav Suris is suing Pornhub for claiming we’ve denied the deaf and hearing-impaired access to our videos,” Pornhub vice-president Corey Price said in a statement to Global News. “While we do not generally comment on active lawsuits, we’d like to take this opportunity to point out that we do have a closed captions category.”
More than 6.83 million new videos were uploaded to Pornhub in 2019, the site says.
Global News identified 410 videos listed under Pornhub’s “closed captions” category on Friday. A separate category link provided by the company listed 362 closed captioned videos.
This is the eighth lawsuit filed by Suris over the last year. He has also filed civil rights lawsuits against The Weather Channel, Fox News Network, CBS, Warner Bros./TMZ, Columbia University, Investor’s Business Daily and NYP Holdings, the parent company of the New York Post. Court dockets do not show any resolution to those cases.
New York attorney Mitchell S. Segal, who is representing Suris in all his cases, did not return a call from Global News.
Global News has reached out to Pornhub for comment.
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