Pornhub founder Feras Antoon is building a massive mansion on a Montreal nature reserve

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The massive mansion standing on the edge of a nature reserve is testament to the millions of dollars to be made from porn, as the company faces claims it was facilitating the exploitation of children and sex trafficking victims. 

For this is the house that porn built — the brand-new chateau in Montreal that Pornhub boss Feras Antoon will soon call home.

Syrian-born Antoon, 45, bought two lots of land next to the Bois-de-Saraguay nature park on the northern edge of Montreal for CAN$2.3 million (US$1.8 million) cash four years ago and spent millions more building the home of his dreams ever since.

And now, he is watching his deluxe mansion, complete with a six-car garage, near completion.

It backs on to Montreal’s ‘Mafia Row’ where many crime figures live. On the very spot that Antoon’s home is being built, a gunman stood and fired a single bullet through a double-paned window, killing Nicolo Rizzuto — ‘The Canadian Godfather’ — in his kitchen in 2010.

‘It’s an area well-known as home to people who, let’s say, didn’t necessarily make their fortunes legally,’ said one long-time Montreal resident. ‘You ask anyone in the city about this area and they would say ‘Oh, Mafiaville.’

‘Antoon’s home is very opulent and completely over the top in everything. The front alone has 20 windows.’ he added. ‘But it fits in perfectly with other homes in the area,’

When DailyMail.com visited this week, a two-story arch that forms the front door was in the process of being installed.

Antoon and his wife Nicole Manos, who is of Greek-Canadian descent, have two sons. They already own several properties in Quebec.

Le Journal de Montreal reported he has a $2 million mansion an hour from Montreal in the tony resort town of Sainte-Marguerite-du-Lac-Masson and at least two sprawling condos in the city itself.

The previous owners of the site where his palace is being built went to court to win a planning battle to allow 220 trees to be felled to make room for it. 

The Montreal Heritage Council argued that the wooded land should be left alone as it played ‘an important ecological role…particularly with regard to biodiversity, the movement of fauna and the flow of water.’

Antoon was only granted permission to build if he agreed to fund the planting of 160 trees elsewhere.

But just as his dream home gets close to completion, Antoon, the CEO of Pornhub’s parent company MindGeek, faces a money crunch nightmare. His empire is in danger of crumbling following allegations that much of the content on his leading site contains videos of underage girls.

‘Its site is infested with rape videos. It monetizes child rapes, revenge pornography, spy cam videos of women showering, racist and misogynist content, and footage of women being asphyxiated in plastic bags,’ wrote Nicholas Kristof in a New York Times column that first exposed Pornhub.

‘A search for ‘girls under18′ or ’14yo’ leads in each case to more than 100,000 videos. Most aren’t of children being assaulted, but too many are.’

Already major credit card companies Mastercard, Visa and Discover have cut ties with Pornhub forcing it to delete 80 percent of its content in a bid to clean up its act. It has also severely curtailed uploading of videos and completely banned downloading.

And lawmakers in both the United States and Canada are drafting legislation to make it easier for child victims to sue companies that post videos of sexual acts.

Antoon runs MindGeek alongside his Chief Operating Officer David Tassillo. The two men have been called to testify before the Canadian parliament’s ethics committee on the New York Times allegations.

Tassillo also has opulent taste in real estate. He lives in this house on a quiet cul-de-sac in Laval, just north of Montreal. The home backs onto the Prairies River. 

‘I would…like to ask them how they expect to remedy the harm caused to individuals who never provided their consent for images and videos to be shared,’ said Member of Parliament, Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, who introduced the motion.

A group of 40 women are also suing MindGeek for $80 million saying it partnered with another site, GirlsDoPorn, and profited from its sex trafficking operation. GirlsDoPorn was closed down in January and ordered to pay nearly $13 million to its victims.

Antoon is the only remaining one of four founders of MindGeek who started the company in 2007 when they were all students at Montreal’s Concordia University. He was joined by Stephane Manos, who later became his brother-in-law, and two brothers Ouissam Youssef and Matt Keezer. The quartet had originally become friends through their love of foosball.

They had seen the success of YouTube as a search engine for videos and formed Pornhub as an adult version making money from banner ads.

It now has 1,200 employees and is based for tax reasons in the tiny European country of Luxembourg. It also has offices in Los Angeles, London, Cyprus and Romania according to its website. Other sites under MindGeek’s banner include YouPorn, RedTube, Brazzers, RealityKings, Babes.com and WickedPictures.

Keezer claims to have bought the domain name Pornhub for $2,750 from someone he met at a Playboy mansion party. The site first went online in 2007 and its popularity quickly exploded.

The company was sold for $140 million to German millionaire Fabian Thylman in 2010, but he sold it back to Antoon for $100 million three years later after he was arrested for tax evasion.

Pornhub now has more than 22 million registered users, drawing 120 million viewers a day — more than Amazon or Netflix.

In his New York Times piece that threatens to bring Pornhub down, Kristof said the website differed from YouTube because it allowed videos to be downloaded direct from the website.

‘So even if a rape video is removed at the request of the authorities, it may already be too late: The video lives on as it is shared with others or uploaded again and again,’ he wrote.

‘I came across many videos on Pornhub that were recordings of assaults on unconscious women and girls. The rapists would open the eyelids of the victims and touch their eyeballs to show that they were nonresponsive,’ Kristof added.

A Pornhub spokesman told DailyMail.com that since last week the company has created a ‘Red Team’ of additional moderators, increased the site’s list of banned words and is partnering with non-profits and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

He called allegations that it allows child videos on the site ‘irresponsible and flagrantly untrue.’

‘But due to the nature of our industry, people’s preconceived notions of Pornhub’s values and processes often differ from reality.’