Editor’s note: This story has been updated to clarify that while Pavlovski owned domains, he was not involved in operating them as websites.
President Donald Trump’s MAGA movement has long been a coalition of strange bedfellows. On the one hand, there is Trump himself, who once bragged about grabbing women “by the pussy” and enjoyed a long friendship with child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein that revolved around the men’s mutual appreciation of “beautiful women.” On the other hand is a cadre of deeply religious men like former Vice President Mike Pence, who has said he does not eat alone with women for fear that he might act inappropriately toward them (and has since been exiled from MAGA), and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, who once told a Louisiana church group that he used an accountability software called “Covenant Eyes” to send reports of his web browsing to his seventeen-year-old son to deter him from watching pornography.
On porn in particular, MAGA struggles with internal tension. Vice President J.D. Vance wants the government to ban it. So does The Heritage Foundation, the influential conservative think tank with deep ties to the Trump White House, and Russ Vought, the Project 2025 leader who now serves as Trump’s Director for the Office of Management and Budget. One Heritage Foundation legal fellow has called porn “diabolical.”
But a close associate of President Donald Trump — and a key player in his social media business, Truth Social — appears to have different views on the adult entertainment industry. Chris Pavlovski, CEO and former billionaire founder of the video platform Rumble, also founded Jokeroo, a company that owned the domains of explicit websites like PornoBrokers.com, LustyMaids.com, and MilfMansion.com, for roughly a decade between 2003 and 2013.
Some of the domains owned by Pavlovski appeared to be offline during the years he owned them. Internet Archive records show that at least one domain registered to Pavlovski, CanadianClit.com, advertised “Church upskirts” and “nasty hidden cam pics” of “hot naked college girls” while Pavlovski owned it. (It appears that the advertisements linked out to other sites he did not own.)
Rumble spokesperson Tim Murtaugh, sent Forbes the following statement: “Forbes must have a lot of free time if they're writing about a domain parking business Chris Pavlovski ran when he was 18 and 19, and where advertising was managed and operated by 3rd parties. If these were among the hundreds—perhaps thousands—of domains he once owned, he has no recollection of them specifically.” After publication, Murtagh sent additional comment, saying, "These were domain names—among many hundreds or thousands Chris Pavlovski once owned, covering many types of potential businesses—and not operating websites. They were domain names reserved and parked to be sold to businesses that wanted them."
Pavlovski became a darling of the MAGA movement through his stewardship of Rumble, the alt video platform popular with the American right wing. Narya, a VC firm that Vance founded, co-led a 2021 investment round in Rumble with Republican megadonor Peter Thiel, and around the same time, Rumble signed big-dollar contracts with right-leaning entertainers and publishers like Steven Crowder and The Daily Wire. Current FBI deputy director Dan Bongino hosted Rumble’s most popular show in 2022.
In 2021, Pavlovski was drafted into the small cohort of technologists and Trump loyalists that created Truth Social. Pavlovski was even offered the role of Truth Social CEO, but turned it down, according to notes taken by the social network’s co-founder, Andy Dean Litinsky, that were introduced as evidence in an investor lawsuit against Truth Social. (A judge found last year that the company had breached its contract with investors.) Pavlovski instead opted to provide services to Truth Social through Rumble’s cloud and advertising businesses, and through a Canadian-Macedonian outsourcing firm he cofounded called Cosmic Development.
Pavlovski’s ownership of porn domains is consistent with his views about content restrictions online. He has decried the “mass censorship” that he says is practiced by other tech companies, and suggested that porn might be allowed on Rumble (where it is currently banned) if it weren’t for Apple and Google’s app store rules.
“[T]hey let porn on X, but they'd never allow it on Rumble. Why? I don't know, but I'd love to know the answers to these questions. They simply treat Rumble differently,” he mused on X earlier this year.
President Trump himself has never taken a stance on banning porn. He did, however, sign the Take It Down Act into law earlier this year, a measure that criminalizes knowingly publishing intimate photos or videos of a person without their consent. If published today, “church upskirts” and “hidden cam pics” like those once advertised on Pavlovski’s website might run afoul of the law.
Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social, also bans porn — though a quick search of the app by Forbes surfaced multiple examples of full male nudity. The company came under fire in 2023 for its reported connections to an obscure bank known for providing payment services to porn websites. Trump Media sued the Washington Post last year for its reporting on the matter, and litigation is ongoing.
Today, it outsources many of its operations — including, according to the Washington Post, “senior developers, content editors, content acquisition managers, fraud prevention experts, video recruiters and digital marketing specialists” — to Macedonian and Serbian staff at Cosmic Development.
Executives at Cosmic, which Pavlovski cofounded in 2011, have their own history with pornographic domains. Pavlovski’s cofounder and the company’s CEO, Ryan Milnes, previously owned more than 20 explicit web domains, including several with LGBT-themed titles. One of those domains, Slutload, was reportedly “one of the largest adult tube sites” online when it was owned by Milnes. During the same period, prosecutors invoked alleged child predators’ visits to Slutload.com as evidence of crimes in at least two cases. Both prosecutions resulted in convictions, though one conviction was later overturned. (Slutload itself was not accused of any wrongdoing.) Milnes sold the site in 2011, saying that he would continue to pursue other business opportunities in adult entertainment.
Another former Cosmic Development executive, Vuk Popovic, has owned more than 400 explicit domains, many of which he held during his tenure at Cosmic. He left the company after it began working with Rumble, but before it began working with Truth Social.
Milnes and Popovic did not respond to requests for comment. The White House declined to comment, referring Forbes to Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG). TMTG did not respond to a request for comment.
Many of the porn domains previously owned by Pavlovski are associated with Jokeroo, a business he started in the early 2000s that no longer exists. Jokeroo was a primitive social website and blog, which also ran a slew of other websites, including “domain squats,” a term for misspelled URLs that web developers use to mooch traffic from other websites. One of Jokeroo’s “domain squats” was britebart.com, an apparent misspelling of the right-wing news site breitbart.com. Milnes, a Canadian, also at one point owned buyamericanonly.com.
Based out of Skopje, Macedonia, Cosmic Development was originally founded as an IT outsourcing firm, and grew its business by making clickbaity content for American internet companies like America’s Funniest Home Videos and ScaryMommy. The company later opened offices in Bitola, Macedonia, Belgrade, Serbia, and Toronto, Canada. (One employee, who worked for Cosmic in 2022 and 2023, wrote on LinkedIn that his job was in part to “ensure that each piece isn't plagiarized or fully reliant on AI.”)
In 2013, Pavlovski founded Rumble, which he positioned as a competitor to YouTube. Milnes joined Rumble as a director. It was years after the Vance and Thiel investment in 2021 that Rumble and its executives became associated with Trumpist politics, an association that rankled some of the company’s other investors.
Since then, the company’s associations with Trump have only grown. In 2021, when two former contestants on Trump’s former reality TV program, The Apprentice, founded Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG), they looped Pavlovski into a set of conversations with Trump and his closest aides, including now-Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and now-deputy FBI director Dan Bongino. On Pavlovski’s recommendation, TMTG hired Cosmic Development’s Chief Technology Officer, Vladimir Novachki. A Trump-allied congressman reportedly personally intervened to expedite his visa process (the congressman denied this was preferential treatment).
In 2022, just months after Truth Social launched, it announced that it would be moving its data hosting to Rumble Cloud. (A press release said the partnership would propel the network to “New, Uncancellable Heights.) The social network also announced that it would be the first publisher to use Rumble’s in-house ad platform — bringing critical business to Pavlovski’s new ad and hosting platforms.
Recently, Pavlovski and Rumble have expanded their ambitions and begun working with other government officials. Last year, Pavlovski, Truth Social CEO Nunes, and now-U.S. commerce secretary Howard Lutnick traveled to North Macedonia to pitch the country’s right-wing Prime Minister on a data hosting deal.
North Macedonia, like the U.S., forbids the publication of nonconsensual intimate imagery. In 2021, the North Macedonian government threatened to ban Telegram after finding that the messaging platform had facilitated the sharing of nonconsensual intimate images of women and girls.
Meanwhile, Trump’s close relationship with Pavlovski and Rumble continues. Earlier this month, Pavlovski posted a video from a bill signing event at the White House where Trump called him out by name during his speech.
“How’s Rumble doing, good?” Trump asked Pavlovski, who answered “great.”
“Good,” the president said. “If Rumble’s doing good, that means Truth is doing good. That’s great. You’re doing a great job.”
Thomas Brewster and Kyle Khan-Mullins contributed reporting.