Pornhub’s parent company admits to profiting from sex trafficking
The company that operates Pornhub and other adult websites acknowledged Thursday in federal court in Brooklyn that it profited for years from pornographic content depicting sex trafficking victims, federal prosecutors said.
Aylo Holdings SARL, the parent company of Pornhub, pleaded not guilty to charges of engaging in unlawful monetary transactions involving proceeds from sex trafficking. But through an agreement with prosecutors, the company agreed to pay damages to women who said they were coerced into appearing in pornographic videos that were then posted on the company’s websites without their consent.
The deal, known as a deferred prosecution agreement, requires the company to pay a fine of more than $1.8 million and be assigned a monitor to review Aylo’s protocols for screening content and handling reports of illegal content on its platforms. judge. In exchange, the charges against Aylo could be dropped after three years.
Aylo, formerly known as MindGeek, operates several websites that allow third parties to post and distribute adult content, according to prosecutors. In 2009, Aylo started hosting pornographic videos created by the production companies GirlsDoPorn and GirlsDoToys.
Prosecutors said that between 2016 and 2019, Aylo received numerous messages from women saying they had been tricked into making videos for GirlsDoPorn and GirlsDoToys and that the videos had been published on Pornhub.com without their consent.
Aylo was also aware of a 2017 lawsuit filed by victims of the companies, prosecutors said, and knew that a videographer for GirlsDoPorn had testified that he had lied to women to get them to appear in the videos. Nevertheless, the company continued to host the videos and benefit from working with the production companies, prosecutors said.
In 2019, several operators of GirlsDoPorn and GirlsDoToys in California were charged with sex trafficking and other crimes related to “tricking and coercing” young women into appearing in pornographic videos that were then posted online without their consent.
Aylo did not completely remove the videos from its platforms until late 2020, prosecutors said.
In a statement, Aylo said she “deeply regrets” ever hosting content produced by GirlsDoPorn and GirlsDoToys.
“While the production company provided the platforms with written documentation that purported to be consent forms signed by women featured in the photo,” the statement said, the company now understands that these forms were obtained “through fraud and coercion.”
Solomon Friedman, a partner at Ethical Capital Partners, the Canadian private equity firm that acquired Aylo earlier this year, emphasized that Aylo had not admitted to any illegal activity and that his firm is “committed to just outcomes” for anyone wronged by the promotions from GirlsDoPorn.
“Although we were not aware at the time that our partner, GirlsDoPorn, was involved in unlawful activity, we later learned that it was, and we deeply regret that,” he said Thursday.
James Smith, the assistant director in charge of the FBI’s New York field office, said in a statement that Aylo was “motivated by profit” when he “enriched himself by turning a blind eye to the concerns of victims who communicated to the company that they were being deceived and coerced into engaging in illegal sexual activities.”
Hundreds of people have been identified as victims of the GirlsDoPorn sex trafficking operation, prosecutors said.
The agreement with prosecutors “holds Pornhub.com’s parent company accountable for its role in hosting videos and accepting payments from criminal actors,” Breon Peace, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said in a statement. “This resolution will not only oversee one of the largest online content distributors in the world and ensure the company’s lawful conduct, but will also develop industry-wide standards for security and compliance.”