The Parent company of one of the biggest pornographic content websites in the world, PornHub, has acknowledged profiting from sex trafficking. It acknowledged having hosted adult videos in which women were forced to engage in sexual acts on camera; the business subsequently shared the videos online without the women’s consent.
As part of a deferred prosecution agreement reached with federal prosecutors, Aylo, formerly known as MindGeek, would pay a fine of 1.8 million Dollars and compensate the victims of sex trafficking. Aylo, who entered a not-guilty plea to participate in illegal financial transactions involving proceeds from sex trafficking, will be under observation for three years, according to the agreement. The accusations against the corporation will be withdrawn if it abides by the conditions of the contract.
The accusations originate from the fact that the company hosted content and took money from a third party, Girls Do Porn (GDP).
According to court documents, Aylo continued to accept money from the GDP channel even after it was aware of sex trafficking allegations from some of the women appearing in the videos.
Court records stated that Aylo failed to comply with all removal requests and independently checked consent, even after receiving requests from multiple women in 2016 and learning of federal action against the production business in 2017.
The victims said that the GDP forced them to have sex on camera and misled them about how the footage would be disseminated.
According to prosecutors, the company received more than $100,000 from GirlsDoPorn and roughly $764,000 in payments from advertisers attributable to the production company.
In 2021, Aylo, then known as MindGeek, settled with 50 women out of court.
“Aylo received money that Aylo knew or should have known was derived from the GDP Operators’ sex trafficking operations,” the US Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York alleged.
In all, there were over 400 victims, and GDP producer Ruben Andre Garcia was given a 20-year federal jail sentence in 2021 for forcing women to appear in pornographic recordings.
Later that year, the women gained the rights to the videos in which they had starred, and Garcia was forced to make amends by giving them $18 million.
Notably, in the year 2020, the New York Times published an article levelling allegations that MindGeek’s sites were hosting material depicting rapes and sex involving minors.
The NYT‘s 2020 article read, “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. A search for “girls under18” (no space) or “14yo” leads in each case to more than 100,000 videos. Most aren’t of children being assaulted, but too many are.”
The article sparked intense scrutiny from regulators in several countries, and Visa and MasterCard suspended payment processing.
It may be recalled that at the beginning of the year, Ethical Capital Partners (ECP), a Canadian private equity firm, bought MindGeek, the parent company of PornHub, bringing with it a stable of additional websites including YouPorn. The acquisition has also resulted in a slew of legal issues.
In June this year, the new owner of PornHub said that the government should take pride in sexual expression instead of cracking down on porn websites. It further urged the governments to help make porn “normal and boring.”
