In a federal court hearing in Brooklyn on Thursday, December 21, the owner of adult websites, including Pornhub, admitted to federal prosecutors that they had made money for years off of pornographic material featuring victims of sex trafficking.
The parent company of Pornhub, which is Aylo, pleaded not guilty to an allegation of participating in illegal financial transactions involving revenues from sex trafficking.
However, the business consented to compensate women who claimed they were coerced into appearing in pornographic films that were then uploaded to the company's platforms without their knowledge or permission as part of a settlement with the prosecution.
Link With GirlsDoPor, GirlsDoToys
According to the New York Times, Aylo has agreed to pay a fine of more than $1.8 million and have a third party evaluate its content screening processes and response to allegations of unlawful material on its platforms as part of a deferred prosecution agreement. Aylo would be able to have the charges against it withdrawn after three years if this were to happen.
Prosecutors claim that Aylo, formerly known as MindGeek, runs many websites that facilitate the distribution of pornographic material by third parties. When GirlsDoPorn and GirlsDoToys started making pornographic videos in 2009, Aylo started hosting them.
Aylo allegedly received several messages from women between 2016 and 2019 claiming that they were coerced into recording videos for GirlsDoPorn and GirlsDoToys and that these videos had been uploaded to Pornhub without their knowledge or permission.
Prosecutors added that Aylo was also aware of a 2017 complaint filed by victims of the firms, as well as the fact that a GirlsDoPorn cameraman had admitted to lying to women to get them to participate in the flicks.
However, as the prosecution points out, the business went on to host the videos and make money off of its collaboration with the producing businesses.
Some of the people who ran GirlsDoPorn and GirlsDoToys were charged with sex trafficking and other crimes in California in 2019 for "deceiving and coercing" young women to be in sexual films that were then put online without their permission. Prosecutors said that the videos were not fully removed from Aylo's platforms until late 2020.
'Deep Regrets'
Aylo expressed deep regrets in a statement for hosting footage from GirlsDoPorn and GirlsDoToys, as reported by the New York Times.
Aylo said it had realized that the written documentation it received was really permission forms signed by women who were featured but was only acquired by "fraud and coercion."
Aylo has not acknowledged any criminal behavior, and Solomon Friedman, a partner at Ethical Capital Partners—the Canadian private equity firm that purchased Aylo earlier this year—underlined that the business was dedicated to fair results for anybody harmed by GirlsDoPorn and GirlsDoToys' acts.
