Aylo, parent company of Pornhub and other sex sites, entered into a deferred prosecution agreement with U.S. prosecutors to settle a charge it profited from deals with porn producers who were involved in sex trafficking.
Under the settlement announced Thursday, Canada-based Aylo agreed to pay a criminal fine and forfeiture totaling $1.845 million to the U.S. government. In addition, Aylo has agreed to provide payments to victims of the sex-trafficking content operators who have not otherwise already received compensation and whose images were posted on Aylo’s platforms. The Justice Department will assign a monitor for a three-year period to assess Aylo’s compliance with the agreement and its processes for identifying and removing illegal content from its platforms. Under the deal with U.S. prosecutors, the criminal charge against Aylo would be dropped after three years.
The deferred prosecution agreement with Aylo “holds the parent company of Pornhub accountable for its role in hosting videos and accepting payments from criminal actors who coerced young women into engaging in sexual acts on videos that were posted without their consent,” Breon Peace, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said in a statement.
Beginning in 2009, Aylo (formerly called MindGeek) hosted pornographic videos created by GirlsDoPorn founder Michael Pratt and his collaborators on sites including Pornhub. In 2019, a federal grand jury in the Southern District of California returned an indictment against the GirlsDoPorn operators for sex-trafficking offenses and other other charges, for “deceiving and coercing young women to appear in sex videos which were then posted online without the women’s consent,” according to federal prosecutors. Since then, several of the GirlsDoPorn operators have been convicted in connection with that case.
Between 2017 and 2019, Aylo received money that the company “knew or should have known was derived from” the GirlsDoPorn operators’ sex trafficking operations, according to U.S. prosecutors. During that time period, Aylo received payments of approximately $106,370 from the GirlsDoPorn operators. In addition, between September 2017 and December 2020, MindGeek received payments from advertisers attributable to content from GirlsDoPorn and related site GirlsDoToys totaling approximately $763,891.
Between 2016 and 2019, MindGeek received several content removal requests from individuals seeking to remove GirlsDoPorn videos from its websites. In October 2019, MindGeek finally removed the official GirlsDoPorn channel from its platforms but did not remove the official GirlsDoToys channel until December 2020, prosecutors said.
“Motivated by profit, Aylo Holdings knowingly enriched itself by turning a blind eye to the concerns of victims who communicated to the company that they were deceived and coerced into participating in illicit sexual activity,” James Smith, assistant director-in-charge of the FBI’s New York field office, said in a statement.
Aylo is owned by private-equity firm Ethical Capital Partners, which acquired predecessor company MindGeek for undisclosed financial terms earlier this year. ECP has said it would focus on building the company’s “trust and safety” and to make it “the internet leader in fighting illegal online content.”
Aylo said in a statement it “deeply regrets” having hosted 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 who were featured in the GDP/GDT productions, and Aylo was unaware of GDP/GDT’s criminal conduct, Aylo now understands that those forms were obtained by GDP/GDT through fraud and coercion,” the company said.
The company noted the U.S. government’s 30-month investigation did not find that Aylo or its affiliates violated federal criminal laws prohibiting sex trafficking or the sexual exploitation of minors, including child pornography.
Prosecutors said it entered into the deferred prosecution agreement with Aylo based on various factors, including that while it didn’t voluntarily self-disclose the criminal conduct it cooperated with U.S. law enforcement investigators; that it removed the GirlsDoPorn and GirlsDoToys content from its platforms; and that the company committed to “remediating and improving its compliance program and internal controls.”
“It is our hope that this resolution, which includes certain agreed payments to the women whose images were posted on the company’s platforms and an independent monitorship brings some measure of closure to those negatively affected,” Peace said in a statement. “This resolution will not only provide oversight over one of the largest online content distributors in the world and ensure the company’s lawful behavior, but it will also develop industrywide standards for safety and compliance.”
