Pornhub parent company Aylo faces $1.8 million in fines and victim restitution after admitting to profiting from content showing victims of sex trafficking. The company was arraigned Thursday in Brooklyn federal court on charges of "engaging in unlawful monetary transactions involving the proceeds of sex trafficking."
Aylo, formerly MindGeek, will resolve the charges by entering into a deferred prosecution agreement with the U.S. government. Under the terms of the agreement, Aylo must pay $1.8 million to the U.S. government and compensate victims who appeared on its pornographic sites. In addition, Aylo will hire an independent monitor for three years, who will evaluate Aylo's "content screening and monitoring processes" to ensure that it properly handles illegal content.
The federal government alleges that Aylo "turned a blind eye" to sex trafficking victims by first hosting videos produced by GirlsDoPorn on Aylo websites, including Pornhub, in 2009. While the operators of GirlsDoPorn were indicted in 2019 for allegedly coercing dozens of women into filming porn, the U.S. government claimed Aylo had prior knowledge of the illegal activity.
In addition to allegedly receiving "several content takedown requests" between 2016 and 2019, Aylo also learned that several women who appeared in GirlsDoPorn videos filed a lawsuit against the production company's owners in 2017. However, Aylo did not "independently verify consent" related content, and did not start removing content until the conclusion of the GirlsDoPorn trial in 2019. Prosecutors allege that Aylo also failed to take action on GirlsDoPorn’s unofficial content and did not delete the company’s official channel until 2020.
"This deferred prosecution agreement holds Pornhub.com's parent company accountable for its role in hosting videos and accepting payments from criminal actors who coerced young women to perform sex acts on video without their consent," Breon Peace, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said in a statement.
Pornhub and other adult websites are currently facing increasing scrutiny from the U.S. government and the European Union. Several US states, including Louisiana, Mississippi and Arkansas, have passed laws requiring age verification for access to pornographic websites. The EU has also designated Pornhub a "very large online platform" under the Digital Services Act, meaning it will be legally obliged to adhere to strict age verification and content moderation rules.