Pornhub owner to pay $1.8M to U.S. after reaching deal with prosecutors over sex-trafficking allegation

The Pornhub website is shown on a computer screen in Toronto on Wednesday, Dec. 16, 2020. THE CANADIAN PRESS

The Montreal company that owns the world's largest pornography site has agreed to pay more than $1.8 million to the United States after reaching a deal with prosecutors over alleged ties to a sex-trafficking enterprise.

The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York announced Thursday it had reached a deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) with Aylo, formerly known as MindGeek, which owns Pornhub.com and several other porn sites.

A DPA, also known as a non-prosecution agreement, suspends a criminal charge for a set period of time. It's a voluntary legal tool used to sanction a corporation and avoid criminal conviction as long as it complies with the terms agreed to with the prosecutor.

The Aylo deal resolves a money laundering charge related to "unlawful monetary transactions involving sex trafficking proceeds," prosecutors said in a news release. 

"This deferred prosecution agreement holds the parent company of Pornhub.com 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," said United States Attorney Breon Peace in a statement.

According to the attorney's office, Aylo admitted to receiving money from a pornography production company that ran the "GirlsDoPorn" (GDP) website. The operators of the site were convicted of sex trafficking of young women who appeared in online videos. The women complained that they had been tricked or coerced into filming the explicit videos, which were then posted online without their permission.

The company "knowingly enriched itself by turning a blind eye to the concerns of victims," according to FBI Assistant Director-in-Charge James Smith. 

"The complainants told Aylo that they had been lied to and defrauded into making these videos and that the videos were posted on Pornhub.com without their consent. Although Aylo sought, and received, information from the GDP Operators that purported to establish that the complainants had given consent for their videos to be posted online, Aylo did not independently verify consent and did not remove all the videos that were requested to be taken down," the release from the attorney general's office stated. 

"On or about October 14, 2019, Aylo finally removed the official GDP channel from its platforms. However, the company did not take steps to identify for removal all unofficial GDP content from its website at that time. Aylo also did not remove the official GDT channel from its platforms until December 2020 even though the company knew that the individuals operating GDT were the same as those who operated GDP and that many of the individuals featured in the GDP videos were also featured in the GDT videos."

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Aylo is legally headquartered in Luxembourg but has its main office with hundreds of workers on Décarie Boulevard in Montreal.

Under the terms of the agreement, Aylo will have to pay $1,844,952.83 to the United States and pay unspecified monetary payments to victims of the GDP enterprise whose videos were shared without consent and who have not yet received compensation. The company will also have to be subject to an independent monitor for three years to ensure Aylo complies with the agreement.

The monitor will have to, among other things, monitor the "adequateness of the staffing and resources dedicated by Aylo to address, mitigate and remediate takedown requests or allegations of the presence of illegal content on the company’s platforms; and the adequacy of the company’s disclosures to relevant law enforcement authorities regarding the presence of illegal content on the company’s platforms."

In a statement on its website on Nov. 10 about the DPA, Aylo said it "deeply regrets that its platforms hosted any content produced by GDP/GDT" and committed to making payments to the victims.

On March 16, MindGeek announced it was sold to an Ottawa-based private equity firm, Ethical Capital Partners. On Aug. 17, the company rebranded under the Aylo name.