Pornhub’s parent company admits it profited from sex trafficking
CNN
For years, Pornhub hosted adult videos featuring women who were coerced into performing sex acts on camera by a production company, the website’s owner acknowledged in an agreement with federal prosecutors this week.
For years, Pornhub hosted adult videos featuring women who were coerced into performing sex acts on camera by a production company, the website’s owner acknowledged in an agreement with federal prosecutors this week. Aylo, Pornhub’s parent company, will pay a $1.8 million fine and compensate the sex trafficking victims as part of a deferred prosecution agreement. The company pleaded not guilty to the government’s charge of engaging in unlawful monetary transactions involving sex trafficking proceeds, although it acknowledged the illegal material was posted on its site and said it regrets that fact. The government did not accuse Aylo itself of violating any federal sex trafficking laws, but said the company should have known it was doing business with a group that was engaging in sex trafficking. As part of its agreement, Aylo will also be subject to monitoring for three years, and the charges against the company would be dropped if it complies with its agreement. From 2017 through 2019, a production company paid Aylo to stream its pornography that Aylo knew included videos featuring women who did not give their consent for the content to be posted online, according to Aylo’s admission and court documents. In 2016, Aylo began receiving takedown requests from women who appeared in the videos, telling Aylo they were lied to. And Aylo became aware of a federal lawsuit against the production company in 2017, court documents show. But Aylo didn’t follow through with all the takedown requests, nor did it attempt to independently verify that the women consented to have the videos appear on the internet, prosecutors said. Even after Aylo took the production company’s videos off Pornhub in 2019, some of the same videos were reposted by other users and remained online, according to court documents. In a statement, Aylo, which is under new management since the alleged incidents occurred, said it “deeply regrets” that Pornhub hosted the content.