Aylo, the parent company of Pornhub, has been hit with its tenth sex trafficking lawsuit since 2020, with 62 alleged victims filing in federal court Tuesday.
The online pornography giant, formerly known as MindGeek, is now being sued by 257 people, alleging sex trafficking, human trafficking, and racketeering.
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The lawsuit, which is the tenth such suit according to Traffickinghub founder Laila Mickelwait, was brought by victims of the now-defunct pornographic website GirlsDoPorn, which had a strategic partnership with Aylo to promote its videos on flagship website Pornhub.
“For over a decade, GirlsDoPorn used force, fraud, and coercion to get hundreds of high school and college-aged women to film pornographic videos that GirlsDoPorn sold on the Internet,” the lawsuit states. “The illegal publication of the sex trafficking videos upended victims’ lives. Within 48 hours of being uploaded to the Internet, the videos went viral amongst every person in the victims’ network, causing them to become pariahs in their own communities. Victims were ridiculed and ostracized by friends, classmates, teachers, professors, principals, clergy members, and family.”
In 2019, several people involved with GirlsDoPorn were charged with sex trafficking and five co-conspirators have pleaded guilty. Site founder Michael Pratt escaped arrest and was added to the FBI’s top 10 most wanted list until he was apprehended on December 23, 2022, in Madrid, Spain.
The 61 plaintiffs say they contacted Aylo to take videos off their website but the company “nevertheless intentionally ignored the requests, and kept the highly profitable videos published on its sites, despite the harm Aylo knew it would cause the victims.” The lawsuit adds that it was only after the arrests of the GirlsDoPorn employees and the demise of the site that Aylo took the videos off of Pornhub.
“This was too little too late,” the lawsuit states. “Aylo had already spent a decade spreading the videos to every corner of the globe where they could be downloaded for free with the click of a button.
“Every victim became suicidal and depressed. Nearly every victim has been diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder,” it continues. “Some victims have attempted suicide, and multiple victims have been involuntarily committed out of concern for their welfare. Many have legally changed their names and physical appearances in an effort to minimize the abuse.”
The lawsuit also cites recent revelations about Aylo’s content moderation practices, where employees were caught on camera admitting that protocols to remove illegal content, including sex trafficking and child pornography, were not taken “seriously.”
Documents found in discovery in another trafficking lawsuit against the site also found that executives put up a roadblock for reviewing potential child sexual content.
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Aylo vehemently denies any wrongdoing regarding content moderation, having previously told the Washington Examiner that the allegations are “categorically false” and that “Aylo has instituted some of the most comprehensive safeguards in user-generated platform history in order to prevent and eliminate illegal material from its platforms.”
Of the lawsuit, Aylo issued the following statement to the Washington Examiner: “The safety of our community is our number one priority, so we are proud to have instituted Trust and Safety policies that surpass those of any other major user-generated platform on the internet. Our compliance program has helped us set the standard for the tech industry, and we are committed to remaining at the forefront of this important area.”
“Out of respect for the integrity of court proceedings, our policy is not to comment on ongoing litigation,” it continued. “We look forward to the facts being fully and fairly aired in that forum.”
