More than 60 women who say they were forced, defrauded or coerced into making explicit films by San Diego-based GirlsDoPorn are suing the parent company of PornHub and other free adult video sites, claiming “illegal publication of the sex trafficking videos.”
The civil suit filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in San Diego alleges sex trafficking, human trafficking, racketeering and conspiracy to commit racketeering. It names as defendants Aylo Media S.A.R.L., a Luxembourg-incorporated company that owns PornHub and other popular free porn video sites, and several related companies.
The lawsuit is the second of its kind. In December 2020, nearly 60 women featured in GirlsDoPorn videos sued PornHub’s parent company, which was then known as MindGeek. The two sides settled the suit about a year later on that both sides agreed not to disclose. The new lawsuit was filed by 62 new women represented by the same attorneys.
“While this may seem like a lot of plaintiffs, it represents a small fraction of the women PornHub has trafficked and exploited over the years,” attorney Brian Holm said Wednesday. “My clients know being a plaintiff in a case like this will not be easy, but they are determined to shine a light on PornHub’s horrific business practices.”
It was unclear Wednesday if Aylo had retained attorneys in the new lawsuit. Attorneys who represented MindGeek in the previous lawsuit did not respond to emails seeking comment.
An Aylo spokesperson said the company does not comment on ongoing litigation “out of respect for the integrity of court proceedings,” but that the company looked forward “to the facts being fully and fairly aired” in court.
“The safety of our community is our number one priority, so we are proud to have instituted Trust and Safety policies that sur those of any other major -generated platform on the internet,” the Aylo statement said. “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.”
The new lawsuit comes weeks after federal prosecutors unsealed a new sex-trafficking indictment against a former GirlsDoPorn employee. At least six former employees have been prosecuted in connection with the case, while GirlsDoPorn founder Michael James Pratt, who briefly landed on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted Fugitives list, remains in Spanish custody awaiting extradition after his arrest last year in Madrid.
Pratt and his co-defendants were charged criminally in 2019 while they were fighting a lawsuit filed in state court by 22 women. The judge in that case found in favor of the women and handed down a $12.7 million judgment against Pratt, several of his employees and various business interests he owned.
Prosecutors allege Pratt and those who worked for him recruited young women for modeling gigs, but when the women arrived in San Diego, they were pressured to have sex on camera and falsely told the videos would go to private DVD collections overseas.
Attorney: Women exposed on porn website suffered ‘living hell’The new lawsuit filed Tuesday alleges that in 2011, Aylo Media, then known as MindGeek, began a partnership with GirlsDoPorn to “, sell, market, edit, and otherwise exploit GirlsDoPorn’s illegal sex trafficking videos on its websites.” The suit alleges that as part of the partnership, “Aylo provided dedicated representatives that actively promoted GirlsDoPorn’s videos causing them to be some of the most popular videos on Aylo’s sites.”
According to the complaint, a video featuring one of the plaintiffs was the second most viewed video in 2014 on PornHub — a site that the complaint alleges had 42 billion views in 2019, making it the 10th most visited website in the world.
“Whereas GirlsDoPorn published the illegal videos behind a paywall available to about 10,000 subscribers, Aylo’s publication of the sex trafficking videos was on its publicly available websites that garnered billions of views,” the complaint alleges, claiming that Aylo earned millions of dollars from those views.
The suit alleges that soon after it began publishing the GirlsDoPorn videos, Aylo began receiving takedown requests from the women featured in the films. But Aylo allegedly ignored those requests, even as the civil proceedings and trial in San Diego Superior Court brought to light the fraud and deception involved in making the videos, according to the complaint.
PornHub and the other Aylo sites finally removed the videos in 2019 after the FBI raided GirlsDoPorn and Pratt and his co-defendants were charged criminally, according to the lawsuit.
“But this was too little too late,” the complaint alleges. “Aylo had already spent a decade spreading the videos to every corner of the globe where they could be ed for free with the click of a button.”
The lawsuit seeks at least $10 million for each plaintiff in compensatory and punitive damages and to bar Aylo from ever again hosting the victims’ videos.
