Aylo, the company that owns porn sites including Pornhub and that recently changed its name from MindGeek, has been sued by a new wave of women claiming to be victims of the defunct illegal porn company GirlsDoPorn.
Two years after MindGeek settled a similar civil case brought by multiple women allegedly deceived by GirlsDoPorn, 62 women are now suing Aylo for offenses that include sex and human trafficking, plus racketeering. They are seeking $5 million each in damages, plus restitution for income Aylo earned from their videos.
They claim that Aylo’s porn sites failed to remove content they appeared in after being coerced, defrauded or otherwise deceived by the people behind GirlsDoPorn, which made porn videos in the US that its performers were told would not be shown in the country.
Many of the videos were then distributed on porn sites easily accessible in the US, including Pornhub, one of the biggest porn sites in the world. GirlsDoPorn was shut down in 2020, with its co-owners since convicted or arrested on sex trafficking charges.
The new lawsuit, filed on Tuesday (October 3, 2023), comes less than two months after Aylo’s name change as part of an acquisition by the Ethical Capital Partners investment firm.
In the lawsuit the women claim that Aylo knew about GirlsDoPorn using fraud and coercion to create its porn videos as early as 2009, but still chose to partner with the company until it was shut down by the FBI.
They claim that evidence shows that Aylo only had one person to moderate 700,000 videos, and a policy of only reviewing a video after it had been flagged 15 times for potentially illegal or terms-violating content.
Women who asked the company to remove their GirlsDoPorn videos were, the lawsuit claims, ignored by the company. One woman allegedly told Aylo that she had been “scammed” by GirlsDoPorn, by being told that her video would only appear on a DVD in Australia, only to find that her work colleagues and family saw it in the US. She allegedly wrote “I want to just die” in a video takedown request.
The lawsuit states that “the videos have collectively generated billions of views on Aylo’s websites, from which Aylo has earned millions of dollars.”
In response to the filing, Aylo told 404 Media: “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. We look forward to the facts being fully and fairly aired in that forum.”
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