Sixty-two additional women are suing Pornhub’s parent company, claiming that the company failed to take down videos of their abuse as part of the sex trafficking operation Girls Do Porn. They’re suing the company and its sites for sex trafficking, racketeering, conspiracy to commit racketeering, and human trafficking.
The complaint, filed on Tuesday, includes what it claims are internal emails obtained by the plaintiffs, represented by Holm Law Group, between Pornhub moderation staff. The emails allegedly show that Pornhub had only one moderator to review 700,000 potentially abusive videos, and that the company intentionally ignored repeated reports from victims in those videos.
The damages and restitution they seek amounts to more than $600,00,000. They demand a jury trial, and seek damages of $5 million per plaintiff, as well as restitution for all the money Aylo, the new name for Pornhub’s parent company, earned “marketing, selling and exploiting Plaintiffs’ videos in an amount that exceeds one hundred thousand dollars for each plaintiff.”
The plaintiffs are 61 more unnamed “Jane Doe” victims of Girls Do Porn, adding to the 60 that sued Pornhub in 2020 for similar claims.
Girls Do Porn was a federally-convicted sex trafficking ring that coerced young women into filming pornographic videos under the pretense of “modeling” gigs. In some cases, the women were violently abused. The operators told them that the videos would never appear online, so that their home communities wouldn’t find out, but they uploaded the footage to sites like Pornhub, where the videos went viral—and in many instances, destroyed their lives. Girls Do Porn was an official Pornhub content partner, with its videos frequently appearing on the front page, where they gathered millions of views.
The complaint includes what the plaintiffs claims are internal emails between Pornhub moderation staff, where staff discuss being ignored by management when flagging potential abuse content. The complaint states:
The internal emails show, according to the complaint, that as of May 2020, Aylo had “700,000 flagged videos and only a single employee to review them. The emails also reveal Aylo had a policy to only review a video after it had been flagged 15 times.”
An Aylo spokesperson said in a statement to 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."
The new lawsuit follows a lawsuit filed last month by Kristy Althaus, Girls Do Porn victim and former runner up for Miss Teen Colorado. In 2014, her Girls Do Porn appearances went viral after appearing on Pornhub and other free porn sites, and she was stripped of her title and faced public shaming while still in college.
In January 2020, in a civil trial against Girls Do Porn, a judge awarded 22 women $12.7 million, and in October 2021, a total of 60 victims reached a settlement with Mindgeek (recently rebranded as Aylo), Pornhub's parent company, in a lawsuit that claimed Pornhub knowingly benefited from Girls Do Porn videos and failed to moderate them as they circulated on its network of tube sites.
Pornhub listed the official Girls Do Porn channels as a "Content Partner", and only removed it as a partner after the owners and employees of the ring—by then already embroiled in the civil trial—were charged with federal sex trafficking counts. The plaintiffs claim that Pornhub had a policy to never take action against Content Partner videos, and that videos’ popularity rather than the evidence of the victim’s lack of consent.
“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,” the latest complaint states. 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 full complaint is here.
10/3: This article was updated to include comment from Aylo.
10/3: A previous version of this article stated the total amount sought as lower than accurate, as well as the total number of Jane Does bringing the case; the current version has been corrected to reflect this.
