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| Source: LIONEL BONAVENTURE/AFP via Getty Images) |
The owner of Pornhub acknowledged this week in a plea deal with federal prosecutors that the website has carried adult movies for years that feature women coerced by a production firm to engage in sexual acts on camera.
The parent company of Pornhub, Aylo, has agreed to defer prosecution in exchange for compensating sex trafficking victims and paying a $1.8 million fine. The business has acknowledged distributing illicit content, but it has entered a not guilty plea to using the earnings of sex trafficking in unlawful financial activities. She expressed her apologies for this truth on her website.
The government said that Aylo should have known it was working with a group engaged in human trafficking, even though the company did not claim to have broken any federal laws against sex trafficking. Aiello's agreement also includes a three-year probationary period, and if she follows through on it, the company's charges will be dropped.
According to Aiello's confession and court records, from 2017 to 2019, a production business paid Aiello to stream pornography, that Aiello knew comprised videos of women who had not granted consent to post the content online. Women who appeared in the recordings started requesting takedowns from Aiello in 2016, claiming they had been duped. According to court records, Aiello learned of the federal case that the production firm was the target of in 2017.
Prosecutors claim that Aiello neglected to independently confirm that the ladies gave their approval for the recordings to be posted online and failed to act upon all takedown requests. According to court documents, even after Aylo withdrew the production company's videos from Pornhub in 2019, some users reposted the videos and they remained accessible online.
Aylo, which has been run by different executives since the alleged incidents, released a statement stating that it "deeply regrets" hosting the footage on Pornhub.
