Girls Do Porn Owner, Employees Charged With Sex Trafficking

Choose a Girl

MindGeek doesn’t regulate the types of videos being uploaded and often allows content that is illegal or stolen.To upload a video, you don’t need an ID or background check—just provide an email address and you’re in. The chatbot was designed and created by the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), a nonprofit which removes CSAM from the web, and the Lucy Faithfull Foundation, a charity which works to precent child sexual abuse. It appeared alongside the warning messages a total of 2.8 million times. The trial counted the number of sessions on Pornhub, which could mean people are counted multiple times, and it did not look to identify individuals. The report says there was a “meaningful decrease” in searches for CSAM on Pornhub and that at least “in part” the chatbot and warning messages appear to have played a role.

62 women sue PornHub in latest San Diego case involving GirlsDoPorn videos

Victims were told that the contracts they were presented with simply said what the victims had already been told, including that the videos would not be posted online. Nowhere on the contract could the reader find a reference to “girlsdoporn,” “girlsdotoys” or pornography at all. The companies were instead identified with innocuous names, such as Bubblegum Casting. 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.

• “It is our hope that this resolution, which includes certain agreed payments to the women whose images were posted on the company’s platforms and an independent monitorship brings some measure of closure to those negatively affected,” Peace said in the statement.
• But legal repercussions from those pre-purge days — including federal monitoring and an ever-growing number of lawsuits — are still rippling through Pornhub and its network of user-generated porn sites.
• Once the videos were posted online many victims contacted Garcia and his co-conspirators seeking to get their videos taken off the websites.
• Over the past few years, Pornhub has had a dramatic downfall after being exposed and held accountable for profiting from mass sexual crime.
• The FBI indicted GirlsDoPorn for federal counts of sex trafficking in October 2019, Vice noted.

How Pornhub Makes Trafficking Easy

Few other porn sites buy billboards in Times Square or have their year-in-review trend lists published across news websites. Althaus is one of dozens of victims who have brought similar allegations against GirlsDoPorn and websites like Pornhub that promoted the since-closed website’s content, “generated millions of dollars in revenue,” the lawsuit states. “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.” Pratt’s GirlsDoPorn co-conspirator, Michael Isaac Wolfe, admitted to coercing about 100 “models” between the ages of 18 and 23 into making pornographic videos for their San Diego-based website, which he said would not be shared in the United States. It’s time to finally hold Pornhub and its owners accountable to the full extent of the law and to enact policies to prevent this kind of abuse in the future.

Filming process

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• Nearly two dozen videos uploaded to Pornhub showed a 12-year-old Alabama boy being repeatedly drugged and raped.
• Pratt victimized hundreds of young women, federal prosecutors said, including at least one girl under the age of 18.
• Prosecutors say the website’s operators led women to believe the videos they appeared in would be distributed only to private customers living outside of the country, rather than proliferated online, despite always intending to post the videos on the internet.

The more traffic the video gets, the more opportunities Pornhub has to earn from ads placed in and around the videos. They are literally profiting off both criminal behavior and people’s pain. One of the challenges to stopping trafficking is a culture of corruption among law enforcement and people in authority. Where money is to be made, a system often emerges that protects predators and silences victims.

He also falsely assured at least two women that their videos wouldn’t be posted online after knowing other women’s videos had already been uploaded to the Internet, the plea agreement states. A former employee of San Diego-based GirlsDoPorn.com who appeared in more than 70 of the website’s videos pleaded guilty Thursday to a federal conspiracy charge. “This defendant lured one victim after another with fake modeling ads, false promises, and deceptive front companies, ultimately devolving to threats to coerce these women into making sex videos,” said Acting US Attorney Randy Grossman in a statement issued at the time of his conviction. They were allegedly told that the job would be anonymous and that their videos would not be posted on the web but were being made for DVDs of private collectors or far-flung markets.

Most of the videos created as a part of the conspiracy were shot at hotels or short-term rental units in the San Diego area. If one of the victims agreed to act in the pornographic video, Garcia and his co-conspirators promptly booked flights to San Diego within a day or two to limit the chances that the victim would change her mind. After the victim arrived at the hotel or short-term rental unit, Garcia would continue to falsely assure them that the videos would not be posted online and that no one who knew the victims would see – or even know about – the videos.

Internet porn has been around for a long time now, and has been for a good majority of our lives and the lives of people around us. So much that viewing online porn has been considered to be the societal norm. In fact, the average age for an American child to have viewed porn for the first time is 13.

I’m guessing you’re some sort of pornography addict, if it means that much to you that you whip out this level of hyperbole. It’s really quite telling that Pornhub is removing itself from all markets where it’s mandated to do this. Like all dealers of addictive and abusive substances, they want to hook their users in while young and impressionable. But the truth is, this will never happen, because sites like PornHub are not interested in keeping minors off. They want to get young kids (boys mostly, although I hear girls are getting more amenable) addicted to their porn.

It has long been suspected that Pornhub has been aware of the content derived from human trafficking on their site for years. “Plaintiff fears for her life and safety, as well as the lives and safety of people close to her,” the complaint continues. Althaus has been unable to maintain a job or healthy relationships and “has been repeatedly followed and harassed,” according to the lawsuit. The complaint further alleges that Pratt took Althaus’ cellphone during the filming and only gave it back to her afterward.

Aylo operates free and paid adult websites where content providers can post and distribute adult videos, with Aylo generating revenue through licensing agreements, advertisements and subscriptions. James Smith, head of the FBI’s New York office, said Aylo Holdings “knowingly enriched itself by turning a blind eye” to victims who told the company they had been deceived and coerced into the videos. The deal calls for the Montreal-based company to pay more than $1.8 million to the U.S. government, as well as make separate payments to the individual women harmed by the trafficking. It also requires appointment of an independent monitor for three years, after which the charges will be dismissed. The website was dedicated to revealing the true identities of the women appearing in those sex videos, “causing the victims to be subjected to severe harassment,” the DOJ said in a press release last year. Five years after he fled the country and minutes before his former right-hand man was sentenced in federal court, authorities announced that the alleged mastermind behind the GirlsDoPorn sex-trafficking ring had touched down in San Diego in federal custody.