MONTREAL — Aylo, the Montreal-founded company behind Pornhub, has failed to pay medical and therapy bills of 68 female victims of a sex-trafficking website it hosted, despite agreeing to do so as part of a deal that allowed the company to avoid criminal prosecution, The Logic has learned.

In November 2023, Aylo entered into a deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) to resolve a U.S. federal criminal investigation regarding its eight-year content partnership with GirlsDoPorn, a subscription website purporting to show women having their first on-camera sexual encounter.

According to court documents, GirlsDoPorn owner Michael Pratt and others lured women to hotel rooms for clothed modelling gigs before coercing them into sex acts with promises of more money and assurances the content wouldn’t go online. In fact, the material was posted and promoted on Pornhub and other Aylo-owned sites. In September, Pratt was sentenced to 27 years in prison for orchestrating the sex-trafficking scheme.

Aylo, formerly known as MindGeek, expressed regret at having hosted the content between 2011 and 2019, and said it would give financial assistance to the victims. Yet dozens of victims who filed claims with Aylo in March 2025 haven’t received payment for their medical bills, according to lawyer Brian Holm, who represents 68 of the women who appeared in GirlsDoPorn videos. 

“We received an automated message confirming receipt of the claims in March. Since then, we’ve heard next to nothing from Aylo,” Holm told The Logic. “My clients, who are seeking medical treatment and therapy as a result of Aylo’s mass dissemination of their videos, haven’t even received a response to their claims, let alone payment.” 

A DPA is a negotiated settlement allowing individuals and businesses to avoid criminal convictions by acknowledging responsibility for their acts. As part of its DPA, Aylo admitted to entering into an “unlawful monetary transaction” with GirlsDoPorn and agreed to pay US$1.8 million in criminal fines and forfeiture, and make monetary payments to individuals who were defrauded by the operators of the site. These costs include past and future medical services, therapy, lost income, temporary housing, child care and attorneys’ fees. Holm declined to say the total sum of his clients’ submissions to Aylo. “It’s a lot,” he said.

Holm has since submitted the claims to Toronto law firm Henein Hutchison Robitaille, the independent compliance monitor retained by Aylo to ensure the company’s adherence to the DPA. Holm said assistant U.S. attorney Tara McGrath informed him that Aylo had already had sufficient time to process the claims, and that he should submit the claims to the monitor. Reached by phone, McGrath declined to comment. U.S. Attorney’s Office spokesperson John Marzulli didn’t respond when asked if six months was a reasonable amount of time for the GirlsDoPorn victims to expect payment.

“Aylo takes complying with its obligations under the DPA seriously and has devoted substantial time and resources to doing so. While we won’t address Mr. Holm’s specific points out of respect for the DPA and the confidential nature of the process, we disagree that the company is non-compliant, both with respect to Mr. Holm’s assertions and with respect to claimants generally,” Aylo community head Alexzandra Kekesi told The Logic. Danielle Robitaille, managing partner at Henein Hutchison Robitaille, declined to comment.

Nearly every GirlsDoPorn victim suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder once their videos were made available on Pornhub and other Aylo-owned sites, according to the victims’ lawsuit against the company. 

One of the GirlsDoPorn victims, who spoke to The Logic on condition of anonymity, said she answered an advertisement promising paid, clothed modeling work in 2015, when she was 18, only to be coerced into sex once she arrived at the gig. “Nobody had a gun to my head, but I was in a state across the country from where I was living at the time, there were two grown men with me at all times, and I didn’t necessarily feel that I had the freedom to push back,” the woman said.

Though she was told her video was only for private consumption overseas, it was soon uploaded to Pornhub and seen by her family and friends. After trying to take her own life on the day the video was released, she was remanded to a psychiatry ward and then outpatient therapy. She soon changed her legal name.

Along with seeing a therapist and psychiatrist on a regular basis, the woman takes anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medication as a result of her ordeal. She is relying on reimbursement of hundreds of thousands of dollars from Aylo to ensure care for the rest of her life. “I don’t think I’ll ever be 100 per cent but I’d love to just keep improving and working on myself and finding better methods to deal with all of the trauma that I’m carrying,” she said. 

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