MONTREAL — The Montreal-founded company behind Pornhub and other adult titles is the subject of a U.S. federal criminal investigation regarding its relationship with a sex-trafficking website.

Prosecutors are pursuing Aylo, formerly known as MindGeek, “in connection with MindGeek’s knowing and intentional engagement in monetary transactions involving the proceeds of sex trafficking by the operators of GirlsDoPorn.com and GirlsDoToys.com,” according to a U.S. Department of Justice message to Kristy Althaus. In September, Althaus filed suit against Aylo in U.S. District Court, alleging she was raped during a GirlsDoPorn shoot, and that GirlsDoPorn published the resulting content on MindGeek’s various platforms.

According to the document, which was filed as part of Althaus’s case against Aylo, law enforcement was pursuing Aylo for engaging in an unlawful monetary transaction, a violation of the U.S. Code. An adjoining declaration from Lisa Marks, Althaus’s lawyer, said she learned that the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York was negotiating a deferred prosecution agreement with MindGeek. The agreement had not yet been signed, as of Oct. 19, according to Marks’s declaration. 

“I can’t confirm or deny the existence of any investigation,” U.S. Attorney’s Office spokesperson John Marzulli wrote in an email to The Logic.

Marks declined The Logic’s request for comment, but gave permission to use Althaus’s name as written in the complaint. (Althaus has changed her name, and chose to file the suit as “Jane Doe f/k/a Kristy Althaus.”)

A deferred prosecution agreement is a negotiated procedure allowing individuals and corporations to avoid criminal convictions by acknowledging responsibility for their acts. It can include the payment of restitution and to comply with ongoing investigations. In return, criminal charges are either dropped or go unpursued.

Aylo is the Montreal-founded, Luxembourg-based company behind Pornhub, Brazzers and other popular pornography websites. Visa and Mastercard dropped payment services to Pornhub following the December 2020 publication of a New York Times column claiming Pornhub was “infested with rape videos.” In August 2022, Visa and Mastercard halted payment services for MindGeek-owned advertising portal TrafficJunky after a U.S. District Court ruled Visa was potentially liable for child sexual-abuse material on Pornhub.

Ethical Capital Partners (ECP), a private equity firm with an office in Ottawa but registered in the British Virgin Islands, acquired MindGeek in March. MindGeek changed its name to Aylo in August. At the time of the acquisition, ECP, which has said it practises “ethics-first investing,” pledged to make it “the internet leader in fighting illegal online content.”

Yet as The Logic found, Aylo’s flagship brand Pornhub promoted role-playing material depicting incestuous relationships and non-consensual filming as recently as August.

In response to The Logic’s questions about the federal investigation in the U.S., ECP partner Solomon Friedman said in an email, “We will not comment at this time on the status of this matter.” 

“It comes as no surprise that the United States Department of Justice has an ongoing criminal investigation regarding MindGeek’s partnership with the GirlsDoPorn sex-trafficking venture,” said Brian Holm, a San Diego lawyer who represents 130 women who appeared on the Girls Do Porn website. In a statement of claim filed in a California district court, Holm’s clients alleged that when they alerted MindGeek that the videos in which they featured had been made or posted without their consent, MindGeek did not dump GirlsDoPorn as a partner or alert authorities. Rather, the company continued to profit from GirlsDoPorn’s content.

GirlsDoPorn was a Pornhub content partner between 2011 and 2019. The videos were popular, with nearly 670 million views on Pornhub alone. In 2019, a California judge ruled that the site’s producers lured women between the ages of 18 and 23 to San Diego hotel rooms with promises of clothed modelling gigs. The producers then used “deceptive, coercive, and threatening behavior” to get the women to sign consent forms, before coaxing them to perform pornographic acts on camera, according to Althaus’s complaint, in part by assuring them that the content wouldn’t go online.

Instead, according to the complaint, the company uploaded clips to Pornhub, and shared the videos with the women’s “friends, family members, classmates, employers, and social media contacts” so the content went viral in their communities. The women suffered “severe harassment, emotional and psychological trauma, and reputational harm” as a result, the complaint reads. Many lost family relationships and professional opportunities. Some became suicidal as a result. 

Five of the people behind GirlsDoPorn have since pleaded guilty to conspiracy and sex trafficking charges. The company’s owner Michael Pratt fled San Diego in 2019 and was placed on the FBI’s Most Wanted list in September 2022. Spanish National Police arrested him that December in Madrid. Pratt has been charged with sex trafficking, production of child pornography, sex trafficking of a minor and conspiracy to launder monetary instruments in connection with the operation of the website. He is currently fighting extradition to the U.S., according to court filings. 

“Through MindGeek’s world-wide distribution channels, MindGeek provided GirlsDoPorn the network and financial lifeline for its unlawful business,” Althaus’s complaint reads. “GirlsDoPorn could not have achieved the distribution, sales, and profit it had—and that MindGeek benefitted from—without MindGeek’s crucial support and participation.”

Though she has since changed her name, she says she continues to face harassment as a result of the videos published on Pornhub. “As recently as May-June 2023, Plaintiff was assaulted at her home by a self-described PornHub subscriber who confronted her about the recent removal of the subject videos from Defendants’ websites,” the complaint reads.