Pretty tough to get a fair trial when the defendant is perfectly willing to make it known what the Judge and other court staff and future jury pool prefer when it comes to their p.o.r.n viewing habits.

Mindgeek

Pornhub

Pornhub settles lawsuit brought by 50 women, including Canadians

Pornhub and several affiliated companies have settled a lawsuit brought by 50 women who alleged it profited from pornographic videos published without their full consent.

“The parties reached a mutual resolution to resolve the dispute and the terms are confidential,” Brian Holm, the lawyer for the plaintiffs, wrote in an email.

The lawsuit filed last December in U.S. district court in California alleged that MindGeek, parent company of Pornhub, knew or should have known that one of its commercial partners regularly used fraud and coercion to get women to appear in videos.

The lawsuit initially involved 40 women, including three Canadians, but it was later expanded to include 10 additional women and other businesses connected to MindGeek were added as defendants.

The original court filing alleged that MindGeek did not end a partnership with GirlsDoPorn until that company’s operators were charged by U.S. authorities in November 2019.

According to the FBI, three other people involved with GirlsDoPorn have pleaded guilty to sex trafficking charges, while two more are awaiting trial.

Authorities allege that women were recruited to participate in videos under false pretences and told that pornographic videos would never be posted online or released in the U.S.

However, the site’s operators planned to post the videos on their website, where viewers could pay to watch, with excerpts appearing on free sites, such as Pornhub, according to admissions made as part of the guilty pleas.

Women were also pressured to participate in sex acts that they did not want and paid less than they had been promised, one of GirlsDoPorn’s operators, Ruben Andre Garcia, admitted when he pleaded guilty in November.

In June, Garcia was sentenced to 20 years in a U.S. federal prison.

According to the lawsuit, MindGeek and GirlsDoPorn entered into a partnership in 2011. The deal allegedly allowed videos created by GirlsDoPorn to be hosted on MindGeek’s sites, such as Pornhub.

In January 2020, a California state court awarded 22 women who had appeared in GirlsDoPorn videos nearly US$13 million in damages.- Source

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