LOS ANGELES—A lawsuit was filed last week against Aylo, the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), two scientists, and an academic publisher, alleging a civil conspiracy to defame Alexander Rhodes, the founder of the so-called pornography addiction self-help group NoFap LLC, AVN has learned.
Filed in a Pennsylvania state court in Allegheny County, which encompasses Pittsburgh, Rhodes says the defendants purposefully and knowingly conspired against him and his organization. Aylo, the parent company of Pornhub.com, is the top-line defendant. The court docket reveals that this action was initiated in 2024.
AVN was previously tipped off by an anonymous source that Rhodes' attorneys were attempting to lump Aylo into a civil conspiracy with the named defendants back in 2024. But AVN was unable to confirm this until now with the immediate filing.
UCLA is named simply because it employs one of the scientists being sued, Dr. Nicole Prause. The other scientist named as a defendant is Dr. David Ley.
Also named is the academic publisher Taylor & Francis Group, a division of the U.K.-based trade publishing house and conference management company Informa.
Alexander Rhodes et al. v. Aylo Holdings SARL et al. is filed in the Court of Common Pleas of Allegheny County. The case number is GD-24-013043.
UCLA has attempted to dismiss itself from the case, according to the docket.
A statement from Aylo regarding the suit was not received by the post time.
Prause and Ley have conducted peer-reviewed academic research about the claims that NoFap can help people break so-called pornography addiction.
Note that Prause and Ley have concluded that NoFap, which promotes abstinence from masturbation and viewing pornography, is not an effective means of treatment. They also maintain that pornography is not addictive, and therefore, shouldn't be presented as such in public health messaging.
Prause's research, particularly, has connected NoFap participation among participants in the group's subreddit r/NoFap to potential extremist and violent sentiments.
Ley has been used as an expert witness in a variety of federal lawsuits that Aylo has brought against state governments that have tried to mandate unvetted and unsettled public health messaging that watching pornography is addictive like a drug.
One such case of Ley's testimony was the case where Aylo and other pornography sites were involved in challenging a Texas law that required both age verification and health warnings falsely characterizing pornography as a public health crisis.
Aylo's stake in the lawsuit is interesting. Legal counsel representing Rhodes attempts to paint a picture of a coordinated scheme hatched by the defendants to target Rhodes in an alleged years-long effort to "silence" him.
Tactics used to silence Rhodes, the suit alleges, include characterizing him and/or NoFap, or some of its participants, as aligned with antisemitic, far-right, and pseudoscientific beliefs.
It is worth noting that the American Psychological Association does not recognize problematic pornography use as an "addiction" that requires a twelve-step approach of sorts. A major sexual therapy journal in the United Kingdom recently affirmed such a sentiment.
And at the center of this scheme, the suit reads, is Aylo. The suit mentions many of the organizational and institutional reforms that Pornhub's parent company has undergone since an investigative commentary written by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof in December 2020.
The backlash from that column led to significant "nuclear" actions, such as deleting millions of unverified videos. Other actions included efforts to verify the identities of content creators, initiate criminal background checks on producers and content partners, and settling a Federal Trade Commission probe announced earlier this year.
Aylo additionally agreed to a deferred prosecution agreement to ensure compliance and transparency with federal sex trafficking prevention laws instead of criminal prosecution, which was a response to the GirlsDoPorn sex trafficking scheme that convicted trafficker Michael Pratt led.
There is no evidence that Aylo ever paid Prause, nor that Ley was, aside from serving as an expert witness.
"This is not a lawsuit about the cultural debates surrounding the use of legal pornography by consenting adults," the 202-page lawsuit states.
It adds, "This is a lawsuit about disinformation, sexual exploitation, and a criminal racketeering operation, in which a multinational, wealthy, and powerful pornography conglomerate—raking in hundreds of millions of dollars per year and its collaborators use illegal and unethical tactics to target therapists, scientists, journalists, authors, educators, politicians, addicts in recovery, recovery peer support groups, pornography recovery and filtering software providers, academic journals, survivors of sexual exploitation, whistleblowers, critics, and anyone else who interferes with their efforts to make as much money as possible."
Ley and Prause serve as the "mouthpieces" of this scheme by Aylo, the suit says. At the same time, UCLA and Taylor & Francis "aided and abetted the scheme, providing substantial assistance with actual knowledge of the wrongful activities." Rhodes' counsel refers to Ley, Prause, and Aylo as "porn industry defendants" throughout.
What is asked of the court is ultimately apologies, retractions, and gag orders on critics of Rhodes and the NoFap organization, which is a for-profit company that is organized in Pennsylvania. Further, the lawsuit mentions dozens of people who reportedly aided Ley, Prause, and Aylo in these alleged defamatory statements.
The individuals mentioned in the lawsuit are primarily journalists who have reported on NoFap, and many have done so critically, and at times, not mentioning the named defendants directly.
At least 38 journalists and columnists mentioned have allegedly written "disparaging" but otherwise factual content about Rhodes and NoFap.
For example, the author of this report is mentioned, alluding to an investigative report into anti-pornography organizations in Utah published by a different outlet. That report makes no mention of the defendants Prause, Ley, UCLA, or Taylor & Francis and features no interviews with any of them or their representatives.
Other notable journalists mentioned include NPR journalist Lisa Hagen, who published one of the most comprehensive journalistic accounts of NoFap's potential harms in February 2024. Eddie Kim, formerly of MEL Magazine, is mentioned for reporting on NoFap and receiving legal threats from Rhodes' former attorney.
Taylor & Francis is additionally accused of trademark dilution and other claims, thereby tarnishing NoFap's legally protected marks.
Mentions of other scientists and clinicians as "collaborators" also appear throughout the complaint. This also calls into question the plaintiffs' claims that the defendants intimidated journalists and scientists who disagreed with them.
