After years on the run, GirlsDoPorn boss faces ‘beginning of the end’ in San Diego

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Aylo says it has since developed an improved internal program utilizing both human moderation and AI software to verify illegal content is not uploaded and/or disseminated. Pratt’s attorney didn’t immediately respond to USA TODAY’s message for comment on Wednesday. However, as part of the plea agreement, prosecutors said they would recommend a term in the mid-range of the sentencing guidelines, not above 12 years and six months. The film delves into regional preferences, consumer stories and industry insights, featuring interviews with sexologist Dr. Prakash Kothari and founders of emerging sex toy startups.

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In 2015, Holloway added several entities, allegedly controlled by Pratt and his partners, including Oh Well Media. The Vanuatu entities, the Jane Doe lawsuit alleges, were set up by a mysterious man from Wichita, Kansas, named Kevin Holloway, an attorney with the expertise to set up complex offshore financial structures. The plaintiffs finally tracked down and served Holloway in September 2018, but Pratt’s alleged offshore fixer, and, according to him, his “mentor,” died a month later. The attached affidavit, detailing Special Agent Lana K. Sabata’s investigation, includes information and statements uncovered during the Jane Does’ civil trial as the source of some of the state’s evidence against Pratt and the others. Ed Chapin, an attorney for the Jane Does, denied on Tuesday that anyone on his team knew the FBI was investigating GirlsDoPorn.

• As part of his plea, in which he admitted to filming about 100 videos for the GirlsDoPorn site and related sites, he also admitted that he was hired to make the harassment video by GirlsDoPorn’s founder, Michael James Pratt, and the site’s operator, Matthew Isaac Wolfe.
• In response, Garcia and others told the victims that they had to continue and finish the videos.
• The judge awarded the damages jointly against all of the defendants, so the action has a good shot at bankrupting all three of them.
• A not guilty plea was entered on Pratt’s behalf to a 19-count indictment that includes charges of sex trafficking, production of child pornography, sex trafficking of a minor, and conspiracy to launder monetary instruments.

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The plaintiffs’ lawyers will have to figure out who currently owns the site—likely some kind of overseas shell company—and where they keep their funds. The operators of the popular GirlsDoPorn website owe nearly $13 million to 22 young women who were tricked and coerced into shooting pornographic videos, a California judge ruled on Thursday. It took Judge Kevin Enright 187 pages to enumerate the many ways owner Michael Pratt and two co-conspirators mistreated the women. In the complaint for damages against Mindgeek it was alleged that victims had sent the company “complaints detailing the fraud and coercion they were subject to by Girls Do Porn” but the company had not ended the partnership. 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.

He awarded the women $9.45 million collectively in compensatory damages and $3.3 million in punitive damages. As part of his plea, Garcia admitted to threatening and deceiving the women, and paying other women to lie to reluctant recruits, falsely asserting that the footage would not be seen in the U.S. but was intended for private DVD collections overseas. To see some of the text messages sent by the alleged “reference women,” scroll through below or click here. Court exhibits shown at the trial show the man then known as Johnathon followed up with another email.

The administrative assistant said that she had forwarded some of these messages to Pratt, who then instructed her to block the models’ numbers. In 2014, Pratt and Wolfe co-created spinoff site GirlsDoToys, which is named alongside GirlsDoPorn in the criminal complaint. The GirlsDoToys videos were solo scenes shot during the same trips as the GirlsDoPorn B/G scenes. But GirlsDoPorn continued to be the flagship operation and is identified in court filings as the source of the majority of Pratt’s revenue, which he also uses to fund his 50/50 ventures GirlsDoToys, with Wolfe; and MomPOV, with Wiederhold. After filming the videos for about six to seven hours, the girls typically flew back home.

In addition to welcoming piracy, the feature also allowed users to post videos without verifying that they had the consent of the people appearing in the video to do so. The move came after a New York Times report revealed that the company had been – knowingly or not – profiting from videos that included child sexual exploitation, rape and revenge porn. In writing about this case, Samantha Cole described the genre as “a fantasy that plays on coercion, and a real-life version of the ‘casting couch’ porn trope, which blurs the line between reality and fiction”—and sex trafficking, we may add. It was a hope for the GirlsDoPorn trafficking survivors that Pornhub’s December 2020 decision to stop users from being able to download videos on the site and prohibit the upload of videos from unverified users would help to stop the spread of the GirlsDoPorn videos. The unfortunate truth is that the videos have been shared to other porn tube sites, and the doxing and harassment have escalated for the survivors. He ordered GirlsDoPorn’s founder Pratt, his business partner Wolfe, and porn actor Garcia to hand over all images, videos, likenesses, and copyrights and to take “active steps” to remove them from circulation.

• The group behind GirlsDoPorn recruited women by advertising clothed modeling gigs on Craigslist and elsewhere.
• I think I understand the way his mind works and that’s scary,’ Moser told the court.
• And then there are Episodes 439 and 443, released in 2018 and featuring the adult industry debut of one of the top rising starlets in porn right now, Emily Willis.
• The survivors claim that Montreal-based MindGeek—the company that owns and operates over 60 porn sites, much of what people generally understand to be the mainstream porn industry—failed to moderate and remove videos from its sites featuring the women being sex trafficked.
• During the civil trial, some of the women testified that once they arrived in San Diego, the defendants plied them with alcohol or marijuana and rushed them into signing away their rights over their own images.

“An important step in this long-healing process is for the victims to be able to take back control of their lives,” said FBI special agent in charge, Suzanne Turner. Under the terms of the order, US district judge Janis Sammartino has ordered Garcia to pay $18m (£13.6m) in restitution and hand over the video and image rights. Garcia told the women that the videos would be published only on DVDs and sold overseas. Alex Riggins covers federal courts and federal law enforcement for The San Diego Union-Tribune. He joined the Union-Tribune in 2018 from City News Service and previously wrote about courts and public safety in Idaho for the Times-News. He is a La Mesa native and proud Helix Highlander, Grossmont Griffin and San Diego State Aztec.

Ultimately, though, the wild success of those viral GirlsDoPorn Internet videos is what led to the site team’s downfall. The Does were eventually able to find one another—and by doing so, they collectively found the strength to come forth and build a successful legal case against GirlsDoPorn. When she flew to San Diego in October 2013 with her friend who found a modeling ad on Craigslist, Jane Doe 7 believed she’d be paid $2,000 to do a nude photo shoot. Defense attorneys argued that Wolfe, Pratt and Garcia did not personally harass any of the women and were not responsible for “internet trolls” who did so. San Diego Superior Court Judge Kevin Enright, who presided over a four-month-long bench trial, decided in favor of all 22 plaintiffs and against 13 defendants. The sentence is several years longer than the 12 years and seven months in prison that prosecutors suggested.

Meanwhile, the adult film star, called Andre Garcia, only paid her $3,000 and not the agreed higher sum because ‘she was pale and had bruises’. She was even allegedly put in contact with two women who themselves had apparently been filmed and had never been exposed, to assuage her fears. She was contacted by a ‘Jonathan N’ – who attorneys claim is a pseudonym for Pratt – and offered $5,000 to film adult scenes. Despite the understanding, Jane Doe 15 claimed she and the other models later discovered the tapes had been widely distributed online – along with their names, phone numbers and personal information. When Moser sent the complaints to Pratt, he allegedly told her to block their numbers.

A court document filed Friday noted that a settlement agreement had been reached and dismissed the claims. The plaintiffs are seeking damages under Section 1595 of US law, which lets victims of trafficking bring civil actions against either perpetrators or people who benefit when they “knew or should have known” about the crimes. Pornhub has faced increasing problems amid allegations that it hosted content featuring child sexual exploitation, nonconsensual violence, rape, and other illegal material. Pornhub has responded to the controversy by banning uploads from unidentified users and purging millions of user-uploaded videos. Besides Pornhub, the GirlsDoPorn videos were also hosted on other MindGeek properties referred to as “Tubesites” in the lawsuit.