GirlsDoPorn videographer sentenced to 4 years in prison for sex trafficking

Choose a Girl

Daniel’s video corroborates Evie’s story, but her other adult videos are shown to be violent and Barba has a hard time with how to explain to a jury the difference between Evie’s porn videos and Daniel’s video of Evie’s assault. A college student becomes a pornography star, and then she is sexually assaulted by some classmates who confuse fantasy with reality. When the case goes to court, the victim lands in the hot seat as questioning gets underway.

• With a greater focus on peer relationships and increased smartphone ownership comes increased opportunities for bullying and exclusionary behaviors like ostracism or shunning.
• Following an explosive New York Times column on December 4 that accused the company of hosting rape videos and child pornography, the company changed its policies so that only verified users can upload content, and started deleting millions of unverified videos from its platform.
• Someone with a porn addiction may see how these actors behave and expect their partner to act the same way during sexual activity.
• Fifty GirlsDoPorn victims are now suing Pornhub, demanding more than $100 million in damages for their pain and suffering.

Investigation and legal action

And in half the cases, a chatbot has also pointed people to where they can seek help. Defense court filings allege that any instances where the women’s real names were posted online was not committed by the defendants, who also claim that alcohol and/or drugs were not provided to the women during filming, as that “would make the footage filmed unusable.” The owner and three employees of GirlsDoPorn and GirlsDoToys, coerced victims into sexual acts when they were made to believe they were applying for modeling jobs, according to the Department of Justice.

• Simply searching for a term such as \”girls do porn\” on a website is not illegal and generally does not constitute criminal activity.
• A judge ruled in favor of the women in January 2020, ordering Girls Do Porn to pay them $12.7 million in damages and granting them ownership rights to the content.
• Some of the victims say they were sexually assaulted and physically prevented by the defendants from leaving the San Diego hotel rooms and short- term rentals where the videos were filmed.
• “Out of respect for the integrity of court proceedings, our policy is not to comment on ongoing litigation,” said Ethical Capital Partner’s spokeswoman, Bain.

After stint on FBI’s Most Wanted List, GirlsDoPorn founder arrives in San Diego court

Information about something like this may technically be accessible, but there can be a comfort in assuming our experiences are universal, especially those which are painful or difficult, which might prevent a person from seeking it out. She does not annotate the interviews, and one of her skills as an interviewer is that she does not moralize at her subjects and avoids steering their answers. But Porn has the quality of a good novel, in that while reading it you often notice small details or perspectives which make you think about the world, or your own life, differently, without having a lesson overtly spelled out to you. It struck me while reading the above conversations, for example, that theoretically open, progressive public discourse around porn can have almost the same silencing effect as no discourse at all. In the sense that, when a consensus emerges on the progressive perspective to hold on a certain aesthetic of porn, it will change the way we speak and what we admit to, but perhaps not how we feel. I found myself wondering too if this kind of progressive consensus can have negative outcomes as well as positive ones.

GirlsDoPorn deceived vulnerable women to profit off amateur porn—until Jane Does fought back.

When Plaintiff refused, Pratt, now 41, and his conspirators immediately pressured her and plied her with booze and pills to soften her reluctance,” the lawsuit states. Website co-owner Michael James Pratt remains a fugitive and the FBI is offering a $50,000 reward for information leading to his arrest. Other victims were physically prevented from leaving the San Diego hotel rooms or short-term rental units where the scenes were filmed, often with defendants barricading the doors with cameras or recording equipment, prosecutors said. If the women ever changed their minds about filming or completing the scenes, the defendants threatened to sue them, cancel their flights home or post footage that had already been filmed online, the U.S. In late July, one of Pratt’s coconspirators, 40-year-old Matthew Isaac Wolfe, pleaded guilty to committing sex trafficking by force, fraud, and coercion.

According to prosecutors, the producer promised models who answered ads that videos they appeared in would remain anonymous and would be sold only as DVDs, not distributed on the internet. “The defendant lied and tricked these women, made millions along the way, and left his co-conspirators to face justice while he fled,” said Special Agent in Charge Suzanne Turner. “Michael James Pratt is a danger to society, regardless of where he is, and is likely still victimizing people while on the run with his continued lies and false promises.” Pratt, who previously resided in the U.S., reportedly fled during a civil trial before he could be brought in to testify and before feds unsealed an indictment against him, according to the Daily Beast.

So the footage from that horrific night — which was uploaded to the platform without her consent — was downloaded millions of times. So, while GirlsDoPorn has since been shuttered and she now owns the rights to the videos, Jane Doe is forever playing a game of whack-a-mole, finding clips in new places all the time. She is forced to relive that night each time as she petitions for their removal.

On January 2, 2020, after a 99-day bench trial, Judge Kevin A. Enright awarded the plaintiffs $13 million in compensatory and punitive damages. The defendants were ordered to remove all videos of plaintiffs from the Internet and cease all distribution of them. During the civil trial, Pratt, Garcia, Wolfe, and several other individuals were criminally indicted for sex trafficking. Most of the hours-long shoots happened in hotel rooms and at short-term rental units in San Diego, court records show.

The companies deny knowingly profiting from illegal and abusive content and insist that reforms now keep such content off the site. It’s these kinds of videos — uploaded without any verification of the age or consent of those depicted — that now drive Mickelwait’s fight to knock Pornhub out of business. “We have taken unprecedented steps to mitigate the ability of bad actors to upload illegal material on our platforms,” including using AI technologies and human monitoring to police content, she said. “We have no indication she even knows this is being filmed,” Mickelwait said of this video, which has been on the site for two years. “You can hear the woman yelling to stop because it hurts,” she said recently of the video, which includes a tag showing it’s been on the site five years.

Through their lawyer, the women accused Pratt and his attorney of filing a bogus bankruptcy case purely to stall the civil trial. In March of 2019, a federal bankruptcy judge ruled that the civil case could proceed despite Pratt’s bankruptcy case, and Pratt voluntarily dismissed the bankruptcy case. After the girls agreed, they were flown to San Diego, but instead of modeling gigs, they were told the job was actually to appear in an adult film. The women were reassured that their videos would only be released on DVD to collectors in Australia and New Zealand, not online. Victims said in lawsuit filings that GirlsDoPorn and GirlsDoToys lured them into conversations by posing as a modeling agency in Craigslist ads, with links to fake sites, offering modeling gigs in cities throughout the U.S. and Canada. They eventually offered thousands of dollars to make adult videos and connected potential victims with fake performers who convinced them that they’d enjoyed the experience, according to the suit.