GirlsDoPorn videographer sentenced to 4 years in prison for sex trafficking

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Pratt is being held in Spain pending extradition to the US, where he faces a litany of federal sex crime charges, including sex trafficking, production of child sex abuse images, sex trafficking of a minor, and conspiracy to launder monetary instruments in connection with Girls Do Porn, the FBI 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 online that had already been filmed, federal prosecutors said. Since their arrests, Garcia, Wolfe, and several others have pleaded guilty to sex trafficking. Garcia was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison, and Wolfe awaits sentencing. Michael Pratt was recently captured in Spain, while his victims, their attorneys, and federal prosecutors await his extradition to the U.S. Before the video shoots, Garcia offered victims marijuana or alcohol and some drank or smoked with Garcia before filming.

Abuse isn’t pornography

Pratt, who charged users a GirlsDoPorn subscription fee, made more than $17 million in revenue, according to the records. Pratt is accused of working with four people − Matthew Wolfe, Ruben Garcia, Valorie Moser, and Theodore Gyi − to “recruit young adult women to engage in commercial sex acts by fraud and coercion,” according to court documents. Michael Pratt, the owner of GirlsDoPorn, appeared in a federal court on Tuesday and pleaded not guilty to sex trafficking charges filed in the Southern District of California on Oct. 10, 2019, according to a Justice Department news release.

• Victims were promised thousands of dollars for 30 minutes of adult film work and guaranteed that their identities would remain anonymous and that the videos would never be posted online or distributed in the U.S.
• This was cited by many of the victims as an intimidation tactic used by the producers, who wanted the women to feel trapped inside of the hotel room; unable to say no to the demands they were giving at the last minute, preventing them from leaving.
• She told BuzzFeed News she hopes this case helps weed out other shady and “criminal” operations.
• To help us create more content like this, consider joining Fighter Club at FTND.org/FC.
• Other co-defendants have struck plea deals, but Pratt — who faces decades in federal prison if convicted — could choose to take the case to trial after pleading not guilty.
• This would turn into just one of this website’s many scandals, but by no means the largest or most costly – rather, becoming just great promotion for the site’s owners, who stood to profit from the site’s name being repeated by newscasters and pundits all across the country.

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Her rapist, Ruben Andre Garcia, was sentenced in June 2021 to 20 years in prison. His sentencing came several months after he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit sex trafficking by force, coercion, and fraud, and admitted to his part in recruiting for and performing in GirlsDoPorn videos. Once the women arrived in San Diego to shoot, they said, they were lured to a hotel room, where they were plied with marijuana and alcohol. They were then asked to participate in a pornographic video shoot, with the producers telling them that the final product would only be distributed via DVD in foreign countries. The women allege that Pratt and Wolfe also hired a woman, Amberlyn Nored, to pose as a “reference” to reassure them that the final product would not be posted online. GirlsDoPorn and GirlsDoToys were sex trafficking operations whose leaders admitted that, from 2013 to 2019, they convinced victims to make adult videos by lying that their imagery would only be sold to private collectors abroad and not posted online.

She told the Guardian that the #MeToo movement had a major impact on the trial. “[As] the only millennial female reporter to cover the trial in-person … I don’t think this trial could have had this result and I don’t think the Jane Does’ attorneys could have built a case and gotten them to agree to testify were it not for the #MeToo movement in the US. Those who tried to back out once it was clear what was involved were threatened, plied with alcohol and told they would have to pay for their own way home from San Diego. After applying for the modelling work, they received phone calls from other women who have been described as a key part of the business – “reference women” who pitched the idea of making porn and assured them that it would never go online. The women told the court they had replied to ads on Craigslist asking for “beautiful college-type preppy girls” aged 18 to 22 interested in modelling.

If the women tried to leave, the group would either force the girls to “perform certain sex acts” or threaten them with lawsuits and flight cancelations, the documents continued. Throughout the alleged conspiracy, Pratt and the co-defendants recruited hundreds of young women from around the U.S. and Canada who were aspiring models, court records show. Once the young women responded to the group’s online ads, Pratt and the others would tell them that the jobs were for pornographic videos and not modeling gigs, according to court documents. Theodore Wilfred Gyi, 44, pleaded guilty to a federal count of conspiracy to commit sex trafficking for his role in the website’s operations, which prosecutors say involved lying to women who appeared in the videos by telling them their scenes would only be distributed on DVDs to private customers.

At some point we realize we’ve never quite recovered from the grisly pictures imposed on us in health class all those years ago. Superficial, often poorly taught sex ed and a pervasive cultural shh leave many people in the dark, missing out on or avoiding candid conversations about sex and all it entails. I recalled a conversation I’d had with a woman named Cynthia, a young mother of three who grew up in rural southwest Virginia. Cynthia was raised in a Pentecostal family; James, her husband, is a strict Catholic who doesn’t believe in birth control. While less drastic than Paley’s, hurdles have persisted for generations of women since.

Judge Kevin Enright described in his findings how the need to keep finding young women new to the porn industry drove the “deceptive, coercive and threatening behaviour” used by the defendants. A US judge has awarded $13m in damages to 22 women who were defrauded by the owners of GirlsDoPorn, a website specialising in “amateur”-style pornography. Several people linked to GirlsDoPorn were named in a federal indictment handed up in 2019, including the company’s co-owners, Matthew Isaac Wolfe and Michael James Pratt. “Their advertisements would say ‘College women sought for video shoots for $5,000.’ If you’re young and need help, it’s kind of a no-brainer. They had no idea.” “It’s vindication for the brave women who came forward after being manipulated and lied to by GirlsDoPorn,” Ed Chapin, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs, told BuzzFeed News. “They were young and inexperienced, and their lives were changed because they were sucked in by this disgusting, fraudulent scheme.”