GirlsDoPorn

GirlsDoPorn was a pornographic website active from 2009 to 2020, when six people involved were charged on counts of sex trafficking by force, fraud and coercion in November 2019. In December 2019, two more individuals were charged with obstruction of sex trafficking enforcement.<ref name="CourthouseNews12/17/19"></ref> The website was removed in January 2020. According to the United States Department of Justice, the website and its sister website GirlsDoToys generated over $17 million in revenue. Videos were featured on GirlsDoPorn.com as well as pornography aggregate websites such as Pornhub, where the channel reached the top 20 most viewed, with approximately 680 million views.
Pornography produced by the company—which was based in San Diego, California—was in the style of a "casting couch", featuring women who were not professional pornographic actors. A lawsuit filed in 2016 involving 22 plaintiffs alleged "intentional misrepresentation, fraudulent concealment, unlawful and fraudulent business practices, and the intentional infliction of emotional distress" on the parts of Michael Pratt (co-owner), Matthew Wolfe (co-owner and cameraman), and Andre Garcia (pornographic actor). In January 2020, the plaintiffs received damages of $12.775 million, as well as ownership to videos they featured in.
Lawsuits and other testimony describe alleged practices by GirlsDoPorn in detail. According to a lawsuit, women who responded to fake modeling advertisements on Craigslist were put into contact with "reference girls" who pretended to have had positive experiences shooting videos for the company. Some participants were told that they would be paid between $2,000 and $6,000 to have sex for 30 minutes on camera. All plaintiffs said that they were given verbal promises that the videos would never be released on the internet or in the United States, instead being told the videos would be put on DVDs and sold only to private buyers or independent video stores in Australia, New Zealand, or South America. When they reached San Diego, they were made to sign contracts that did not mention the name "GirlsDoPorn". The Department of Justice said that "some were sexually assaulted and in at least one case raped". Filming was described as lasting up to seven hours and, according to an ex-employee, 50% of women were not paid the amount they were promised.
History.
GirlsDoPorn was a pornography website owned by Michael Pratt (born 1982, New Zealand), who also worked as the editor. Matthew Wolfe (born 1982 or 1983, New Zealand) served as co-owner and cameraman. He is also a childhood friend of Pratt's. Doug Wiederhold and Ruben "Andre" Garcia (born 1986 or 1987) were male pornographic actors for the company. Lawyer Adam Sadock began working for the company in 2012, while camerman Teddy Gyi filmed around 120 videos between 2015 and 2017. Pratt began planning GirlsDoPorn in 2006, founding it in 2009.
Pratt began working in the pornographic industry around the year 2000, after graduating high school. He initially launched the websites Wicked Movies, Kute Kittens and TeenieFlixxx, the last an affiliate of the existing website ExploitedTeens, all of which produced pornography in the same style that GirlsDoPorn later would. In 2007, he moved to the United States to film pornography. Between 2007 and 2009, Wiederhold worked with Pratt, the two filming videos of Wiederhold having sex in hotel rooms with women who were not in the porn industry. These videos formed the basis of the videos first released by GirlsDoPorn. In 2010, Wiederhold and Pratt created the MILF pornography website MomPOV, which has a Vanuatu address but operates from Las Vegas. In 2011, Wolfe moved from New Zealand to the United States. Wolfe was involved with Pratt's work from 2008 onwards. Over 100 videos were filmed by Wolfe for GirlsDoPorn between 2011 and 2020.
GirlsDoPorn was active during a period of growing consumption of "casting couch" internet pornography. Such pornography is often filmed in hotel rooms with minimal crew, and may feature women who have not previously filmed pornography and are given money on-camera. In the case of GirlsDoPorn, the women would be asked about their sex lives on camera, and sometimes videos including women reading parts of their contracts aloud. "Vice" reported that "the current iteration of the 'casting couch' trope is largely based on" Backroom Casting Couch, a series that started in 2007 by a pornographer who allegedly deceived the women featured in his videos.
Over a dozen U.S. and foreign companies were associated with GirlsDoPorn throughout its lifespan. In 2011, GT Group Limited—a company referenced in the Panama Papers—was listed as its parent corporation. "The Sydney Morning Herald" reported in 2011 that GT Group Limited was founded by a man associated with arms-smuggling, drug gangs, and tax fraud. By 2017, its parent corporation were Oh Well Media Limited, a company based in Port Vila, Vanuatu, which is an offshore tax haven according to the "San Diego Reader". The company BLL Media Inc. was referred to in contracts signed with some women who worked for the company.
GirlsDoPorn.com had a subscription model costing $30 per month. It had a spin-off site, GirlsDoToys, launched by Pratt and Wolfe in 2014. In January 2017, GirlsDoPorn.com was the 33,949th-most-visited website in the United States, receiving roughly 1.2 million visitors between November and December 2016, including approximately 84,000 who were visiting the website for the first time. According to the United States Department of Justice, the websites GirlsDoPorn and GirlsDoToys generated over $17 million in revenue. Pratt was the sole recipient of profits from the websites. Upon filing bankruptcy in 2018, Pratt estimated his income to be greater than $60,000 per month, and reported over $134,000 in back taxes.
The company received tabloid attention in 2013 and 2014 when it was reported that two beauty pageant models for Miss Teen USA were the subjects of videos on the website; as a consequence of this being made public, the models ceased connection with the beauty pageants. Some women who filmed videos with GirlsDoPorn later became professional pornographic actors, including Emily Willis, who filmed two videos with the website in 2018 after dating Garcia for a month, according to her own account.
In October 2019, in a court testimony, Wolfe said that GirlsDoPorn continued to recruit new women, whose contracts did not mention the name of the company. GirlsDoPorn.com appeared to go offline in January 2020, according to "Ars Technica".
Content on other websites.
In addition to being released on GirlsDoPorn.com, videos produced by the company were also released on websites which aggregated pornographic videos such as Pornhub, XVideos, and YouPorn. They were viewed over 800 million times on these websites, including roughly 680 million views on Pornhub, where GirlsDoPorn was amongst the top 20 most viewed channels. Overall, court documents found that videos produced by the website were watched over 1 billion times, and pirated versions were viewed hundreds of millions of times. GirlsDoPorn's channel was removed from Pornhub in October 2019, which journalists at "Daily Dot" and "Motherboard" said was a slow response to the incident. Additionally, the videos could still be found afterwards unofficially on Pornhub's website. "Motherboard" found that the digital fingerprinting which Pornhub uses to remove duplicates of removed videos, Vobile, prevented them from uploading some identical or nearly-identical clips of GirlsDoPorn videos, but also did not remove many slight variants on the footage.
A lawsuit was filed in December 2020 against MindGeek, which owns Pornhub, for its partnership with GirlsDoPorn and alleged continual hosting of GirlsDoPorn videos up to December 2020, after repeated requests for removal by subjects. Following this, "Vice" reported that XVideos, XNXX and Spankbang had removed many GirlsDoPorn videos on their sites and ensured that the search term "Girls Do Porn" returned no results.
Discussion website Reddit had a forum, "r/girlsdoporn", which began in 2013 and was dedicated to posting links and videos as well as the identities of the women featured on GirlsDoPorn. In October 2019, amidst a lawsuit against GirlsDoPorn, moderators removed most content on the subreddit and announced it to be in hiatus. Reddit removed the subreddit shortly afterwards. The forum had approximately 99,000 accounts subscribed to it at the time of its closure. In 2014, GirlsDoPorn.com launched an internet forum. The company was also active on Instagram, where posts would brag about how young the actors involved were.
Reported practices.
Details of alleged practices by the company have been documented in lawsuits, mainstream media and court testimonies by employees of the company. One attorney pursuing legal actions reported that he and his co-counsel communicated with 150 women who said that they were misled during their experience filming videos for GirlsDoPorn. A lawsuit filed in 2016 contained information from 22 plaintiffs. Six further women who were not part of the lawsuit told NBC 7 San Diego journalists in 2019 that they had similar experiences.
Casting process.
According to the 2016 lawsuit, GirlsDoPorn was associated with fake modeling websites such as BeginModeling, ModelingGigs, ModelingWork, and Bubblegum Casting. Advertisements for these websites were posted on Craigslist under college towns and localities spanning America and Canada. Explore Talent was also used by them to find models. They requested applicants aged between 18 and 22, and provided forms asking for physical and personal information about applicants.
Pratt, Wolfe and Garcia often used aliases when dealing with the girls they recruited and never revealed their real names. Pratt would use names such as "Mike" and "Mark". Garcia mostly went by "Jonathan", and Wolfe used "Ben", "Joshua" and "Isaac" when doing the recruiting and subsequent filming. They would contact women who had applied and tell them that the job was not modeling, but having sex on camera. They claimed that the footage would be used only for DVDs sold to private buyers and independent video stores in Australia, New Zealand, or South America and would never be released online or in the United States in any form. There were instances where women were lured to San Diego under the false pretences of a clothed modeling or nude modeling shoot, if they declined initial offers to film pornography.
Some women were offered between $2,000 and $6,000 for 30 minutes of filming, consisting of five sexual positions lasting between five and seven minutes apiece. Women involved report frequent and persistent contact from the company before they agreed. Filming would take place in San Diego, California, and their travel expenses and accommodation would be paid for. Several women report that Garcia booked flights for them before they had fully committed.
Women who agreed were put into contact with a "reference girl". According to one such person, reference girls were hired to lie to the women and conceal information in order to convince them to agree to the job. They were paid between $25 and $200 per contact they persuaded. They would communicate via text or video call. Some women took months of convincing to agree. According to several of these women, reference girls would make false claims about distribution of the videos, saying that their ostensible videos had not been seen within the United States. One woman involved reported Garcia threatening to sue her after she attempted to withdraw from the process shortly before she was due to fly to San Diego.
Filming process.
Once in San Diego, women were met by employees who had signed non-disclosure agreements forbidding them from mentioning the name GirlsDoPorn. They were allegedly instructed to call the company Plus One Media, or deny that the videos produced would be published online. The women stayed in four-star hotels, where filming took place. Additionally, women have alleged being lied to in various ways by Garcia to convince them to enter his apartment: in some cases, he said that the women should stay at his apartment before he drove them to the airport the next morning; in others, he feigned needing to stop at his apartment and suggested that the women should come inside briefly.
Women in the 2016 lawsuit were hurried to sign contracts written in hard-to-understand legal terminology, sometimes being told the contracts were needed for tax purposes. The contract did not mention "GirlsDoPorn". The contracts involving the 22 plaintiffs also did not mention "GirlsDoPorn" anywhere in the entire document, as per court records. There were reports that company employees got the women drunk before signing, or smoked marijuana with them, or offered them cocaine. An FBI complaint said that the company prevented the women from keeping copies of their contracts. In the lawsuit's 187-page proposed statement of decision, the release form is described as purposefully long and vague, written with an intent to obscure the true nature and character of the video's distribution.
Filming lasted up to seven hours, in contrast to the thirty-minute shoot that the women were told to expect. It begins with an interview in which the subject is asked personal and sexual questions, after being coached on how to answer. There were reports of Garcia being verbally abusive. During sex, some women reportedly experienced vaginal bleeding, while another said that she vomited in her mouth and began choking due to the violence of the sex. Accounts of the women document that if they expressed pain or refused to continue, they were told that it was too late to withdraw, and in some cases the exit was physically blocked by the men. Some women were also threatened with cancellation of the return flight or being asked to pay back the flight and hotel costs if they tried to renege on filming or refused to shoot an additional scene. Filming for GirlsDoToys took place during the same trips.
The United States Department of Justice reported that "some [of the women] were sexually assaulted and in at least one case raped". It has been reported that Garcia had sex with some of the women before or after shooting, or in the midst of shooting, after asking the cameraman to leave.
Former employee Val Moser testified that only 50% of women received the amount of money they were promised. The court case found that women were frequently told that their pay would be reduced immediately after stripping naked, despite never being told that their pay was contingent. Another frequently used tactic was to cut pay after the scene was shot by citing body flaws even though the models had sent nude photos clearly showing whatever blemishes and tattoos they had. One woman was allegedly paid $400 after having been promised $2,000, and also locked out of the hotel room where she was expecting to stay.
Outcomes.
Videos were published online around a month after recording. Some women filmed on multiple occasions, and their first video was not released online until they had completed all of their shoots. One woman reported that naked photos she had sent in communication over the Craigslist advert were also published. Some women reported receiving sexually transmitted infections from sexual contact with Garcia. Personal information of the women was posted online including contact details, social media profiles, home addresses, and parents' names and home addresses. Many women contacted GirlsDoPorn employees to complain. Court documents indicate that responses to complaints varied from claims that the employee would attempt to remove the video to referral to Panakos Law, which would send cease-and-desist requests to the complainant. There was testimony that Panakos Law also sent cease-and-desist requests to women who contacted websites asking for the video of them to be removed.
The names of hundreds of women who filmed videos for GirlsDoPorn were published on Porn Wikileaks, a website specifically set up to dox porn actors. The 2016 lawsuit alleged that the website's domain was transferred to an email address known to be owned by Pratt in November 2015, and an FBI affidavit describes the site as "a website connected to Pratt". Judge Kevin Enright found it "more likely than not" that Pratt, Wolfe, and Garcia were instigators of the online harassment of one of the women who filmed with them. Pratt reportedly held control of the website until June 2016; it was purchased in August 2019 by pornographic film studio Bang Bros and closed down.
Women involved in filming reported that their family, friends, and colleagues were sent text messages with links to videos or GIFs of them having sex when the videos they made were published online. The incidents led to women involved losing jobs or accommodation and leaving college or being disowned by family. Others reported experiencing panic attacks, depression, self-harming and, in at least four cases, suicide ideation. According to an opinion piece in "The New York Times", the murder of a 20 year old woman, described as a "vibrant college athlete", was allegedly by a jealous ex-boyfriend over the video she made for the site. He awaits trial as of December 2020.
Legal action.
Lawsuit filing.
In June 2016, four women filed a lawsuit in the San Diego Superior Court against Wolfe, Pratt, Garcia, and GirlsDoPorn. Six months later, the lawsuit had 14 plaintiffs; within a year, the number was 22. Plaintiffs were aged between 17 and 22 during recruiting of their videos for GirlsDoPorn and most of them were college students at the time of filming the video. 10 of the 22 plaintiffs reported that they wanted to leave at some point before or during the shoot but were made to complete it. The plaintiffs testified on how the release of the videos adversely affected their college life, career plans and plans for having a family. The plaintiffs requested more than $22 million in damages. The defendants stood accused of "intentional misrepresentation, fraudulent concealment, unlawful and fraudulent business practices, and the intentional infliction of emotional distress". Brian Holm was a lead attorney, with John O'Brien as co-counsel. Eventually the legal team of the 22 plaintiffs grew to include multiple law firms including Sanford Heisler Sharp LLP. Attorney Daniel Kaplan also represented GirlsDoPorn in the lawsuit.
Trial and charges.
An initial trial date was set for March 8, 2018, but the trial was set back by several different delays. In January 2019, the judge set a tentative ruling that Wolfe, Pratt, and Garcia had engaged in "malice, fraud or oppression". The same day, Pratt filed for bankruptcy, and the case was put on hold. The bankruptcy judge deemed that Pratt had acted in bad faith, so the case resumed in early 2019. After further delay, trial began on August 20, 2019, lasting until November 2019. Kevin Enright served as the judge.
In September 2019, attorneys were told that Pratt had left the country, according to NBC 7 San Diego. The following month, Garcia and Wolfe were arrested on charges of sex trafficking after a search warrant was executed by the FBI. As of January 2021, Pratt is on the FBI's most wanted list. Wolfe was denied bail in October 2019, and again in May 2020.
In November 2019 a federal indictment was unsealed naming three more individuals—Theodore Gyi, Valorie Moser and Amberlyn Dee Nored–as defendants. Gyi had acted as videographer. Moser was the administrative assistant who had worked for Pratt for almost three years. She had also testified on the plaintiffs' behalf in the trial. Amberlyn had acted as a fake reference girl on Pratt's behalf. She had never shot a pornographic video for GirlsDoPorn or any other production. 
Pratt alone has been charged with producing child pornography of a 16-year-old girl in 2012 and of sex trafficking of a minor. Additional charges for Pratt and the other five include conspiracy to commit sex trafficking by force, fraud and coercion and sex trafficking by force, fraud and coercion. The crimes are alleged to have happened in October 2013, January 2015, May 2015, January 2016 and February 2016.
There are multiple reported cases of attempted disruption or obstruction during the trial. Attorney Holm was harassed throughout the legal process, with fake gay porn images of him spread, and one woman testifying that she was paid to make repeated harassing phone calls to him by a GirlsDoPorn employee. He reported that harassing posts on social media and pornography blogs were made about himself, his wife and young daughter, and that a private investigator was hired to follow him. In a separate case, brothers Fredrick Jimenez and Efrain Jimenez were charged in December 2019 for obstruction of sex trafficking enforcement. The complaint states that they tried to remove and destroy evidence related to the federal sex trafficking in October 2019. Fredrick Jimenez was an ex-employee of GirlsDoPorn.
Prosecutors also collated evidence of witness harassment: a U.S. attorney found evidence that defendants called the plaintiffs to falsely pose as journalists. A witness alleged that a co-defendant offered her $1,000 in exchange for not testifying in the trial. FBI agents found a planned video script, "22 Whores + 5 Shady Lawyers VS GirlsDoPorn", which encouraged viewers to spread the real names of the plaintiffs. In December 2020, Garcia pled guilty to federal charges of sex trafficking by force, fraud, and coercion. His sentence is scheduled for March 2021. In January 2021, Gyi pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit sex trafficking by force, fraud and coercion. He lied to performers that their videos would not be posted on the internet. He is due to be sentenced in April.
Lawsuit outcomes.
On January 2, 2020, the women in the trial were awarded $12.775 million in damages—$9.475 million for compensatory damages and $3.3 million in punitive damages. On January 9, Faith Devine was appointed receiver over the business and individual assets of the defendants. Furthermore, the women were given ownership rights to the videos they featured in. The ruling ordered defendants to remove all images and videos from websites under their control, and to take action to remove them from other websites.
In the injunction, the court ordered GirlsDoPorn to clearly state in bold and centered at the top of the first page of their model agreement that the video was going to be published on GirlsDoPorn.com. The verbal release must also show the model clearly stating the name of the website. Additionally, they were ordered in the future to state in recruitment postings that videos will be posted online, give participants copies of the contracts before arriving, and ensure that participants sign documents indicating that they understand their names or personal information may be used. Later in January 2020, another woman sued the men involved with GirlsDoPorn with a similar case to the 22 previous plaintiffs.
MindGeek lawsuit.
On December 16, 2020, 40 women involved with GirlsDoPorn filed a lawsuit against MindGeek—a company that owns Pornhub, Tube8 and other pornography websites—for damages including distress, ostracization, trauma and attempted suicide. The lawsuit claims that MindGeek knew about the company's sex trafficking as early as 2009 and definitely by fall 2016, but continued to partner with GirlsDoPorn until the company became defunct. The site featured GirlsDoPorn as a Content Partner and a member of the Viewshare Program. The lawsuit also alleges that MindGeek failed to remove GirlsDoPorn videos despite requests for removal by victims, as recently as December 2020. The plaintiffs are seeking $80million in damages. The lawsuit follows a "New York Times" article about Pornhub and GirlsDoPorn, following which Pornhub began to remove videos from unverified users. On April 1, 2021, another 10 women joined the lawsuit against Mindgeek, bringing the total number of plaintiffs to 50.