Girls Do Porn victims, who were pressurised into having sex, finally won rights to their videos World News

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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.

Revenge Porn Is an Outdated, Inaccurate Term, Advocates Say

Another woman said an anonymous person sent a video she appeared in to her grandmother. Now with two children, she said she worries what she will tell them if the video ever surfaces again. One woman said that for years afterward, her video was the first result that came up if her name was searched online. She said she’s spent several years and thousands of dollars attempting to get the videos scrubbed from the internet.

Victims of GirlsDoPorn’s Sex Trafficking Operation Now Own Their Videos

Dozens of victims had gathered at San Diego’s James M. Carter and Judith N. Keep Courthouse to speak at the sentencing hearing when they were told that Pratt was in federal custody. Sex workers are more likely to be harassed and have their images stolen and distributed without their consent, Stabile said. Nowadays, the nonconsensual sharing of intimate images is a crime in 49 states and the District of Columbia. The most recent state law was signed by Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healy on June 20, leaving South Carolina as the only remaining holdout.

Pratt, Garcia, and Wolfe, operating in San Diego, ran adult websites through a series of overseas shell companies and defrauded hundreds of women over the course of more than a decade. At trial, the plaintiffs proved all thirteen defendants were alter egos of each other and joint venturers in the fraudulent scheme. The GirlsDoPorn and GirlsDoToys websites generated millions of dollars in revenue from this scheme.

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.

In statements made to pageant officials, she said that she had participated in the pageants to not only stand as a good example for others younger than her going through the foster system but to raise awareness for volunteer efforts with other foster children. “He used deceit and lies and vindictiveness to torture the young women he caught in his snare,” FBI Supervisory Special Agent Renee Green said in a September news release announcing Pratt’s inclusion on the list and the $100,000 reward for information leading to his arrest. He and his partners used threats of lawsuits, canceled flights home and, in some cases, physically blocked the door so the young women could not escape. Pratt, who spent years on the lam after being charged in October 2019 and fleeing the U.S., according to prosecutors, was eventually placed on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list.

Garcia admitted that victims were also misled about how long the video shoots lasted. Most were told that the video production would take around 30 minutes, when they typically lasted for several hours. Garcia admitted that the sex was rough and caused many victims pain, and, in some cases bleeding. When victims asked to stop filming, Garcia and other co-conspirators told the victims that they had to keep going and finish the videos. Garcia also admitted that he recruited and paid other young women to act as “references” to falsely reassure reluctant victims that the videos would not be posted online and that there was “no way” anyone would find out.

• Two other members of Pratt’s team have already been indicted, including the porn actor Ruben Andre Garcia of San Diego who was sentenced to 20 years for sex trafficking in California district court.
• 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.
• The fights to change the terms “child pornography” and “revenge porn” show how wording affects survivors, policy and public perceptions of crime.
• GirlsDoPorn was charged with trafficking in October 2019, but a year later, a simple search I conducted for “GDP” on Pornhub returned more than 300 videos and images of the victims.
• Investigators said they lied to the women, saying that the videos would not be widely disseminated because they were for a private collector overseas and they would remain anonymous.

One of the defendants, porn actor and producer Ruben Andre Garcia, was sentenced to 20 years in prison, while videographer Theodore Gyi was sentenced to four years in prison. Last year, The New York Times exposed Pornhub as a platform for monetized rape, child trafficking sexual abuse, and other forms of nonconsensual image-based abuse. The women begged GirlsDoPorn and Pornhub to remove the videos as early as 2011.

Many laws focus on criminalizing distribution of intimate photos that were meant to be shared privately, although platforms generally can’t be held liable for the content they host, due to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. And the laws don’t necessarily mention AI-generated imagery, which is increasingly used to make deepfakes. Sophie Maddocks said that many researchers like her hate the term and that about 10 years ago, they started coalescing around “image-based sexual abuse” instead.

But The Appeal has learned that three women who say they were victimized by the men behind the site filed police reports as far back as 2015. According to records obtained by The Appeal, it appears that police never followed up. In one case, a complaint by a woman who alleged that she was raped by a man who worked for Girls Do Porn was closed the day it was filed.