22 women win $13 million in suit against GirlsDoPorn videos Los Angeles Times

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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. « 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. » 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. More than a dozen of these lawsuits were filed in the past month alone, and many more may be on the way. « We are in the process of filing cases on behalf of approximately 250 victims, with more reaching out weekly, » Bowe told BI. Business Insider has found lawsuits on behalf of nearly 300 plaintiffs who allege that back before the 2020 purge, videos of their abuse were uploaded to Pornhub without their consent and remained on the site for weeks or months after they were flagged.

A Pornhub Chatbot Stopped Millions From Searching for Child Abuse Videos

In several cases, the women filmed for GirlsDoPorn would be propositioned outside of the video shoot. Andre Garcia, who reportedly sexually assaulted several women before, during, or after the film shoot, would often text them and ask to have sex outside of the shoot. Website owner Michael Pratt would also ask women to have sex with him for generally small sums of money – $400 or so – but was rejected almost every single time. Many of the women were filmed as soon as they were picked up at the airport, with cameras being on them from the moment they arrived until they left. But when traveling through the hotels – where the video shoots always took place – the production crew would attempt to hide the fact that they were filming. It would later be learned that they didn’t have any of the necessary permits to film adult content, and often smuggled the film and sound equipment to the hotel room in suitcases and other large luggage containers.

GirlsDoPorn videographer sentenced to 4 years in prison for sex trafficking

Others said that they were gagged or choked to the point of vomiting during the shoot. Several women even would claim to have gotten STDs from Garcia, which he had either been unaware of at the time of filming or which he had simply never bothered to mention to any of them. Some of the women would even say that Garcia raped them – either during or after filming – with many of them expressing a strong desire to stop filming, but Garcia persevering… Even then, they were told to act bubbly and excited during filming, or risk being docked even more pay. In the case of one young woman (Jane Doe #17), she wasn’t even told that she was filming a sex scene until she arrived at the hotel, and was pressured into it by the men present in the hotel room – who began plying her with alcohol the moment that she got there. A boyfriend that decided to end things now instead of getting further invested in a woman that had filmed porn.

But, much to his chagrin, the case remained in the California court it had been filed in, due to the work of the plaintiffs’ attorney Brian Holm, who was able to produce evidence of Pratt using this bankruptcy as a shield to stall the court proceedings. In several of the GirlsDoPorn videos, you can see these containers and suitcases blocking the front door of the hotel. 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. After emailing in to learn more about these ads, the three men from GirlsDoPorn – Pratt, Wolfe, and Garcia – would begin to respond to the young women through aliases. Michael Pratt often used the names Mark and Jonathan, Matthew Wolfe often used the names Ben or Isaac (oftentimes with the surname « Fox » attached), and Andre Garcia typically used the alias of Jonathan. Site owner Michael Pratt was described as a paranoid individual, who was the main driver behind everyone using different pseudonyms, insisting upon it when the others seemed less than committed.

Others detailed how they had lost jobs, been evicted, and were estranged from friends and family. That suit caught the attention of prosecutors when it went to trial in 2019, touching off the criminal investigation. Those who spoke at Garcia’s sentencing told harrowing stories of assault, coercion and brutality during the hours-long shoots, when many wept, bled, vomited, cried out in pain or begged for the filming to stop — scenes that were carefully edited from the final video. Many said they were pressured into performing sex acts they’d previously refused to do.

In some instances, however, Pratt and his assistants allegedly locked women in rooms until the explicit videos were filmed and forced some women to commit sex acts that they initially declined to do, according to the FBI. He allegedly did so by telling the women and girls that they would be paid $3,000 to $5,000 for a one-day pornographic video shoot. A short time later, she received a written response from an individual calling himself « Jonathan N » (who responded using the email address). In this email, Jane was offered $4,000 for a first photoshoot – just regular modeling, mind you – but was told that she could be paid an additional $1,000 for an additional video shoot… It became clear to this young woman that this was porn, which she had no interest in, despite the promise of good pay for very little work. As a foster child, she didn’t have the same resources that other kids her age had.

The warning message and chatbot were deployed by Pornhub as part of a trial program, conducted with two UK-based child protection organizations, to find out whether people could be nudged away from looking for illegal material with small interventions. A new report analyzing the test, shared exclusively with WIRED, says the pop-ups led to a decrease in the number of searches for child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and saw scores of people seek support for their behavior. Most content shared through social media has the potential to reach a large audience, regardless of privacy settings. Talk with your teen about the permanency of the internet and how, once something is shared, they lose control of that message or image.

The FBI is still searching for GirlsDoPorn creator Michael Pratt, who faces criminal sex-trafficking and child-porn charges. Charges were also filed against other GirlsDoPorn principals including Ruben Andre Garcia and Matthew Wolfe. Despite this knowledge, MindGeek continued to partner with GirlsDoPorn, never bothering to investigate or question its business partner regarding the mounting evidence of sex trafficking that MindGeek received. MindGeek continued its partnership with GirlsDoPorn until October 2019 when the Department of Justice shut down GirlsDoPorn by arresting and indicting its principals. Forty Jane Does who say they were victims of GirlsDoPorn sued Pornhub yesterday for at least $2 million each, alleging that Pornhub hosted videos despite knowing that « GirlsDoPorn was a sex trafficking venture. » PornHub and the other Aylo sites finally removed the videos in 2019 after the FBI raided GirlsDoPorn and Pratt and his co-defendants were charged criminally, according to the lawsuit.

• Young women were selected as references, because Garcia, Pratt and Matthew Wolfe believed the victims were more likely to believe other young women over Garcia or Pratt.
• We now know through legal proceedings that the Girls Do Porn conspirators planned to upload the videos to mainstream porn sites like Pornhub all along, as a method to control and shame their victims into silence.
• Like the other charges, Pratt has pleaded not guilty to this allegation through his lawyers, but he remains a wanted fugitive to this day, and his whereabouts remain unknown after more than a year.

Yet in this fraud trial, these women all claimed they believed the porn videos they shot, which were published among GirlsDoPorn’s library of hundreds of porn flicks viewed collectively over one billion times, would never get posted online. The plaintiff-victims, some of whom were paying their way through college or needed money for rent, were lured into the defendants’ pornography scheme through phony ads on Craigslist.com for clothed modeling gigs. 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.

The agents of the creation of forced sex change during childhood, adolescence, and adulthood; younger children are primarily victimized by the family members, while the youth are victimized usually by acquaintances, intimate partners, foreigners, and those in authority. The incidence of sexual violence grows progressively from around 8 years of age, with the maximum rate of incidence of sexual violence for infants being the age range of 14–17 years [6, 7]. The women were promised that their videos would only be seen by private collectors in other countries like New Zealand and Australia, and that their images would not appear online, according to the FBI.