22 Women Win $13 Million in Lawsuit Against Predatory Porn Company

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District Court in San Diego alleges sex trafficking, human trafficking, racketeering and conspiracy to commit racketeering. It names as defendants Aylo Media S.A.R.L., a Luxembourg-incorporated company that owns PornHub and other popular free porn video sites, and several related companies. The owners and operators of GirlsDoPorn knew the type of women they wanted to appear in their amateur porn videos—college-age millennials—would not agree to casually participate in the porn industry.

• “I ended up trying to kill myself many times. I ended up in mental hospitals,” Serena Fleites, the lead plaintiff in Bowe’s 34-plaintiff trafficking suit, said 2021, while testifying at a hearing before the Canadian Parliament, according to Mickelwait’s book.
• The victims suffered immense emotional distress and economic harm, and their lives were derailed for years.
• I can’t recall if I bought the tampons myself at the pharmacy a few blocks from my middle school or if I had surreptitiously added them to my father’s grocery store list.
• BongaCams delivers incredible shows but doesn’t provide many private show options.

Pornhub is awash in lawsuits by hundreds who say they never consented to the videos uploaded on the site

As part of his addition to the list, authorities doubled the previous reward for information leading to his arrest to $100,000. It was a moment hundreds of women had been waiting for — and one many feared would never come. District Judge Janis Sammartino, who has sentenced all the other defendants in the GirlsDoPorn case other than website owner Michael James Pratt , whose case remains ongoing. Prosecutors will argue Thursday, when Pratt is due back in court for a bail hearing, that he is both a flight risk and a danger to the community.

GirlsDoPorn owner goes from FBI’s Most Wanted List to San Diego court appearance

Last November, Michael Pratt was charged with production of child pornography, with investigators unearthing evidence that he had solicited a girl as young as sixteen to film a pornographic film in 2012. It is believed that he went through with this plan, and a few other GirlsDoPorn employees were charged with him. 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. Theodore “Teddy” Gyi had been a cameraman and interviewer, who had been hired by Matthew Wolfe in the mid-2010s to take over his job filming for the company.

Hosting non-consensual pornography

In civil court, victims testified that Pratt and his co-conspirators would even promote their videos to victims’ friends, communities and colleges. Garcia admitted that he and co-defendant Michael Pratt were the lead recruiters for GDP and GDT. Garcia and Pratt created Craigslist advertisements, along with fake websites and email addresses consistent with the websites to cause their victims to believe that they were applying to work asclothed models. Only after the victims responded to the advertisements would Garcia and Pratt disclose that they were actually seeking women for pornographic video shoots.

Afterward, they cut her pay from $2,000 all the way down to $400 and then locked her out of the hotel room – forcing her to find other accommodations on her own. For many of the women ensnared by this scheme, the filming of the scene was the worst part. What had originally been promised as 30-minutes would often turn into a several hour shoot, during which time the male performer – oftentimes Andre Garcia – treated the women roughly. Dozens of women were slapped and choked in the process of shooting their scene and would report vaginal bleeding afterward. Others said that they were gagged or choked to the point of vomiting during the shoot.

This case is SEALED.” San Diego is where Girls Do Porn was based and where a federal investigation into the company is ongoing. 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. The New Zealand national is accused of carrying out a seven-year sex trafficking scheme. Both Pratt and Wolfe were defendants in a fraud lawsuit that went to trial before San Diego County Superior Court judge in 2019, resulting in a $12.7 million verdict. He ordered GirlsDoPorn’s founder Pratt, his business partner Wolfe, and porn actor Garcia to hand over all images, videos, likenesses, and copyrights and to take “active steps” to remove them from circulation.

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… “Garcia coached me on how to correspond with the prospective women, to gain their trust, even if that included telling lies and hiding information. Garcia instructed me to tell women the videos they filmed would never be released in the United States or on the internet.”

Mickelwait said that she has reported many hundreds of videos to law enforcement and anti-trafficking watchdogs. An ever-growing number of lawsuits by some 300 plaintiffs allege the site knowingly profited from videos of their abuse. The women begged GirlsDoPorn and Pornhub to remove the videos as early as 2011. 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. U.S. authorities allege the pair filmed young women from the U.S. and Canada committing sex acts between 2012 and 2019.