Choose a Girl

Victims of the GirlsDoPorn case have reached a mutual settlement with Mindgeek, Pornhub’s parent company, as per a court document filed Friday, October 15. Brian Holm, the women’s lawyer, said, “The Parties reached a mutual resolution to resolve the dispute and the terms are confidential.” The agreement happened two years after GirlsDoPorn owners were convicted of intimidating and forcing 22 women into having sex on camera. Ruben Andre Garcia, 31, the producer of GirlsDoPorn site has pleaded guilty to federal charges after it was revealed he tricked and forced women into appearing in sex videos. As the Federal Bureau of Investigation continues its manhunt for the owner of GirlsDoPorn, the site’s videographer pleaded not guilty in federal court to sex trafficking charges. Four of Pratt’s co-defendants have pleaded guilty, with Matthew Isaac Wolfe facing 11 to 14 years in prison after admitting in July to filming about 100 videos over seven years while managing the websites’ finances and supporting businesses.

women win $13 million in suit against GirlsDoPorn videos

• Your sex drive can take a hit from any of these alone, so imagine what might happen when you have a few of these issues happening together.
• “That’s doubly more sensitive when you’re dealing with adult content,” he said.
• 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.
• He again assured her that nothing she appeared in would be posted online and that the shoot would be quick and painless – taking less than 30 minutes of her time.
• Simply searching for a term such as “girls do porn” on a website is not illegal and generally does not constitute criminal activity.

“No platform on the internet has taken the significant steps we have to protect the safety and security of our community,” said Sarah Bain, a spokeswoman for Ethical Capital Partners, a Canadian private equity firm that owns the Pornhub network of adult-content sites. 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. The videos were heavily monetized and globally distributed on Pornhub, the world’s largest and most popular porn site.

Sex education and counseling

Another woman said, “The fear of being recognized in public never goes away,” while another said the continuous messages and threats she receives from anonymous people online are “constant reminders of the worst time in my life.” Several women described during his sentencing hearing how links to their videos were sent en masse to family members, friends and co-workers, sabotaging their employment prospects and ruining familial relationships to this day. One woman said she’s faced consistent harassment since her video was posted nine years ago, leading her to move and change her name. The woman said she’s about to graduate from college, but said that though “I’m proud to be the first in my family to go to college, when I graduate, it’s not going to be my name that’s called.” WIRED is not naming the deepfake abuse website due to its role in spreading abusive content or the celebrities featured in the videos.

In the end, Jane was only paid $3,000 – roughly half of what she had been originally promised. The men present at the hotel told them that that wasn’t their fault, it all had to do with the executives at the company; but if she backed out now, she would get paid nothing. Yet, “Jonathan N” was persistent with his offers, and later managed to arrange a call with Jane. During this phone call, he said that she could earn $5,000 by appearing in a sex scene filmed by his company, to which she asked if it would be distributed throughout North America. “No,” said Jonathan, who insisted that this footage would only be distributed throughout Australia and the United Kingdom on DVDs for private collectors. Jonathan promised Jane that this footage would never be released in North America or even on a digital platform – just physical.

As deepfake technology has become increasingly capable of creating realistic imagery and easier to use, hundreds of websites and apps designed to create or host deepfake sexual abuse have appeared. Laws to limit the use of these tools and protect those targeted are lagging, even as the malicious use of AI has evolved to not just create new victims but to revictimize survivors. Prosecutors said that Garcia and others sometimes threatened lawsuits, canceled flights home, or to post videos online if women refused to continue with a scene. According to prosecutors, he tricked women into appearing in sex videos after promising them they would only be sold in DVD and not be distributed on the internet. In October of last year, the Daily Beast reported on a motion in which their attorney claimed to have interviewed 100 women with similar stories of fraud and coercion by GirlsDoPorn, and over a dozen accused actor Andre Garcia of sexual assault. “There is a high price to be paid by those who fraudulently exploit young women and forever alter their lives for profit,” said U.S.

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. Dozens, if not hundreds, of the women featured on GirlsDoPorn were subjected to sex acts that they had not consented to, and which they had received guarantees they wouldn’t have to perform on video. Sometimes, they were convinced to do so by the cameraman – who threatened to withhold their pay or recoup the cost of travel – or through force (by Garcia and the other male performers). During filming, they were not allowed to leave the hotel room and were again threatened with the loss of pay, travel fare, lodging, etc. Around a month after filming, the victims learned the true nature of the defendants’ business when the videos were not only released on their subscription site girlsdoporn.com, but also prominently published on popular free tube sites like Pornhub.com. The defendants and “fans” of GirlsDoPorn also sent the videos to victims’ friends, family, classmates, and colleagues, and posted the victims’ names and contact information with the videos.

Michael Pratt, the founder and sole owner of GirlsDoPorn, was again a no-show. He failed to answer his court summons, having returned to New Zealand due to what friend and confidante Matthew Wolfe described as “health issues related to threats he had received,” but offering up no details about either the threats or the health issues involved. Wolfe did admit that he had been chatting with Pratt recently over the encrypted messaging app Signal but claimed to have no knowledge of Pratt’s whereabouts. All the while, the popularity of GirlsDoPorn continued to grow, with each new case of harassment giving the website a splash of publicity. Word-of-mouth was helping GirlsDoPorn become a common name in porn, and the dozens of women whose lives they ruined were just casualties.

However, as this lawsuit continued to fall into place within the court system, it became apparent that the labyrinth of production companies and shell corporations established by Michael Pratt had become a minefield for his opponents’ lawyers. A look into the finances of GirlsDoPorn showed that they had once been owned by a parent company called GT Group Ltd., which was a corporation listed in the Panama Papers as a tax haven for several illicit organizations. This group had laundered hundreds of billions of dollars for entities such as the Sinaloa Cartel and Ukrainian gun runners and was also linked to Iranian arms dealers, U.S. lottery scammers, and Russian tax evaders – a who’s who of terrible people on a global scale.

Nored is accused in the criminal case of acting as a “reference woman” who would lie to the victims by saying she had performed in similar videos that were never posted online. The judge also ordered the GirlsDoPorn website owners to prominently post in recruitment ads that videos would go on the internet. Women who sign up to make the videos must get copies of the legal agreement ahead of time and give permission before their names or personal information are used.