Choose a Girl

SAN DIEGO – Matthew Isaac Wolfe was sentenced in federal court today to 14 years in prison for his role in a conspiracy with Michael Pratt, owner of the website… SAN DIEGO – Michael Pratt, the alleged mastermind behind the GirlsDoPorn commercial sex trafficking ring, made his first appearance in federal court today following his extradition from Spain Monday night. Another defendant, Alexander Brian Foster, pleaded guilty to creating a video meant to harass several women who sued GirlsDoPorn and was sentenced to just over one year in prison.

• «It was the same phone number calling them claiming to be from multiple different media outlets,» he said.
• In October, 50 victims of GirlsDoPorn and GirlsDoToys won a settlement with MindGeek, owner of the PornHub and tube site empire; the terms of the settlement were not disclosed.
• The women in these videos legally own that content, as a result of a ruling by a federal judge in 2021.
• Research of addictive behavior related to pornography suggests that approximately 56% of men experience pornography as a form of relaxation decreasing subjective feelings of tension (Cooper et al., 2004; Weiser, 2000).

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The companies were instead identified with innocuous names, such as Bubblegum Casting. The next day, the FBI charged the owners of Girls Do Porn with federal counts of sex trafficking. The raid came in the middle of a years-long civil trial, where 22 of Girls Do Porn’s victims sued the company for lying to them about how the videos would be spread online. In January, the women won, and the owners of Girls Do Porn—primarily Michael Pratt, Matthew Wolfe, and Andre Garcia—owe them nearly $13 million. Simply searching for a term such as \»girls do porn\» on a website is not illegal and generally does not constitute criminal activity.

San Diego’s short-term rental rules have had a disastrous effect

But the lawsuit argues that the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) enacted in 2018 would override a Section 230 defense. Pornhub’s purge of millions of videos, presumably including many of the videos in which the plaintiffs appeared, was announced on December 14. Besides Pornhub, the GirlsDoPorn videos were also hosted on other MindGeek properties referred to as «Tubesites» in the lawsuit.

Porn site to pay $12.7m to women who didn’t know videos would be posted

Pratt, who was the owner of the website GirlsDoPorn, was charged in October 2019 in the Southern District of California with sex trafficking crimes in connection with a scheme to deceive and coerce young women to appear in pornographic videos. Pratt was an international fugitive for more than three years before he was arrested in Spain in December 2022. Prosecutors say the website’s operators led women to believe the videos they appeared in would be distributed only to private customers living outside of the country, rather than proliferated online, despite always intending to post the videos on the internet. During his cross-examination, Buchanan rips Evie’s testimony apart, saying that the only difference between the adult films that she made and the boys’ video was that she was paid for the adult films.

Evie’s parents are upset with the choices that Evie has made and refuse to attend the trial. When Benson tries to explain to Evie’s father that Evie is a victim, he leaves the room and his wife follows. Despite that, Evie wants to testify in court to show people that she didn’t do anything wrong.

Pornhub was hit with a $40 million lawsuit from sex-trafficking victims the day after it said it had started deleting millions of videos from its platform, Vice reported. “Threatened, coerced, and physically and sexually assaulted, Plaintiff was forced to succumb to the demands of the GirlsDoPorn sex trafficking venture, entirely sustained by MindGeek’s vast online network,” the federal lawsuit filed on Sept. 8 states. Prior to the beginning of trial, the GDP legal team filed two motions to unseal the 22 Does’ names (PDF) in the hopes of publicizing the women’s involvement in porn (and in tandem, the availability of such videos). Attorneys for the defendants had argued (PDF) it was in the public interest for their names to be revealed, but attorneys for the Does claimed it was another effort to doxx the women so they’d be publicly harassed. Some of the victims say they were sexually assaulted and physically prevented by the defendants from leaving the San Diego hotel rooms and short- term rentals where the videos were filmed.

“The money’s one thing but these guys have ruined [the plaintiffs’] lives and we have to clean this up as much as possible,” Ed Chapin, attorney for the women, said after the judge’s decision was issued. He awarded the women $9.45 million collectively in compensatory damages and $3.3 million in punitive damages. “Unfortunately, GirlsDoPorn had posted the first video of Plaintiff on MindGeek’s network, and the video became wildly successful. MindGeek and GirlsDoPorn generated millions of dollars from Plaintiff’s video,” the complaint states.

Since then, 22 survivors have been awarded nearly $13 million in damages, and 402 victims were given copyright ownership of videos featuring them, making it easier to scrub them from the web. At the end of 2023, Pornhub’s parent company, Aylo Holdings, agreed to pay damages to women impacted by the sharing of the GirlsDoPorn videos. 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. LGBTQ+ teens and young adults may be particularly at risk of participating in sexting, with 21% of LGBTQ+ youth reporting they have shared images or videos of themselves.

The company reached settlements with the women in both lawsuits and also agreed to pay over $1.8 million to resolve a probe by federal prosecutors who alleged the company knew or should have known it was accepting money that originated from sex-trafficking operations. Brian Holm, a managing attorney at the Holm Law Group and a longtime civil attorney for GirlsDoPorn survivors, confirmed that the videos posted to the deepfake sexual abuse website were originally from GirlsDoPorn. These include, Holm says, survivors who have been involved in the legal cases against GirlsDoPorn or against Pornhub. The chatbot was designed and created by the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), a nonprofit which removes CSAM from the web, and the Lucy Faithfull Foundation, a charity which works to precent child sexual abuse. The trial counted the number of sessions on Pornhub, which could mean people are counted multiple times, and it did not look to identify individuals.