Victims Win Nearly $13 Million in Lawsuit Against GirlsDoPorn

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The trial lasted over three months, beginning in August of 2019 and finally wrapping up that November. There was no jury, with the case being heard and decided by Judge Kevin A. Enright himself, who ruled overwhelmingly in the plaintiffs’ favor. Not only would the operators of GirlsDoPorn have to pay the women $12.7 million in damages ($3.3 million in punitive damages, and $9.45 in compensatory damages), but Judge Enright declared that the women would reclaim ownership over whatever footage had been made of them. This would not only help remedy the pain the women had been through but would make it possible for them to file copyright strikes against websites like PornHub – who, because of copyright law, were limited in what they could do for sexual content created by a third party. Now, the women in each clip owned their footage, allowing them to choose what to do with it. It was also learned during these court proceedings that the defendants had engaged in a bizarre conspiracy in an attempt to silence these victims and their legal counsel, after the filing of the lawsuit in 2016.

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• One woman said that for years afterward, her video was the first result that came up if her name was searched online.
• Victims said in lawsuit filings that GirlsDoPorn and GirlsDoToys lured them into conversations by posing as a modeling agency in Craigslist ads, with links to fake sites, offering modeling gigs in cities throughout the U.S. and Canada.
• Douglas Wiederhold is the latest defendant to plead guilty in the criminal cases against the website’s owners and operators, whom prosecutors say engaged in a years-long sex trafficking conspiracy in which women were coerced and tricked into appearing in pornographic videos under false pretenses.
• Pratt was arrested in Spain last year after spending years on the run from law enforcement.
• “We have no indication she even knows this is being filmed,” Mickelwait said of this video, which has been on the site for two years.

Since 2016, Charles DeBarber, director of operations at technology firm Phoenix AI, has been undertaking the arduous task of discovering and trying to remove content from GirlsDoPorn that has been posted online. As part of Phoenix AI, this work—including building tools to automate online searches and using face recognition—has helped to remove around 60 GirlsDoPorn survivors’ footage from the web, DeBarber says. While discussing the case at the precinct, Olivia Benson says that even though Evie did porn, it has no bearing on what happened to her, while Carisi says that the guys thought that since Evie wanted it in the porn video, she wanted it from Matt and Daniel.

women sue PornHub’s parent company for allegedly hosting videos posted by San Diego’s GirlsDoPorn

In September of 2020, the FBI would announce a $10,000 reward for any information that led to the arrest of Michael James Pratt, who stands about six feet tall, weighs upwards of 200 pounds, with brown hair and hazel eyes, and may have a tattoo on his left arm. He is known to be a private and paranoid person who is prone to emotional outbursts that may turn violent, so please use caution. Very few photos of him exist on the internet, but the ones that do will be posted on the podcast website as well as our social media accounts. Wolfe would end up shooting more than a hundred videos for GirlsDoPorn, before going on to launch a spinoff venture in 2014 called “GirlsDoToys” (which is exactly what you think it was). Doug Wiederhold – one of Michael Pratt’s original male performers – had gone on to launch a spinoff of his own in 2011 called “MomPov” (which, if you’re catching onto the subtleties of their clever naming conventions, was centered around older women).

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Videographer Theodore Gyi was sentenced to four years in prison, while administrative assistant Valorie Moser awaits sentencing later this year. 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.

The same goes for all of its fake modeling websites, such as BeginModeling.com, which were used to trick women into thinking they were a legitimate company. The sites were finally taken down in January of this year (2020), following the resolution of the civil case. However, copies of the videos that were once uploaded to the sites continue to exist on hard drives around the world, being uploaded to torrent sites and other porn platforms with regularity. Megan, on the other hand, had her life changed overnight, with her true identity being revealed to the world just hours after the video appeared online. While she would originally attempt to deny any relation to the video, a subsequent video was obtained by sites like Brobible, which showed her in the same hotel room as the adult film – this time, however, just reading off a prepared statement giving her consent to appear in the flick.

“Copyright is one of the few laws we’ve had during the first generation of the commercial internet where platforms had a business incentive to take down content and build out automated portals for making this a streamlined process,” Johnstone said. Holding businesses accountable motivates platforms to assign a registered DMCA agent with the Copyright Office to facilitate takedowns, Johnstone added, and copyright empowers the holder to subpoena a platform for information about the alleged infringer. The videos persisted with repeat reuploads to other tube sites like PornHub, a problem that has historically tormented anyone who’s needed to get their videos removed. 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 biggest myth, Mintz says, is that women should be able to have an orgasm through penetration alone. The fact that so many people believe this, she says, is keeping women from enjoying sex and thereby diminishing their desire for it. Studies show that in heterosexual relationships, women frequently take the blame for a dip in sexual activity that’s actually the result of a host of problems related to both members of the couple. Unfortunately, there isn’t similar research on women whose partner isn’t a man.

Pratt has fled the country and has been charged with additional counts of producing child pornography and child sex trafficking for coercing a 16-year-old into producing a video despite full knowledge of her age. Michael James Pratt, who fled the United States during a San Diego civil trial and was subsequently charged criminally, made his initial appearance in a San Diego federal courtroom Tuesday afternoon. A not guilty plea was entered on Pratt’s behalf to a 19-count indictment that includes charges of sex trafficking, production of child pornography, sex trafficking of a minor, and conspiracy to launder monetary instruments.

These computers were later removed from the property by a couple of Pratt’s former employees, Fredrick and Efrain Jimenez, who were later charged with obstructing sex-trafficking enforcement. When questioned, they claimed to have not seen any computers inside of the home, which went against testimony provided by a pet-sitting service that Pratt had hired to take care of his cat. The brothers plead ignorance, but authorities believe that the two either destroyed or hid the computers somewhere in an attempt to hinder their investigation. Some it was found to have been transferred overseas, to bank accounts registered in the island nation of Vanuatu, while other cash had been converted into various cryptocurrencies. Andre Garcia – the third of the men alleged to have participated in this long-running scheme – was called to the stand but refused to testify, pleading the fifth to every question asked of him. “There was a grade level A, B, and C, pretty much on the scale of attractiveness of the woman. Pretty much I would get paid more for an A-level girl than a C-level girl.”

The lawsuit alleges that “as early as 2009, and definitely by fall 2016, MindGeek knew GirlsDoPorn was trafficking its victims by using fraud, coercion, and intimidation as part of its customary business practices to get the women to film the videos.” 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. Garcia and other members of the conspiracy took active steps to ensure the victims did not find out that he and the other members of the conspiracy operated GDP and GDT. Garcia knew that most of the young women they were recruiting would have never agreed to appear in a video if they knew that videos of their explicit sexual activity would be posted on the internet and marketed to their friends and family.