Ten More ‘Girls Do Porn’ Victims Join Lawsuit Against Pornhub

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The San Diego superior court heard evidence from the women, Jane Does 1 to 22, in a case their lawyers say has “exposed the rotten underbelly of the San Diego sex industry”. The sentence is several years longer than the 12 years and seven months in prison that prosecutors suggested. 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. All of Pratt’s co-defendants have either accepted plea deals or been found guilty for their involvement in GirlsDoPorn, court records show.

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After a four-year legal battle, the plaintiffs were vindicated by Judge Enright’s finding in their favor on all claims, and they have been working to put their lives back together while the attorneys seek to recover assets to satisfy the judgment. When the victims arrived in San Diego for their shoots, they were prevented from reading their contracts and coerced into participating through lies, deception, and intimidation. For those of us who care about the injustice of sexual crime and desire to stand in real solidarity with its victims, our activism must include holding to account all individuals and corporations that participate in exploitation.

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SAN DIEGO – Adult film performer and producer Ruben Andre Garcia pleaded guilty in federal court today to sex trafficking charges, admitting that he conspired with the owners of the adult websites GirlsDoPorn and GirlsDoToys to fraudulently coerce young women to appear in sex videos. Over 20 victims of Pratt and his crew already won the$12.75 million civil lawsuit against the site. Women cited in the court documents said they were forced to sign contracts that did not give the full scope of what the site intended to do with the videos. Even after the women’s videos were released on the site, the victims said they were doxxed, and their personal info was released to the internet. Women also testified that the men refused to stop the porn shoots, and that they were threatened with withholding their hotel reservations and plane tickets they were going to use to return home. 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.

The media we consume and watch undoubtedly influences how we act in real life, and the most popular porn sites are among the one hundred most-frequented websites in the world. Jones notes that it’s not easy to discern what’s fake and what’s real in porn; the line between fantasy and exaggeration can be blurry. When we talk about controlling women’s bodies, abortion typically bookends the conversation. A woman’s right to choose has dominated the reproductive rights discourse for decades. Paley, who died of breast cancer in 2007, spoke openly and famously about the illegal abortion she had in Manhattan at age thirty. Her remarks on how difficult it was to obtain birth control are less well-known but, I find, are similarly disturbing.

• For many of the women ensnared by this scheme, the filming of the scene was the worst part.
• The founder of Girls Do Porn, a website that published videos of women who said they were coerced into making sex tapes, was arrested in Spain this week after being on the run for years from sex trafficking and child sex abuse images charges.
• It is believed that he went through with this plan, and a few other GirlsDoPorn employees were charged with him.

Pratt, Garcia, and Wolfe, operating in San Diego, ran adult websites through a series of overseas shell companies and defrauded hundreds of women over the course of more than a decade. At trial, the plaintiffs proved all thirteen defendants were alter egos of each other and joint venturers in the fraudulent scheme. The GirlsDoPorn and GirlsDoToys websites generated millions of dollars in revenue from this scheme.

• “The findings of fact in the civil case do not carry over to the criminal case where the government will have to prove the facts under a much more stringent standard.”
• Given that revenge porn distributors have historically evaded punishment due to insufficient legal guidelines, copyright is a useful tool—copyright holders can fine websites up to $150,000 per image if they don’t comply with DMCA takedown requests.
• Advocates in the United States have been pushing to use “child sexual abuse material” for the last decade, and her organization has been urging Congress to make the change official for five years.
• It’s not all that surprising, then, that many young women grow up having an aversion to their periods and feeling pressure to shave their pubic hair, entering adulthood all too often having never uttered the word “labia” and without knowing what a clitoris is, where it is, and/or what to do with it.
• 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 companies were instead identified with innocuous names, such as Bubblegum Casting. From approximately 2013 to 2017, Garcia worked as a recruiter, producer, and actor for the GDP and GDT websites, which grossed millions of dollars during this time. Garcia knew the videos were being posted on the fee-based websites, GDP and GDT, and excerpts were posted on free pornographic sites such as Pornhub.com, one of the most frequently viewed websites in the world receiving millions of views, to drive paying viewers to GDP and GDT. The websites hosting these videos often post the women’s legal names and social media information, and result in stalking and doxing that has followed them online and off through their lives since the videos were first put online by Girls Do Porn.

So the footage from that horrific night — which was uploaded to the platform without her consent — was downloaded millions of times. So, while GirlsDoPorn has since been shuttered and she now owns the rights to the videos, Jane Doe is forever playing a game of whack-a-mole, finding clips in new places all the time. She is forced to relive that night each time as she petitions for their removal. Jane Doe, one of the dozens of women trapped in a sex trafficking operation that lasted more than a decade, is speaking out about the dark chapter that radically changed the trajectory of her life.

Some illuminating information would come from the testimony of two people employed by GirlsDoPorn but were not involved in the running of the company itself. 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.

Reminders of this incident will continue to haunt them as long as the internet exists… And until those that did them harm are finally convicted for their alleged crimes. 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. 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.