Girls Do Porn Owner, Employees Charged With Sex Trafficking

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Jonathan made the final arrangements, and Jane prepared to be treated like a celebrity for a day. Also in October 2015, Jane Doe 17 said she was tagged in an Instagram post advertising the pornographic video she had filmed after responding to a Craigslist ad, which she thought no one would ever see. The post on the Girls Do Porn account included a photo of her on a hotel bed captioned “Coming soon.” The next day, she filed a report at the San Diego Police Department. She felt as though she hadn’t truly consented to being filmed because she was deceived about where the video would be released. She also said she wasn’t allowed to leave the shoot when she said she was in pain and asked to stop. Viewers shared the link to the video on the Yelp page for her mother’s hair salon, her ex-boyfriend’s fraternity played it during a chapter meeting, and she dropped out of school because she was too scared to go to class.

• But GirlsDoPorn’s successful manipulation was possible because large swaths of society still label women who participate in sex work as cultural pariahs.
• Garcia admitted that victims were also misled about how long the video shoots lasted.
• In the lawsuit, which sought $500,000 for each of the women, it was alleged that the producers of GirlsDoPorn had promised each woman that the video would only be released on physical formats in foreign nations, not on several of the most popular websites in the entire world.

Women Who Claim They Were Scammed Into Performing in Porn Awarded $13 Million

Supposedly, the appeal of this content is believing the women would normally never set foot on a porn set, but they are desperate for cash. Pornhub continued to host Girls Do Porn videos even after victims started to come forward and be covered in the press in 2019, and the suit alleged the site still hasn’t managed to boot all the videos off its service. “As of December 12, 2020, MindGeek still hosts victims’ videos on its websites, including Plaintiffs,” it said. It argued that it was an open secret in the porn industry that Girls Do Porn was scamming and coercing girls as soon as it started in 2009.

• 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…
• “The videos went viral amongst every person in the victims’ network, causing them to become pariahs in their own communities. Victims were ridiculed and ostracized by friends, classmates, teachers, professors, principals, clergy members, and family.”
• For his part, Garcia was paid a commission for each victim that he recruited on top of an hourly wage for his time.
• Pratt, meanwhile, began to focus more and more on “big picture” stuff, trying to figure out ways to keep the site stocked with attractive young talent, and promotional tools to get the name of the site out into the world-at-large.
• That scandal would actually be repeated the following year when an additional Miss Teen USA candidate was outed as having appeared in a GirlsDoPorn video; like the prior contestant, she too was stripped of her title and eliminated from all of the Miss Teen USA material (websites, promos, etc.).

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

The charges are separate from an ongoing trial in San Diego Superior Court, in which 22 women are accusing the company of recruiting them to shoot porn under false pretenses. In their suit, the women claim that they were told that they were being hired for modeling jobs, for which they would be paid $5,000, and were not informed that they would be making pornographic content until they arrived on set. During testimony earlier this week, Moser, who spoke on behalf of the plaintiffs, said that Pratt instructed her not to tell recruits the name of the company, telling her to call it “Plus One Media” instead.

While the victims may never be fully free of the trauma they have suffered, one of the women, who months before had tried to take her life, told Holm after the sentencing that she has never felt better than knowing Garcia was finally held accountable. The women faced a dark reality – the knowledge that for the rest of their lives, people would use the crime scene footage of their abuse for both pleasure and profit. GirlsDoPorn’s victims were doxxed, harassed and humiliated, and they felt they had a full-time job they never asked for – trying to get the videos of their trafficking removed from the internet. Garcia’s victims were coerced, defrauded and forced to participate in recorded sex acts, some of which were violent to the point of drawing blood.

The tendency to label any sexually explicit image as pornographic affects how law enforcement, juries and doctors view the crimes, Souras said. It causes confusion and implies that any children pictured were willing participants, which is not possible. Other victims were physically prevented from leaving the San Diego hotel rooms or short-term rental units where the scenes were filmed, often with defendants barricading the doors with cameras or recording equipment, prosecutors said. GirlsDoPorn is an adult subscription service launched in 2006 by New Zealander Michael Pratt and operated by Ruben Garcia and Matthew Wolfe. Filmed in homes, hotels and trailer parks, videos on GirlsDoPorn specialise in promoting the image of the “ordinary” college girl who is making her first and only pornographic film. And once the images hit the internet, many of the women were threatened, harassed and faced other serious repercussions.