22 Women Paid $12 7 Million and Given Rare Ownership Rights in GirlsDoPorn Lawsuit

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The man whom multiple young woman alleged coerced them into amateur porn shoots is on the lam from federal law enforcement, and all that running has only made cops want to dress him down even more, so to speak. Boden, who has been in the adult industry for 15 years and is helping spearhead consent and transparency initiatives, pointed out that legitimate producers and companies do not use false and misleading practices to recruit women like Girls Do Porn allegedly did. She told BuzzFeed News she hopes this case helps weed out other shady and “criminal” operations. Obtaining ownership rights under the court ruling is such a big deal because it’s nearly impossible to force sites like Pornhub to remove content once it is uploaded, attorneys and experts said, even if it had been created and published without a person’s consent. The decision comes about four years after the women first took action against the San Diego–based adult film site, which creates and advertises videos featuring young “amateur” teens and college students who are usually about 18 to 20 years old.

GirlsDoPorn Founder and FBI Most Wanted Fugitive Arrested in Spain

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. Michael Pratt was the original founder of the company, who served as the cameraman for the first few dozen episodes, which he started releasing in 2009. In 2011, he brought in his old friend Matthew Wolfe to begin doing that job – interviewing and filming – while he took on a more “big picture” role in the company (per his admission). Wolfe would bring in Andre Garcia in 2011 to begin filming with the women, but Garcia quickly exceeded his role as an actor very early on, becoming a full-fledged participant in the deceptive scheme, recruiting women on his own to appear in the GirlsDoPorn videos. Wolfe eventually handed off camera duties to other individuals a few years later, and it seems like he, Pratt, and Garcia were all working on recruitment over an extended period of time… You see, since recording that video, Megan had gone on to higher education, and was using a scholarship she had obtained in high school to study journalism.

• She feared that if she reported it, people would find out about the video she made.
• An Aylo spokesperson said the company does not comment on ongoing litigation “out of respect for the integrity of court proceedings,” but that the company looked forward “to the facts being fully and fairly aired” in court.
• 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.
• In 2013, a video featuring Megan appeared online, alongside a couple of male figures.
• For patients who do see a gynecologist regularly, appointments are typically brief, with barely enough time for a woman to refill her birth control prescription and ask if she’s up to date with her HPV vaccine shots, much less inquire about the quality of her eggs or check her hormone levels.

A Group Of Women Sued Girls Do Porn For Coercing Them Into Doing Videos. Now They Own All The Rights.

• Many people in the industry prefer “adult content” instead of pornography, Stabile said, because it emphasizes the media is made for adults, by adults.
• However, the stigma against pornography and other sex work, the aptly-described “oldest profession,” will undoubtedly always exist for a myriad of reasons.
• Even then, they were told to act bubbly and excited during filming, or risk being docked even more pay.
• The defendants were ordered to remove all videos of plaintiffs from the Internet and cease all distribution of them.
• Half of them said the widespread proliferation of their abuse videos convinced them death was a better option than living in perpetual pain and humiliation.
• ” For over a decade, GirlsDoPorn used force, fraud, and coercion to get hundreds of high school and college-aged women to film pornographic videos that GirlsDoPorn sold on the Internet,” the suit says.

Believing she was protecting her family at her own expense, Jane Doe allowed her family — her parents, siblings, and grandparents — to believe she was a willing participant in the abuse she endured, and that she was a porn performer. Even as she’s seeing some level of justice served against those who trafficked her, Jane Doe’s pain is still very palpable. Each time she goes on a date, she internally hopes the man sitting across from her won’t search her name on the internet. Besides Foster, four of the website’s other employees have pleaded guilty to a variety of felonies. Porn actor and producer Ruben Andre Garcia, was sentenced to 20 years in prison, while videographer Theodore Gyi was sentenced to four years in prison. Val Moser, the website’s office manager and chauffeur who drove the women to and from the airport, corroborated the issue of pay.

He and his co-conspirators are accused of posting internet ads about modeling jobs to lure young women before pressuring and manipulating them into shooting sex tapes. Investigators said they lied to the women, saying that the videos would not be widely disseminated because they were for a private collector overseas and they would remain anonymous. However, Girls Do Porn distributed the videos after they were shot, and they appeared on popular porn websites. The New Zealand native is charged in a 19-count indictment for allegedly running the now-defunct website. Charges against him include sex trafficking, production of child pornography, sex trafficking of a minor, and conspiracy to launder monetary instruments.

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). 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. Despite providing contestants with a decent networking platform – and resources to stay in shape while earning relatively useless trinkets – the pageants that Megan participated in didn’t provide anything in the form of payment. Hence, her – being a young woman with little in the way of a support structure – taking part in an adult video to support herself through college. That’s precisely why GirlsDoPorn owner Michael Pratt, videographer Matthew Wolfe, and actor Andre Garcia created a bait-and-switch scheme to get the women to appear in their videos.

Child safety advocates celebrated a win in June, when the congressional reauthorization for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children used the term “child sexual abuse material” (CSAM) instead of “child pornography” to describe the scourge the agency seeks to eradicate. The National Center runs the CyberTipline national reporting service for online exploitation of children. Survivors of image-based sexual abuse — overwhelmingly women and girls — can experience the same kinds of mental health issues as those who have been physically sexually assaulted.

At some point we realize we’ve never quite recovered from the grisly pictures imposed on us in health class all those years ago. Superficial, often poorly taught sex ed and a pervasive cultural shh leave many people in the dark, missing out on or avoiding candid conversations about sex and all it entails. I recalled a conversation I’d had with a woman named Cynthia, a young mother of three who grew up in rural southwest Virginia. Cynthia was raised in a Pentecostal family; James, her husband, is a strict Catholic who doesn’t believe in birth control. While less drastic than Paley’s, hurdles have persisted for generations of women since.

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.

In 1975, my mother waited until she was away at college to visit Planned Parenthood for the first time so as to avoid running into someone she knew at her small-town’s clinic. In 2006, a girl I went to high school with exaggerated her period cramps so she’d be put on the Pill without her parents knowing she was sleeping with her boyfriend. As part of his plea, Garcia admitted to threatening and deceiving the women, and paying other women to lie to reluctant recruits, falsely asserting that the footage would not be seen in the U.S. but was intended for private DVD collections overseas. Pratt’s attorney didn’t immediately respond to USA TODAY’s message for comment on Wednesday. “These women could now, theoretically, hire someone to search for all this content that they now own the copyright to and issue a [Digital Millennium Copyright Act notice] to get it taken down. I highly suggest they do that.”