62 women sue PornHub in latest San Diego case involving GirlsDoPorn videos

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A law enforcement source told BI last week that an announcement will be made soon. “Performers” remain unverified in many thousands of pre-2024 videos, including those that pop up from search terms involving teens and violence, Mickelwait told Business Insider. Then, the women alleged, they were victims of an orchestrated system of harassment, threats and public humiliation by defendants who made sure friends, family, college and work colleagues saw the online films. “If a woman agreed to make a video, members of the conspiracy paid to fly the woman to San Diego,” according to court documents.

Pornhub owner “knew GirlsDoPorn was trafficking its victims,” lawsuit alleges.

According to civil lawsuits and bankruptcy proceedings related to the GirlsDoPorn cases, Wiederhold began working for Pratt and GirlsDoPorn in 2007. The GirlsDoPorn website featured mostly college-aged women, but in 2010 Wiederhold began preparing for the launch of a similar “mom” porn site that featured women over 30 years of age. The website was dedicated to revealing the true identities of the women appearing in those sex videos, “causing the victims to be subjected to severe harassment,” the DOJ said in a press release last year. Additionally, Wolfe admitted that Pratt also operated a website called Pornwikileaks.com with identifying information and social media accounts for some women being filmed. The 22 plaintiffs sought compensatory and punitive damages, alleged intentional misrepresentation, fraudulent concealment, misappropriation of name and likeness, and deceptive business practices, among other civil grounds. Following this announcement, a video was uploaded to the BangBros YouTube channel, showing an unknown person standing over a pile of hard drives – containing the information compiled on PornWikiLeaks – along with a bottle of lighter fluid and a lighter.

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Under the ruling, where the judicial panel encouraged lawmakers to change the law, the appellate court upheld a lower court’s decision where a 16-year-old girl was convicted as her own pornographer. Pratt is accused of participating in a conspiracy to recruit young women and girls to engage in commercial sex acts by use of force, fraud and coercion. “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. 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. It was also believed that Andre Garcia might have been a previously-unknown individual named “Jonathan,” who the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) had been attempting to identify and locate for over a year.

• “Do any contracts presented to models since the lawsuit was filed in June 2016 reference websites?
• Pratt’s GirlsDoPorn co-conspirator, Michael Isaac Wolfe, admitted to coercing about 100 “models” between the ages of 18 and 23 into making pornographic videos for their San Diego-based website, which he said would not be shared in the United States.
• “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.
• Per his own lawyers’ admission, Pratt was in New Zealand during the trial, but his parents admit that they haven’t seen him in some time.
• An 18-year-old testified that she couldn’t move back to her small hometown in Canada because people had been sending the video around and posting screenshots to Instagram.

But soon after the incident, she was harassed at work—Jane Doe 7’s video had been posted online. While she only looked at it on one website, others told Doe the video was now all over the Internet. During that time, Pratt allegedly threatened and blackmailed her into filming more pornographic content for GirlsDoPorn. Pratt’s GirlsDoPorn co-conspirator, Michael Isaac Wolfe, admitted to coercing about 100 “models” between the ages of 18 and 23 into making pornographic videos for their San Diego-based website, which he said would not be shared in the United States.

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. In dozens of cases, women had to undergo even more harassment due to the owners of GirlsDoPorn uploading the women’s true identities to the website PornWikileaks (which was exactly as disgusting as it sounds). This website was a compendium of porn actresses’ real names and identities, which included links to their social media accounts, their school & work information, and oftentimes even more personal or intimate details (their home town, address, phone number, etc.).

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. 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. It means we are now aware that things aren’t always as they seem when it comes to online pornography. One woman stood before Garcia with sutures on her wrist from a recent attempt to end her life, flashing it to the judge as she spoke. He and his partners used threats of lawsuits, canceled flights home and, in some cases, physically blocked the door so the young women could not escape. Weeks after they returned home, the videos were released in full on Pratt’s subscription site, and as clips on PornHub and other popular free porn platforms.

He also falsely assured at least two women that their videos wouldn’t be posted online after knowing other women’s videos had already been uploaded to the Internet, the plea agreement states. 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. Close to one-fifth of students (16.9%) had experienced forced sex, out of whom, most (96.1%) were coerced by one person for the forced sex. The forced sex for 36.2% of participants had occurred through touching the breast or other parts of the body (Table 2). Statistical analysis of this data was done using IBM SPSS Statistics, version 26.0 released in 2019 (IBM Corp., Armonk, NY, USA). Descriptive analysis, bivariate, and logistic regression were performed to analyze this data.

Prosecutors allege Pratt and those who worked for him recruited young women for modeling gigs, but when the women arrived in San Diego, they were pressured to have sex on camera and falsely told the videos would go to private DVD collections overseas. SAN DIEGO – David Warren of Las Vegas was sentenced in federal court today to 10 years in prison for coercing three women to engage in prostitution and transporting them… According to his plea agreement, Wiederhold appeared as the male actor in 71 GirlsDoPorn videos.

A PORN website producer has been sentenced to 20 years for conspiracy and sex trafficking. Finding and erasing every video, screenshot, or repurposed clip from the internet will still be a challenging task; but with the judge’s ruling, the women now have the right and agency to do so, which is a significant step. “It’s vindication for the brave women who came forward after being manipulated and lied to by GirlsDoPorn,” Ed Chapin, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs, told BuzzFeed News. “They were young and inexperienced, and their lives were changed because they were sucked in by this disgusting, fraudulent scheme.” “The government’s burden of proof in the criminal case is ‘beyond a reasonable doubt,’ which is a much higher standard than in this civil lawsuit where the burden of proof is a mere preponderance of the evidence,” the attorneys added. “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.”