(Image via Getty)
Score one for the good guys. Yesterday, Judge Kevin Enright of San Diego County’s Superior Court issued a preliminary decision ordering the owners of the website GirlsDoPorn.com to pay the 23 unnamed plaintiffs $9.5 million in compensatory damages and $3.3 million in punitive damages for deceptive and unfair business practices, using shell entities to hide corporate ownership and assets, fraudulently obtaining contracts, misappropriation of likeness, and fraudulent transfer.
The case was filed in 2016 by Jane Does 1-22, who were girls and women ages 18 to 23 who responded to an online job posting for adult modeling. Jane Doe “A” was added in October, because unbelievably the Defendants continued to run their scheme enticing young women to shoot pornographic videos under false pretenses, even after the case was filed. They do appear to have stopped after federal sex trafficking and child pornography charges were filed though.
The Defendants convinced hundreds of women to shoot pornographic scenes in a scheme that would be comically evil if it weren’t so tragic.
They assured the women that the footage would never be posted online, vaguely alluding to a “private collector,” perhaps in Australia. In fact the videos were posted almost immediately to the Defendants’ own subscription sites, with additional clips posted on free portals like PornHub.com.
The Defendants supplied “reference models” who told the women that it would be a safe, fun experience. In fact, many of the “references” had not themselves shot videos. And when the women were flown to San Diego, they found themselves alone in a room with several strange men who wouldn’t give them their plane tickets home if they didn’t go through with the video. Multiple defendants testified that the defendants blocked the doors with furniture to prevent them leaving.
The Defendants assured the women that no one they knew would ever find out. In fact, the Court found that “Defendants deliberately profited from the videos being leaked to Plaintiffs’ personal circles and communities.” According to The Daily Beast, which has covered this story extensively, the Defendants tried to make the videos go viral by sharing them within the woman’s social media networks, resulting in harassment and humiliation. Worse, the women were immediately doxxed by trollsites devoted to the purpose, with the active participation of the Defendants, who, according to the Court, “encouraged and facilitated this outing process and even participated directly.”
The Defendants were verbally promised that they would receive between $2,500 and $5,000 for a thirty minute shoot, after which the footage would be processed onto DVDs for private sale overseas. Moments before the shooting, which often ran several times as long, the women were coerced into quickly signing contracts which buried references to online distribution under several pages of dense legalese.
The Plaintiffs read a “script” at the beginning of the shoot attesting that, “I {real name} am doing this scene for BLL Media of my own free will and I am of sound mind and body. I am not under the influence of drugs or any mind altering substances.” In fact, the Defendants routinely gave the women alcohol and/or marijuana before shooting, even though many of the Plaintiffs were under 21.
The Defendants hid their assets in a series of shell companies in Vanuatu, deliberately transferring them to obscure actual ownership and deny Plaintiffs recovery. As Judge Enright put it, “The Court is not persuaded by Defendants’ claim that these transfers were effectuated to fix ‘mistakes’ in the ‘corporate structure’ and that ‘this is how it was supposed to be all along.’”
The Defendants names are Michael Pratt, Matthew Wolfe, Andre Garcia, Valorie Moser, and Teddy Gyi. Pratt, the owner of the company, is currently on the lam in his native New Zealand, which does have an extradition treaty for child sex charges, Moser and Gyi are out on bond, and Wolfe and Garcia are currently guests of the federal government, where we fervently hope they will remain for the rest of their natural lives.
“They’re so relieved, thanking us many times over—just overjoyed with the result. We’re going to do everything we can to get their images down and to get these guys to stop practicing the way they were,” Plaintiffs’ attorney John O’Brien told The Daily Beast. Small mercies, in a scary world.
Women Win $13 Million in GirlsDoPorn Fraud Suit [Courthouse News]
Amateur Porn Company Girls Do Porn Hit With $12.8M in Damages for Exploiting Young Women [Daily Beast]
Jane Does 1-22 v. GirlsDoPorn.com [via Courthouse News]
Elizabeth Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.