Unwitting Online Porn Actresses Win $13M After Being Defrauded By Adult Sites : NPR

Choose a Girl

It’s only today, three days after the federal government revealed that the owners of Girls Do Porn have been arrested and charged with counts of federal sex trafficking — and one of whom is currently a fugitive at large — that Pornhub has finally made its official Girls Do Porn partner page disappear, as Motherboard is reporting today. But not the videos strewn across its site, unless they were directly uploaded to that Girls Do Porn page. Michael Pratt, the owner of GirlsDoPorn, appeared in a federal court on Tuesday and pleaded not guilty to sex trafficking charges filed in the Southern District of California on Oct. 10, 2019, according to a Justice Department news release.

Jane Doe Nos 1-14 v. girlsdoporn.com

As the owner and operator of the now-defunct adult film website GirlsDoPorn, Pratt coerced multiple women, and at least one underage girl, into sexual activities they had not signed up for. According to public court filings, Pratt and his co-defendants used force, fraud, and coercion to recruit hundreds of young adult women – most in their late teens – and at least one minor victim, to appear in GirlsDoPorn videos. One woman recalled the day she learned that her pornographic video received more than 300 million views on Pornhub, one of the most-visited websites in the world. Wolfe pleaded guilty to the conspiracy on July 26, 2022, admitting he moved to the United States from New Zealand in 2011 to work for Pratt and had a wide range of responsibilities. He filmed approximately 100 videos; uploaded finished videos onto the internet; oversaw the company’s financial books; and operated various business entities that were used to promote the business. Since 2016, Charles DeBarber, director of operations at technology firm Phoenix AI, has been undertaking the arduous task of discovering and trying to remove content from GirlsDoPorn that has been posted online.

Social/Emotional Milestones

“We have no indication she even knows this is being filmed,” Mickelwait said of this video, which has been on the site for two years. Some women said the men physically blocked the exit to their hotel room during the shoots. Some accused one of the men of raping them before or after the on-camera shoot.

Mo Money Mo Problems

If Pornhub paid Khalifa a portion of advertising revenue per view similar to YouTube, the videos could have generated about $501,000 using an amount disclosed by Pornhub, said Jason Urgo, the chief executive of Social Blade, a third-party analytics site for YouTube. The vast majority of people who received the warning message and chatbot did so only once, the report says. Around 1.7 million people saw a warning before leaving Pornhub or making other searches related to legal material. They typically remained on the site and looked for other stuff,” Findlater says.

• Banca et al. also found that, compared with healthy controls, compulsive Internet pornography users had enhanced preference for conditioned cues (abstract patterns) related to sexual images (Banca et al., 2016).
• To dispel doubts, Pratt paid other young women, including Moser, to “act as references or provide false assurances to the women that, if they filed a video, the video would not be posted online,” court records show.
• Generate custom, on-brand visuals and videos by typing in what you need with our AI art generator.
• This may be because LGBTQ+ teens report feeling more pressured to sext, or, possibly due to uncomfortability or inability to be “out” and dating in real life, are creating romantic relationships online.

The interviews in Porn demonstrate how easy it is for any of us to operate with our own system of myths and half-facts about sex and porn, even in the internet age when we can theoretically look anything up, because we mostly don’t talk about it. Information about something like this may technically be accessible, but there can be a comfort in assuming our experiences are universal, especially those which are painful or difficult, which might prevent a person from seeking it out. Although many guidelines for screen time exist, preschool-aged children spend an average of 2.5 hours per day using screens, and online videos from platforms like YouTube are extremely popular for children this age. Deputy Chief Dodds walks into the precinct with a copy of the New York Ledger’s front page headline that says “From Straight A’s to XXX.” He is not happy that the detectives didn’t know about Evie’s other pornography videos and that Hudson University was informed.

Prior to the criminal prosecution, the website and its operators were sued by 22 women featured in its videos, and a San Diego judge awarded the women nearly $13 million at the end of a civil trial. SAN DIEGO – Matthew Isaac Wolfe was sentenced in federal court today to 14 years in prison for his role in a conspiracy with Michael Pratt, owner of the website… SAN DIEGO – Michael Pratt, the alleged mastermind behind the GirlsDoPorn commercial sex trafficking ring, made his first appearance in federal court today following his extradition from Spain Monday night.

The five straight men she interviews all seem very cognizant of current feminist thinking on porn and are adept at referring back to this while discussing their own views and habits. Maybe this is the way they truly think, but I would be interested to read more from those who are less steeped in theory. She felt ill equipped to conduct a comprehensive academic survey, which would necessitate asking a large number of subjects formulaic questions. Instead she came to the idea of interviewing a group of her friends, acquaintances, and colleagues. Intimate, honest conversations about porn were what she felt she was missing, and what she thought other people might be missing too. This idea of secrecy, and the related shame, comes up again and again in the conversations in Porn, and is often much more entrenched than I would have anticipated.

Michael James Pratt, identified by law enforcement as “the ringleader,” remains at large, but his trial is set to begin in June 2022. The FBI is offering a $50,000 reward for information that leads to his arrest. Most of the hours-long shoots happened in hotel rooms and at short-term rental units in San Diego, court records show. Once the video productions began, court documents say that some women weren’t allowed to leave the shooting locations until the adult films were completed. If the women tried to leave, the group would either force the girls to “perform certain sex acts” or threaten them with lawsuits and flight cancelations, the documents continued. The conspiracy included recruiting the victims from throughout the United States and Canada using internet advertisements for clothed modeling jobs.

Pratt, who charged users a GirlsDoPorn subscription fee, made more than $17 million in revenue, according to the records. Most of the video shoots took place in San Diego – at local hotels and short-term rental units. Although the women were promised that the video shoots would be brief, they often took hours. Once the video productions began, some women were not permitted to leave the shooting locations until the videos were completed; some were threatened with lawsuits or cancelled flights home if they did not complete the videos; and others were allegedly forced to perform certain sex acts, which they had earlier declined to do. From 2012 to 2019, the DOJ says, the creators of GirlsDoPorn worked by recruiting young women, using ads posted on Craigslist, for what they claimed were clothed modeling photo shoots. When the women responded, they were told the ads were for pornographic videos, and they were pressured into taking part, according to various lawsuits and survivor testimonies.