SAN DIEGO (CNS) - The owner of the GirlsDoPorn.com website that produced and posted pornographic videos online featuring young women who were forced or coerced into appearing in the films under false pretenses pleaded guilty in San Diego federal court Thursday to sex trafficking and conspiracy to commit sex trafficking charges.
Michael James Pratt, 42, who fled the country in 2019 after criminal charges were filed against him and other GirlsDoPorn employees, is the final defendant to enter a guilty plea in the long-running federal prosecution.
Prosecutors say the San Diego-based 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.
Some of the women believed the job involved clothed modeling when they were recruited by Pratt and then flown out to San Diego, where the majority of GirlsDoPorn's videos were shot.
The U.S. Attorney's Office said some victims were forced into sex acts or told they could be sued or their flights home canceled if they didn't complete the videos.
The company also hired fake "reference girls" to falsely assure victims that they had participated in past videos, which would not be posted online.
At prior co-defendants' sentencing hearings and a San Diego civil trial that led to a nearly $13 million verdict against GirlsDoPorn, victims said their lives were upended upon realizing their videos had been posted online, with the ensuing harassment and abuse driving some to suicidal thoughts and substance abuse.
Several women described how links to their videos were sent en masse to family members, friends and co-workers, sabotaging their employment prospects and ruining familial relationships. Many of the women said they pleaded with GirlsDoPorn's leadership to take down their videos, but they refused or ignored the women's requests.
Prosecutors say clips of the women's videos were widely disseminated on free pornographic websites as a means to convince viewers to pay subscription fees for the full videos on GirlsDoPorn.com, which generated over $17 million in revenue for Pratt.
Pratt fled the country after the civil trial got underway, spent more than three years on the lam, and was at one time on the FBI's Top Ten Most Wanted list. He was arrested in Spain in late 2022 and extradited to San Diego.
Pratt is due to be sentenced in September.
Many of his co-defendants have been sentenced to prison terms, including porn actor Ruben Andre Garcia, who received a 20-year sentence, and Pratt's ex-business partner Matthew Isaac Wolfe, who was sentenced to 14 years. Another co-defendant, Alexander Brian Foster, was prosecuted and sentenced to one year in prison for creating a video meant to harass and publicly identify the 22 women who sued GirlsDoPorn.
The parent company of PornHub, which was sued by more than 100 women featured in the videos, also settled a criminal probe by paying $1.8 million and admitting it accepted money it knew or should have known originated from sex-trafficking operations.
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