SAN DIEGO (CNS) - The owner of the San Diego-based GirlsDoPorn.com website, which featured pornographic videos of young women who were forced or coerced into appearing in the films under false pretenses, was sentenced to 27 years in federal prison Monday.
Michael James Pratt, described by prosecutors as "the ringleader in a wide-ranging sex-trafficking conspiracy" surrounding the now-defunct website, pleaded guilty earlier this year to charges of sex trafficking and conspiracy to commit sex trafficking.
Prosecutors said the website's operators led women to believe the videos in which they appeared would be distributed only to private customers living outside of the country and that their identities would not be exposed. But the goal was always to post the videos on the internet as part of the scheme, which netted Pratt "millions of dollars in profit," prosecutors said.
Victims were given false promises by Pratt and other GirlsDoPorn.com employees, which included "reference girls" who falsely assured victims that they had participated in past videos that were never posted online.
After their videos were posted and proliferated to their family, friends, and employers, many of the women said they pleaded with GirlsDoPorn's leadership to take down their videos, but their requests were refused or ignored.
U.S. District Judge Janis Sammartino sentenced Pratt to more than the nearly 22 years requested by federal prosecutors due to what she said was "the sheer scope and magnitude of this offense."
Pratt's sentencing hearing spanned nearly six hours and featured testimonials from almost 40 victims, including the mother of a young woman who died of a drug overdose in the years after her video was released. Victims who spoke Monday said at least 15 women they knew who appeared in GirlsDoPorn videos have since died from suicide or other causes.
Many of the women said they have spent years and countless amounts of money trying to scrub evidence of their videos from the internet, with little to no success.
"The scariest part is the internet doesn't forget," one woman said.
Numerous victims said those videos were re-posted by people online featuring their full names and other personal identifying information, leading to an onslaught of harassment that follows them to this day.
One woman said that just when she thought she'd escaped the specter of the video filmed over a decade ago, screenshots of it resurfaced on the social media page of her new job, leading her to quit. Several said that people in their lives who discovered their videos -- including former friends and co- workers -- have attempted to blackmail them in exchange for their silence.
Victims spoke of legally changing their names and surgically altering their appearances to avoid recognition. Many said they turned to self- medication with drugs and/or alcohol, and spoke of suicide attempts or suicidal thoughts.
Prosecutors say Pratt was the mastermind behind the coercive scheme and had a hands-on role in creating the videos, including sometimes manning the camera, recruiting women who appeared in videos, and transporting the women to and from video shoots.
After victims were flown out to San Diego -- where the majority of the website's content was filmed -- they were presented with contracts that concealed the true purpose of the scheme, prosecutors said. Rather than stating the videos were for GirlsDoPorn, the companies were referred to as Bubblegum Casting, BLL Media, or other innocuous, misleading names.
The U.S. Attorney's Office said some victims were told they could be sued or their flights home canceled if they didn't complete the videos, and that the doors at video shoot locations were often blocked by cameras and recording equipment, leaving the victims feeling "powerless and unable to leave."
Defense attorney Brian White conceded in his sentencing papers that Pratt misled the women about where their videos would end up.
"Mr. Pratt now recognizes those misrepresentations were reckless, fraudulent, and ultimately harmful to many women," White wrote in a sentencing memorandum.
However, he argued that Pratt was not involved with any mistreatment of victims during the video shoots and stated he took measures to ensure safety during filming.
The defense filing also alleged that "erratic and unpredictable" conduct from porn actor Ruben Andre Garcia -- who was in all the videos involving the victims in the case -- was unknown to Pratt, such as providing alcohol and marijuana to the women or engaging in "`extracurricular' contact with the models."
Several victims pushed back on that claim though. One woman said that during the filming of her video, she begged Pratt to halt the video shoot, but he refused.
White also wrote that doorways at the filming locations were not intentionally barricaded, but that the rooms were merely cramped and offered little to no room to store the equipment.
"There was no intention to block access to the door, it was simply a convenient place to store the empty crates and boxes during filming," the memorandum states.
White wrote that Pratt made efforts to protect women's identities from being publicly released after a website was launched by another person, which exposed many of the victims' names. The attorney wrote that Pratt purchased the site with the intention of shutting it down.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Alexandra Foster said that whatever Pratt's intention, he continued to recruit women for GirlsDoPorn while knowing their identities weren't being safeguarded and continued to lie to them about the videos going online.
Along with criminal charges, the website's operators were sued by 22 women featured in the videos, including several who spoke Monday. The civil lawsuit led to a nearly $13 million verdict against GirlsDoPorn in early 2020.
Pratt left the country after the civil trial got underway. After criminal charges were filed, Pratt 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.
Pratt is among the last GirlsDoPorn employees to be sentenced in the long-running criminal case.
Sammartino has sentenced several of his co-defendants, including Garcia, who received a 20-year sentence, Pratt's ex-business partner, Matthew Isaac Wolfe, who was sentenced to 14 years, and camera operator Theodore Gyi, who was sentenced to four years in prison.
Another co-defendant, Alexander Brian Foster, was sentenced to one year in prison for creating a video meant to harass and publicly identify the 22 women who sued GirlsDoPorn. Prosecutors said the video --which was never completed or released -- was made at Pratt's direction, and that he instructed Foster to include video clips of the women's videotaped depositions from the civil case, their Instagram posts and video footage of them leaving the courthouse.
Later this week, GirlsDoPorn bookkeeper Valorie Moser is scheduled to be sentenced. Prosecutors say Moser largely performed administrative tasks for the company, but was aware of the trafficking scheme and attempted to recruit models for the website.
Another defendant, Douglas Wiederhold, also awaits sentencing later this year. According to his plea agreement, Wiederhold appeared as a male actor in 71 GirlsDoPorn videos and 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 website's activities also spurred dual lawsuits from more than 100 women against the parent company for porn-streaming site PornHub for profiting off of GirlsDoPorn's trafficking by hosting its videos. The company reached settlements with the women in both lawsuits and also agreed to pay over $1.8 million to resolve a probe by federal prosecutors who alleged the company knew or should have known it was accepting money that originated from sex- trafficking operations.
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