Girls Do Porn Ordered To Pay Millions And Turn Over Copyrights To 22 Women

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A victim of the Girls Do Porn sex trafficking ring is suing Pornhub and its parent company, claiming that it intended to cause her severe emotional distress by hosting videos of her abuse. He said during the trial that he filmed around 100 videos for GirlsDoPorn and moved to the US in 2011 to help Pratt, his childhood friend from New Zealand. Wolfe, who was identified as the “person most qualified” to testify on behalf of the company, is also an owner of GirlsDoPorn’s affiliate website, GirlsDoToys.

Investigation and legal action

Prosecutors allege the website’s owners and operators lured unsuspecting young women, and at least one underage girl, with advertisements for clothed modeling gigs. When it was revealed that the job involved filming adult videos, the victims were led to believe the videos they appeared in would be distributed only to private customers living outside of the country, rather than proliferated online, according to the U.S. If MindGeek did not know GirlsDoPorn was a sex trafficking venture before October 2019, it should have known for a great number of reasons, the most notable of which is that GirlsDoPorn’s victims sent MindGeek complaints detailing the fraud and coercion they were subjected to by GirlsDoPorn.

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On January 2, 2020, after a 99-day bench trial, Judge Kevin A. Enright awarded the plaintiffs $13 million in compensatory and punitive damages. The defendants were ordered to remove all videos of plaintiffs from the Internet and cease all distribution of them. During the civil trial, Pratt, Garcia, Wolfe, and several other individuals were criminally indicted for sex trafficking. Last November, Michael Pratt was charged with production of child pornography, with investigators unearthing evidence that he had solicited a girl as young as sixteen to film a pornographic film in 2012. It is believed that he went through with this plan, and a few other GirlsDoPorn employees were charged with him.

• The U.S. Attorney’s Office in San Diego declined to comment on the indictment or the timing of it.
• Research on the social, emotional, and mental health impacts of social media continues to develop — evidence is mixed on the negative and positive effects of using it and how dramatic those effects are.
• But the lawsuit argues that the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) enacted in 2018 would override a Section 230 defense.
• By working together with your teen to create a media use agreement — and to update it as they grow increasingly independent and responsible about their media use — you can help them build the habits that will lead to a healthier, more balanced engagement with the digital world.
• Young women were selected as references, because Garcia, Pratt and Matthew Wolfe believed the victims were more likely to believe other young women over Garcia or Pratt.

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. Considering the impact of gender, knowledge about STD, and sexual attitude on forced sex, educational interventions among the youth especially girls are required to provide complete and proper information about sexual and reproductive health and rights and correct the sexual attitudes of the youth. The chatbot was designed and created by the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), a nonprofit which removes CSAM from the web, and the Lucy Faithfull Foundation, a charity which works to precent child sexual abuse. The trial counted the number of sessions on Pornhub, which could mean people are counted multiple times, and it did not look to identify individuals. The report says there was a “meaningful decrease” in searches for CSAM on Pornhub and that at least “in part” the chatbot and warning messages appear to have played a role.

Victims were also often paid significantly less than originally promised with Garcia and others would citing a tattoo, a mole, or some other perceived “imperfection” to pay the victim less. The results of the present study indicated that the variables of gender, knowledge of STD, and sexual attitude are among the predictors of forced sex. Thus, considering the pattern of gender, implementing proper behavioral, educational interventions among the youth, especially girls for reducing forced sex, as well as presenting complete and proper information about SRH, are required to enhance the awareness and correct the attitudes of the youth. In a study by Tsai et al. [31], the prevalence of forced sex among women in Botswana and Swaziland was 10.3 and 11.4%, respectively.

It makes you wonder what, if anything, will be enough to convince Pornhub and its porn owner MindGeek to proactively get rid of Girls Do Porn’s worrying content, seeing how the simplest searches for Girls Do Porn videos on Pornhub turn up plenty of Girls Do Porn videos that aren’t even trying to hide. MindGeek’s defense against the lawsuit could cite Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which gives legal immunity to online platforms that host user-submitted content. But the lawsuit argues that the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) enacted in 2018 would override a Section 230 defense. Another one of the Jane Doe plaintiffs in January 2016 “submitted a content removal request to MindGeek, begging to have her video removed because of the lack of consent and harassment she was under,” the complaint said.

The porn industry is often seen as being rather lucrative, but only for those that can manage to get into it and take advantage of the rare opportunities. At least, that’s how it was for decades, until the internet began to change everything. Eventually, cameraman duties would be handed off to another new hire named Theodore “Teddy” Gyi, who took over Wolfe’s duties of filming the shoots and interviewing the women. He would become the only non-GirlsDoPorn executive to be present in the hotel rooms during filming (an important detail to remember for later on), and his hiring allowed Matthew Wolfe to begin focusing on more “big picture” ideas, alongside his childhood friend, Michael Pratt. The site would feature a new girl every week, over several years, like clockwork.

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. Pratt victimized hundreds of young women, federal prosecutors said, including at least one girl under the age of 18. Investigators said that victims were forced into performing nonconsensual sexual acts, and when they wanted their videos removed from the websites, Pratt and his partners threatened and intimidated them.