Choose a Girl

Defense attorneys argued that Wolfe, Pratt and Garcia did not personally harass any of the women and were not responsible for “internet trolls” who did so. When attorneys finished with closing arguments, the judge took the matter under submission on Dec. 13. Chapin said Enright is giving attorneys additional time to file any objections to his rulings.

• This was cited by many of the victims as an intimidation tactic used by the producers, who wanted the women to feel trapped inside of the hotel room; unable to say no to the demands they were giving at the last minute, preventing them from leaving.
• In the 2016 lawsuit, the Jane Does, who were all between the ages of 17 and 22 at the time, said Girls Do Porn duped them into creating videos based on the understanding that the content would only be for a private collector, sold outside the US, or for a limited-release DVD.
• During the teen years, talk with your teen about expectations for digital management and help them to create habits around putting away their phone before bed, designing schedules for exercise and other offline time, and identifying focus settings for schoolwork to avoid multitasking with media.
• The website and its operators were also 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.

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The women say they were told that the videos would only be available in limited release on DVD, and no one they knew would ever see them. Shortly after they were shot, the videos were posted on the internet, on massively popular websites like Pornhub and YouPorn, and the women were doxed and harassed by viewers using forums like the recently-defunct PornWikiLeaks. During Garcia’s sentencing hearing, the judge heard from 20 victims who described horror stories like being allegedly forced into doing sex scenes and having the videos follow them for years. Meanwhile, the men still face federal charges of sex trafficking and producing child porn.

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«You can hear the woman yelling to stop because it hurts,» she said recently of the video, which includes a tag showing it’s been on the site five years. In August 2023, as part of the Pornhub network, Aylo launched UViU, a platform for creators to sell content directly to fans.[91] Designed with creator input, UViU helps diversify income and increase earnings. Fans can discover and browse creators’ content, while creators can manage their Pornhub and UViU accounts from one dashboard. Pauline Repard covers legal affairs, crime and public safety news in San Diego County. She joined The San Diego Union-Tribune in 1988, and since then has reported police, fire and court news in every corner of the county. Repard grew up in San Diego County and earned a journalism degree at California State University Fullerton.

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• In addition to not being told they’d be online, the group informed the women that they would remain anonymous in the videos, according to court records.
• While they were separate businesses, many of the videos produced by GirlsDoPorn were uploaded to and hosted on Pornhub.
• Reid rose to stardom in the world of adult entertainment during the 2010s and has become a big name in the industry.
• A porn actor and producer who recruited young women under false pretenses to appear in videos for San Diego-based website GirlsDoPorn.com was sentenced Monday to 20 years in custody in connection with his pleas to federal sex-trafficking and conspiracy charges.

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.

Yet, «Jonathan N» was persistent with his offers, and later managed to arrange a call with Jane. During this phone call, he said that she could earn $5,000 by appearing in a sex scene filmed by his company, to which she asked if it would be distributed throughout North America. «No,» said Jonathan, who insisted that this footage would only be distributed throughout Australia and the United Kingdom on DVDs for private collectors.

When 22 women sued independent label Girls Do Porn in June for allegedly manipulating them into performing sex acts for a global audience, it wasn’t enough for giant adult video site Pornhub to stop promoting Girls Do Porn as an official “Content Partner” and profiting from the arrangement. Copyright in a settlement agreement is “standard practice” for attorneys representing victims of nonconsensual pornography, Erica Johnstone, co-founder of the nonprofit legal privacy advocacy group Without My Consent, told Gizmodo. Last year, The New York Times exposed Pornhub as a platform for monetized rape, child trafficking sexual abuse, and other forms of nonconsensual image-based abuse. GirlsDoPorn was charged with trafficking in October 2019, but a year later, a simple search I conducted for “GDP” on Pornhub returned more than 300 videos and images of the victims. The videos were heavily monetized and globally distributed on Pornhub, the world’s largest and most popular porn site.

GirlsDoPorn is an adult subscription service launched in 2006 by New Zealander Michael Pratt and operated by Ruben Garcia and Matthew Wolfe. Filmed in homes, hotels and trailer parks, videos on GirlsDoPorn specialise in promoting the image of the “ordinary” college girl who is making her first and only pornographic film. After the victims returned home, still believing that they would remain anonymous, Pratt and his co-defendants posted clips of the videos on heavily trafficked adult film sites, like Pornhub, to funnel traffic to the full-length versions of the videos on his website, GirlsDoPorn. Even after severing its partnership with GirlsDoPorn, MindGeek continues to profit from Plaintiffs’ videos to this day. As of December 12, 2020, MindGeek still hosts victims’ videos on its websites, including Plaintiffs.

Some illuminating information would come from the testimony of two people employed by GirlsDoPorn but were not involved in the running of the company itself. He failed to answer his court summons, having returned to New Zealand due to what friend and confidante Matthew Wolfe described as «health issues related to threats he had received,» but offering up no details about either the threats or the health issues involved. Wolfe did admit that he had been chatting with Pratt recently over the encrypted messaging app Signal but claimed to have no knowledge of Pratt’s whereabouts.

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.

Brian Holm, an attorney representing the plaintiffs, called this tactic «undue harassment,» and thankfully the judge agreed. Dozens, if not hundreds, of the women featured on GirlsDoPorn were subjected to sex acts that they had not consented to, and which they had received guarantees they wouldn’t have to perform on video. Sometimes, they were convinced to do so by the cameraman — who threatened to withhold their pay or recoup the cost of travel — or through force (by Garcia and the other male performers). During filming, they were not allowed to leave the hotel room and were again threatened with the loss of pay, travel fare, lodging, etc. Beginning to grow confident that this was a decent way to earn a nice chunk of change, Jane would speak to Jonathan again on FaceTime.