Girls Do Ponr

Girls Do Ponr
The lawsuit claims the "porn scheme" was hatched by actor Ruben “Andre” Garcia (left), co-owner and videographer Matthew Wolfe (middle), and owner Michael Pratt (right).
Craigslist ads linked back to modeling websites like ModelingGigs[dot]com. According to the lawsuit, the owners of Girls Do Porn's website own these sites as well.

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A woman testified in court on Wednesday to an elaborate scheme hatched by three men who operate a San Diego-based pornography website to get her and 21 other women into appearing in a sex video.
The woman, known only as Jane Doe 15, is the first plaintiff to testify in the civil trial against popular adult website, Girls Do Porn, its owner Michael Pratt, videographer Matthew Wolfe, and actor and director Ruben Andre Garcia.
During her testimony, the woman described what her attorneys call an “elaborate scheme” to convince her and hundreds of other women to appear in sex videos which were later posted to some of the most popular websites in the world.
Jane Doe 15 said she was 18-years-old and attending college in 2016 when she found an ad on Craigslist for a modeling gig. She had been on the job hunt in order to help pay for tuition, room and board when she found the ad posted on her city’s Craigslist page. The ad directed her to a website owned by Pratt. She said she filled out the online form and attached pictures of herself.
“I had been applying to a lot of jobs and not having heard back, I was very intrigued to get $300 to do clothed modeling,” testified the woman. “I could have used the money.”
After completing the online form, Jane Doe 15 said she received an email from a man identifying himself as “Johnathon.”
Johnathon, who attorneys for the plaintiffs say is the alias for owner Pratt, gave her an offer she wasn’t expecting: Get paid $5,000 to have sex on camera.
The woman said she did not respond to the email. Court exhibits shown at the trial show the man then known as Johnathon followed up with another email. That was when Jane Doe 15 said the scheme began to unfold.
“He kept insisting I hear him out on the other offer,” she testified in court. “He said it would be thirty minutes of having sex, it would be $5000…he repeatedly said not online, not online, he said the videos would be on DVDs in Australia and other countries. I asked if I could do other modeling and he said no.”
She said she again did not respond. But, Pratt persisted, she said, continuing to tell her that the videos would be sold to private collectors in Australia or New Zealand and would not be released online.
“I wasn’t interested in doing porn. I knew how being in a porn could affect your future, your job opportunities, and how people believe you,” she said. “But he kept saying that no one would ever find out it wouldn’t go online.”
The woman said Pratt told her that he could provide a list of 200 women who would vouch for the company and ease any of her concerns about the distribution of the videos.
“He was very insistent that I hear the offer. Five positions, five to seven minutes each, it wouldn’t be in the U.S., it wouldn’t be online, it would be on DVD in other countries, and there were hundreds of girls who did not have any problems.”
She then spoke to two reference women, who assured her that everything Pratt had promised was true.
“It helped to know that girls do regular modeling and go to school, they were regular girls just like me.”
During the hour-long phone call, she said he insisted on booking her flight to San Diego.
“He said let’s book it just in case, we can always change it.”
Added Jane Doe 15, “I still wasn’t fully convinced yet.”
Soon after she got a text from two reference women, Amberlyn Carter and Kailyn Wright.
To see some of the text messages sent by the alleged “reference women,” scroll through below or click here .
“It was comforting to know I could talk to a woman who had done this before.”
Wright told her that she had done two shoots, and no one ever found out.
“It was encouraging to know that another cheerleader had done it,” said Jane Doe 15. “She had done two shoots and no one had discovered her.”
Again Jane Doe 15 said she asked, “These aren’t distributed in America right?”
Wright responded, “no prob and no they aren’t.”
Wright said there was no way anyone would find out.
“It got me a step closer and resolved all of my worries. I was assured it was safe by Wright and Johnathon and they had said no names, no internet, just DVDs in Australia.”
Jane Doe 15 agreed to come to San Diego the following week.
After arriving, she testified that she asked the videographer, the make-up artist, as well as the actor, Andre Garcia, that the videos would never be published online.
She said each had the same answer: No.
Minutes before the shoot, Jane Doe 15 said she had been given marijuana and then handed a stack of papers which she later learned was the contract. The videographer gave her the pages, “He just flips through them; this says these won’t go on the internet, only on DVD to Australia, and this one says no name would be used, and then he gave them to me and I couldn’t understand what he handed me so I just signed it.”
After the filming, she said she was paid $2,000 less because she had bruises and pale skin.
She left shortly after but not before taking screenshots of all of the text messages she exchanged with the man she knew as “Johnathon.”
“I feel humiliated.,” she said crying. “I’ve gotten random texts from strangers. It made me feel kind of unsafe that a stranger would find me like that. It made me feel unsafe and violated.”
Jane Doe 15 will take the stand again Thursday, August 22, for cross-examination. Also testifying will be the woman known as Jane Doe 12.
In a new podcast from NBC 7 Investigates called INSIGHT, journalists Dorian Hargrove and Tom Jones share some of the women’s stories who were featured in these videos and what they uncovered about the Girls Do Porn website, including the company’s ties to shell companies that were charged with laundering billions of dollars for a Mexican drug cartel and trafficking illegal weapons.
To listen to that podcast, click here or hit ‘Play’ below.

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Enlarge / San Diego Superior Court

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Enlarge / GirlsDoPorn's Pratt remains on the run, and the FBI is offering a $10,000 reward for information that can lead to his arrest.

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Bianca Bruno
- 3/3/2021, 3:45 PM

When she flew to San Diego in October 2013 with her friend who found a modeling ad on Craigslist, Jane Doe 7 believed she’d be paid $2,000 to do a nude photo shoot. And that photo shoot would only be released in Australia.
Instead, she found a much different reality. Jane Doe 7 ended up filming a porn video under duress in a hotel room where furniture blocked the door, preventing her from leaving.
First, Jane Doe 7 found out the photo shoot was actually a video shoot only when she was picked up at the airport by Matthew Wolfe, a videographer working for the porn website GirlsDoPorn. Doe didn’t know that last fact, either.
She asked at least 20 times where the video would air before agreeing to do it. Both Wolfe and porn actor Andre Garcia assured her the video would not go online, but it would instead be released on DVD in Australia. It was a believable lie given Wolfe’s New Zealand accent and the duo’s consistency in telling the same story.
Once Doe agreed to film the video, she was rushed through signing a contract and told “we needed to get this done.” Wolfe and Garcia soon put furniture in front of the hotel room door during filming; Jane Doe 7 said she couldn’t leave and was scared.
“I was being coached and I felt like I had to do it,” Doe said later during trial .
The sex was so hard Doe bled. She locked herself in the bathroom while Wolfe and Garcia tried to coax her out. Eventually, she finished the shoot and took a shower. But soon after the incident, she was harassed at work—Jane Doe 7’s video had been posted online. While she only looked at it on one website, others told Doe the video was now all over the Internet.
“I’m too afraid to Google it,” Doe said.
Jane Doe 7 was far from the only woman duped into filming pornography for the subscription website GirlsDoPorn. Her experience ultimately led to a San Diego Superior Court room where—one by one over the course of several months—22 millennial women answered affirmatively when attorneys for GirlsDoPorn asked them if they had ever viewed porn online. Yet in this fraud trial, these women all claimed they believed the porn videos they shot, which were published among GirlsDoPorn’s library of hundreds of porn flicks viewed collectively over one billion times, would never get posted online.
How could millennial women, living in an age where porn is almost exclusively viewed online, ever believe their own videos would never be posted on the Internet? To start, it takes a thought-out criminal scheme where the perpetrators were dedicated to leaving no paper trail. But GirlsDoPorn's successful manipulation was possible because large swaths of society still label women who participate in sex work as cultural pariahs. The GirlsDoPorn operators knew this, and they wagered the Does' shame over appearing in porn would likely ensure these victims would not take the site's management to task for this fraud.
Ultimately, though, the wild success of those viral GirlsDoPorn Internet videos is what led to the site team's downfall. The Does were eventually able to find one another—and by doing so, they collectively found the strength to come forth and build a successful legal case against GirlsDoPorn.
The owners and operators of GirlsDoPorn knew the type of women they wanted to appear in their amateur porn videos—college-age millennials—would not agree to casually participate in the porn industry. After all, these women grew up in the Internet age, where amateur porn has been rampantly available for years. On top of that, many instances of their peers’ sexual exploration through sexting had traveled down several slippery slopes, including cases where teens had been criminally charged for sharing x-rated media they took of themselves .
In 2019, a Maryland appellate court found 6-1 that child pornography laws apply when a teen is both the subject and sender of sexually explicit media. Under the ruling, where the judicial panel encouraged lawmakers to change the law, the appellate court upheld a lower court’s decision where a 16-year-old girl was convicted as her own pornographer.
Prosecution of minors under child pornography laws, the American Academy of Pediatrics warned in 2019, “has the potential to have dire legal ramifications for teens,” as sexting among young people—and prosecution of them under child pornography laws—continues to rise.
That’s precisely why GirlsDoPorn owner Michael Pratt, videographer Matthew Wolfe, and actor Andre Garcia created a bait-and-switch scheme to get the women to appear in their videos.
That scheme, revealed during the months-long trial in San Diego Superior Court Judge Kevin Enright’s courtroom , led to criminal human trafficking charges being filed by the US Attorneys Office in the Southern District of California.
Garcia pleaded guilty ( PDF ) last year to conspiracy and sex-trafficking charges related to five Doe victims. He faces 15 years to life in prison. Wolfe is in federal custody awaiting trial. Pratt is a fugitive on the FBI’s Most Wanted list , and there is a $10,000 reward for information leading to his arrest. He may have fled to his native New Zealand, where authorities there are looking for him and have agreed to extradite him to the United States if he’s caught.
GirlsDoPorn’s racket started with strategic targeting. All three men were involved in recruiting college students to shoot their first porn videos, and by and large they sought out women who were low-income and may have needed money for things like rent, books, and tuition.
From there, the scheme grew digitally. These women were recruited via Craigslist modeling ads and then directed to fill out contact forms on benign-sounding websites like BeginModeling.com and CaliforniaModeling.com. They were then contacted by Garcia, who revealed applicants were actually being recruited to film a 30-minute porn video that they would be paid several thousand dollars to film.
In general, at this point, the GirlsDoPorn trio had to quell the natural skepticism while also avoiding much of a paper trail. Garcia would proactively tell the women the videos were either for a private collector or to be sold on DVDs in adult stores overseas in places like New Zealand and Australia. The videos would never get posted online, and their names would never be associated with the videos, Garcia claimed.
As soon as women had particular questions about where the porn videos were distributed, Garcia would take the conversations offline. He called and FaceTimed the women, dodging answering any specific questions by instead offering to immediately book plane tickets—even before any women had agreed to participate in the filming.
During the trial, Garcia pleaded the fifth and did not testify.
Wolfe was the only one of the three to testify in person. 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.
According to Wolfe, Garcia was still recruiting women to film videos for GirlsDoPorn during the trial. But Wolfe said he did not know about any policies in place during the trial to tell the women their videos could end up on GirlsDoPorn’s website.
“Do any contracts presented to models since the lawsuit was filed in June 2016 reference websites?” attorney Brian Holm asked Wolfe.
“No, I don’t believe so,” Wolfe said.
“Is it fair to say the contracts being used in recruiting today are the same as the contracts prior to the lawsuit?” Holm asked.
“Were the contracts changed in any way to reference GirlsDoPorn.com?” Holm pressed.
When Wolfe was asked about the use of the word “website” on a version of the model talent release form GirlsDoPorn had some of the models sign, Wolfe said he wasn’t aware of any questions or concerns raised by the women who were recruited to film videos for DVDs sold overseas. But he made an aside:
“That’s where almost all of pornography that’s produced goes,” Wolfe said.
“It only went on the Internet? It only went on websites?” Holm asked.
When asked if women had insisted on knowing where the videos were published, Wolfe said he would have told them it was posted online but would not have disclosed GirlsDoPorn’s name “because of online trolls harassing GirlsDoPorn’s employees.”
“Most people know porn goes online,” he said.
Just as attorneys for GirlsDoPorn asked the women one by one during their testimony in the months-long trial if they had ever viewed porn online, the Does’ own attorneys asked all of them a different question: would they have agreed to appear in GirlsDoPorn’s videos had they known the truth—that the videos were posted online?
One by one, the women each had the same response: they would not have appeared in the videos.
Footage courtesy of Dvids, Boeing, and The United States Navy.
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Looks like they're trying to get a charge that applies to the USA/NZ extradition treaty from 1970. Article II, section seven: "Unlawful sexual acts with or upon children under the age specified by the laws of both the requesting and requested parties." I think the production of child pornography would apply, but I'm no expert on extradition treaties.

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Timothy B. Lee
Timothy is a senior reporter covering tech policy and the future of transportation. He lives in Washington DC.

Email timothy.lee@arstechnica.com
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Timothy B. Lee
- 11/9/2019, 1:30 AM

Michael Pratt, the principal owner of the GirlsDoPorn website, is already facing criminal charges for sex trafficking involving adult women. A new indictment, unsealed Thursday, has added child pornography charges .
For years, Pratt has been recruiting young women to San Diego to shoot pornographic videos. Dozens of women say that Pratt and his colleagues lied to them and used physical coercion to induce them to participate—claims that led to federal sex trafficking charges last month.
Now prosecutors say that Pratt flew a 16-year-old girl to Southern California to have sex on camera. That would be a violation of federal laws against production of child pornography as well as sex trafficking of minors.
It's not clear if Pratt will ultimately stand trial for his alleged crimes. Pratt, a New Zealand native, reportedly left the United States in September in the midst of a long-running civil trial that is still ongoing.
Criminal charges were filed against Pratt and three others in October. Two of Pratt's co-defendants are now in federal custody, while a third is out on bail. But Pratt is believed to be in New Zealand.
Courthouse News reports that the new indictment was unsealed at "a hearing attended by Pratt’s co-defendants, GirlsDoPorn videographer Matthew Wolfe, actor Andre Garcia, and administrative assistant Valorie Moser." The judge entered a not guilty plea for the trio.
Footage courtesy of Dvids, Boeing, and The United States Navy.
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