GirlsDoPorn
GirlsDoPorn was an American pornographic website active from 2009 to 2020. In October and November 2019, six people involved with the website were charged on counts of sex trafficking by force, fraud, and coercion. In December 2019, two more individuals were charged with obstruction of sex trafficking enforcement. The website was removed in January 2020 after 22 victims won the civil case against the company. According to the United States Department of Justice, the website and its sister website GirlsDoToys generated over $17 million in revenue. Videos were featured on GirlsDoPorn.com as well as pornography aggregate websites such as Pornhub, where the channel reached the top 20 most viewed, with approximately 680 million views.
Pornography produced by the company, which was based in San Diego, California, was in the style of a 'casting couch', featuring women who were not professional pornographic actors. Lawsuits and other testimony describe practices by GirlsDoPorn in detail. Women who responded to fake modeling advertisements on Craigslist were put into contact with 'reference girls' who pretended to have had positive experiences with the company. Participants could be promised between $2,000 and $6,000 for 30 minutes of sex on camera. However, filming could last up to nine hours and, according to an ex-employee, 50% of women were not paid the amount they agreed on. Verbal promises were given that the videos would never be released on the Internet or in the United States, only to independent video stores in Australia, New Zealand or South America, or to private buyers. When participants reached San Diego, they were made to sign contracts that did not mention the name "GirlsDoPorn". The filming process was violent: the Department of Justice said that "some were sexually assaulted and in at least one case raped". Release of participants' personal information and online harassment accompanied the videos. Subjects of the videos have reported adverse effects including suicidal ideation, physical harassment, and the loss of jobs and accommodation.
A lawsuit filed in 2016 alleged "intentional misrepresentation, fraudulent concealment, unlawful and fraudulent business practices, and the intentional infliction of emotional distress" on the parts of New Zealand nationals Michael Pratt and Matthew Wolfe, as well as Andre Garcia. In January 2020, the plaintiffs received damages of $12.775 million, as well as ownership to videos they featured in. However, they had yet to receive any money by February 2022. In December 2023, Aylo agreed to pay a $1.8million government fine plus compensation to victims. Pratt, Garcia, and Wolfe were sentenced to 27, 20, and 14 years in custody, respectively; others involved in GirlsDoPorn have also been convicted.
History
GirlsDoPorn was a pornography website owned by Michael Pratt, who also worked as the cameraman and editor. Matthew Wolfe was co-owner and cameraman. He is also a childhood friend of Pratt's. Douglas Wiederhold and Ruben Andre Garcia were the main male pornographic actors for the company. Lawyer Aaron Sadock began working for the company in 2012, while cameraman Theodore "Teddy" Gyi filmed around 120 videos between 2015 and 2017. Pratt began planning and shooting for GirlsDoPorn in 2007. The website was launched in 2009.Pratt began working in the pornographic industry around the year 2000, after graduating from high school. He initially launched the affiliate porn websites Wicked Movies, Kute Kittens, and TeenieFlixxx, the last an affiliate of the existing website ExploitedTeens, all of which produced pornography in the same style that GirlsDoPorn later would.
In 2007, Pratt moved to the United States to film pornography. Between 2007 and 2012, Wiederhold worked with Pratt, the two filming videos of Wiederhold having sex in hotel rooms with women who were not in the porn industry. These videos formed the basis of the videos first released by GirlsDoPorn. In 2010, Wiederhold and Pratt created the MILF pornography website MomPOV, which had a Vanuatu domain but operates from Las Vegas.
In 2011, Wolfe moved from New Zealand to the United States. Wolfe was involved with Pratt's work from 2008 onwards. Over 100 videos were filmed by Wolfe for GirlsDoPorn between 2011 and 2019.
GirlsDoPorn was active during a period of growing consumption of 'casting couch' Internet pornography. Such pornography is often filmed in hotel rooms or office setup with minimal crew and may feature women who have not previously filmed pornography and are given money on-camera. In the case of GirlsDoPorn, their homepage boasted, "You will not find these girls on any other website". The women would be asked about their sex lives on camera, and sometimes videos included them reading parts of their contracts aloud. The male performer's face was never shown in the videos. Vice reported that "the current iteration of the 'casting couch' trope is largely based on" Backroom Casting Couch, a series that started in 2007 by a pornographer who plays a role of "deceiving" the women featured in his videos, but in actuality all of the women featured in the series are established porn performers.
Over a dozen U.S. and foreign companies were associated with GirlsDoPorn throughout its lifespan. In 2011, GT Group Limited, a company referenced in the Panama Papers, was listed as its parent corporation. The Sydney Morning Herald reported in 2011 that GT Group Limited was founded by a man associated with arms smuggling, drug gangs, and tax fraud. By 2017, its parent corporation were Oh Well Media Limited, a company based in Port Vila, Vanuatu, which is an offshore tax haven according to the San Diego Reader. The company BLL Media Inc. was referred to in contracts signed with some women who worked for the company.
GirlsDoPorn.com charged a subscription of $30 per month; it published a roughly 45-minute video on a weekly schedule. The official site Girls-Do-Porn.com posted short, free extracts of the videos. The company had a spin-off site, GirlsDoToys, launched by Pratt and Wolfe in 2014. In January 2017, GirlsDoPorn.com was the 33,949th-most-visited website in the United States, receiving roughly 1.2 million visitors between November and December 2016, including approximately 84,000 who were visiting the website for the first time. According to the United States Department of Justice, the websites GirlsDoPorn and GirlsDoToys generated over $17 million in revenue. Pratt was the sole recipient of profits from the websites. Upon filing bankruptcy in 2018, Pratt estimated his income to be greater than $60,000 per month, and reported over $134,000 in back taxes.
The company received tabloid attention in 2013 and 2014 when it was reported that two beauty pageant models for Miss Teen USA were the subjects of videos on the website; as a consequence of this being made public, the models ceased connection with the beauty pageants. Some women who filmed videos with GirlsDoPorn later became professional pornographic actors, including Emily Willis, who said she filmed two videos with the website after dating Garcia for a month. Willis said that she was aware that she was being lied to but wanted to enter the industry regardless.
In a court testimony in October 2019, Wolfe said that GirlsDoPorn continued to recruit new women, whose contracts did not mention the name of the website. According to Ars Technica, amid investigation into the owners of the website, GirlsDoPorn.com went offline in January 2020.
Content on other websites
In addition to being released on GirlsDoPorn.com, videos produced by the company were also released on websites that aggregated pornographic videos such as Pornhub, XVideos, and YouPorn. They were viewed over 800 million times on these websites, including roughly 680 million views on Pornhub, where GirlsDoPorn was amongst the top 20 most viewed channels. Overall, court documents found that videos produced by the website were watched over 1 billion times, and pirated versions were viewed hundreds of millions of times. The second-most viewed video on Pornhub in 2014 was of GirlsDoPorn.GirlsDoPorn's channel was removed from Pornhub in October 2019, which journalists at Daily Dot and Motherboard said was a slow response to the incident. Additionally, the videos could still be found afterwards unofficially on Pornhub's website. Motherboard found that the digital fingerprinting that Pornhub uses to remove duplicates of removed videos, Vobile, prevented them from uploading some identical or nearly-identical clips of GirlsDoPorn videos, but also did not remove many slight variants on the footage. In 2023, a spokesperson for Aylo said the company "deeply regrets" having hosted GirlsDoPorn content.
Lawsuits filed against Pornhub's parent company, Aylo focus on its partnership with GirlsDoPorn and alleged hosting of such videos from 2011 to December 2020 despite repeated requests for removal by subjects. Following this period, Vice reported that XVideos, XNXX, and Spankbang had removed many GirlsDoPorn videos on their sites and ensured that the search term "Girls Do Porn" returned no results.
Discussion website Reddit had a forum, "r/girlsdoporn", which began in 2013 and was dedicated to posting links and videos as well as the identities of the women featured on GirlsDoPorn. In October 2019, amidst a lawsuit against GirlsDoPorn, moderators removed most content on the subreddit and announced it to be in hiatus. Reddit removed the subreddit shortly afterwards. The forum had approximately 99,000 accounts subscribed to it at the time of its closure. In 2014, GirlsDoPorn.com launched an Internet forum. The company was also active on Instagram, where posts would brag about how young the actors involved were.
One woman told Motherboard that, as of 2021, Twitter was the host of most continuing harassment against her, with users contacting her employers with links to the video she featured in; YouTube also declined to remove a video harassing her for five months until contacted by Motherboard. A YouTube video that harassed four women in relation to GirlsDoPorn, with comments giving their identifying information, reached roughly 2million views.