Passenger to Boston facing child porn charges after fellow flyer spots pics on his phone
Choose a Girl
As I detailed a bit at the top of the episode, GirlsDoPorn would gain some national notoriety throughout 2013, when the Miss Teen USA scandal broke for the first time. But these scandals - while damaging for the women involved - only helped the website gain more and more publicity. 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. San Diego Superior Court Judge Kevin Enright issued a tentative decision Thursday finding that website operator Michael Pratt and others used fraud and deceit by falsely promising the women the videos would not appear online or in the United States. One woman said that for years afterward, her video was the first result that came up if her name was searched online.
GirlsDoPorn videographer sentenced to 4 years in prison for sex trafficking
- “Aylo is not pleading guilty to any crime, and the Government has agreed to dismiss its charge against the Company after 3 years, subject to the Company’s continued compliance with the Deferred Prosecution Agreement,” the company said.
- More than a dozen of these lawsuits were filed in the past month alone, and many more may be on the way.
- Alex Riggins covers federal courts and federal law enforcement for The San Diego Union-Tribune.
- Wolfe’s attorney, Jeremy Warren, wrote that the country’s economy ground to a halt, leaving young people like Wolfe with few job prospects.
- He again assured her that nothing she appeared in would be posted online and that the shoot would be quick and painless - taking less than 30 minutes of her time.
Today these young girls are free and have been restored to their families. Also in October 2015, Jane Doe 17 said she was tagged in an Instagram post advertising the pornographic video she had filmed after responding to a Craigslist ad, which she thought no one would ever see. The post on the Girls Do Porn account included a photo of her on a hotel bed captioned “Coming soon.” The next day, she filed a report at the San Diego Police Department.
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In September, Pratt was added to the FBI's list of the top 10 most wanted fugitives due to allegations that he was involved in child pornography production and sex trafficking. For information leading to his arrest on charges related to the two porn websites GirlsDoPorn and GirlsDoToys, the agency was offering a $100,000 prize. The women were awarded nearly $13 million by a San Diego Superior Court judge. Sex trafficking hides in brothels and hotels, where “johns” (people who pay for sex) can purchase time with a trafficked individual to exploit them.
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According to prosecutors, the company received more than $100,000 from GirlsDoPorn as well as roughly $764,000 in payments from advertisers attributable to the production company from 2017 to 2020. The charge stemmed from Aylo’s role in hosting videos and accepting payments from GirlsDoPorn. Attorneys successfully arguing that the two were significant flight risks that posed a danger to the community (especially the victims, whom they had already shown a proclivity to harassing and threatening in the past). It would later be released by authorities that during the search of the GirlsDoPorn office, investigators found evidence that hinted at the defendants fleeing to countries without extradition agreements. And since Michael Pratt, the site's founder, had yet to be located, that argument seemed to carry some added weight.
Pratt, who charged users a GirlsDoPorn subscription fee, made more than $17 million in revenue, according to the records. To dispel doubts, Pratt paid other young women, including Moser, to "act as references or provide false assurances to the women that, if they filed a video, the video would not be posted online," court records show. 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. The group told the models they'd receive $3,000 to $5,000 for a one-day video shoot, court documents show.
She told police that after filming concluded on a subsequent photo and video shoot, Garcia pestered her with invasive questions. She said Garcia asked her to be his girlfriend, then eventually became irate and forcibly pushed her down onto a bed and sexually assaulted her. Days later, Garcia showed up at her boyfriend’s house and refused to leave until she threatened to call the police. The woman told her parents and her sister that she had been raped, and her parents encouraged her to tell the police. In November 2015, an anonymous woman filed a police report in Newport Beach, California, after her video was posted on Girls Do Porn. A copy of the report obtained by The Appeal shows that she told police that she was raped by Garcia after filming her video.
In the end, Jane was only paid $3,000 - roughly half of what she had been originally promised. The men present at the hotel told them that that wasn't their fault, it all had to do with the executives at the company; but if she backed out now, she would get paid nothing. So after filming the painful scene, Jane took the money and flew back home.
Authorities said Pratt’s websites generated more than $17 million in revenue between 2012 and October 2019 by using pornographic videos taken by “force, fraud and coercion” of women and underage girls. Federal authorities allege that Pratt and his co-conspirators lured their victims with ads for clothed modeling gigs. When they arrived to the locations — at luxury hotels far from their hometowns — they were instead offered between $3,000 and $5,000 for one-day pornographic shoots. Michael James Pratt, who fled the United States during a San Diego civil trial and was subsequently charged criminally, made his initial appearance in a San Diego federal courtroom Tuesday afternoon. A not guilty plea was entered on Pratt’s behalf to a 19-count indictment that includes charges of sex trafficking, production of child pornography, sex trafficking of a minor, and conspiracy to launder monetary instruments.
Another defendant, Alexander Brian Foster, pleaded guilty to creating a video meant to harass several women who sued GirlsDoPorn and was sentenced to just over one year in prison. According to his plea agreement, Wiederhold appeared as the male actor in 71 GirlsDoPorn videos. He 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 plea agreement states. Prosecutors say the website's operators led women to believe the videos they appeared in would be distributed only to private customers living outside of the country, rather than proliferated online, despite always intending to post the videos on the internet. Several women described during his sentencing hearing how links to their videos were sent en masse to family members, friends and co-workers, sabotaging their employment prospects and ruining familial relationships to this day.