62 women sue PornHub in latest San Diego case involving GirlsDoPorn videos

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That money, once attorneys fees are paid, will go toward the judgment for the women who prevailed in their civil lawsuit. Garcia, the actor who had sex with the women in the videos, was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison. Theodore “Teddy” Gyi, a cameraman who filmed about 120 of the videos, was sentenced to four years in prison.

GirlsDoPorn victims sue Pornhub for hosting “sex trafficking” videos

According to civil lawsuits and bankruptcy proceedings related to the GirlsDoPorn cases, Wiederhold began working for Pratt and GirlsDoPorn in 2007. The GirlsDoPorn website featured mostly college-aged women, but in 2010 Wiederhold began preparing for the launch of a similar “mom” porn site that featured women over 30 years of age. The website was dedicated to revealing the true identities of the women appearing in those sex videos, “causing the victims to be subjected to severe harassment,” the DOJ said in a press release last year. Additionally, Wolfe admitted that Pratt also operated a website called Pornwikileaks.com with identifying information and social media accounts for some women being filmed. The 22 plaintiffs sought compensatory and punitive damages, alleged intentional misrepresentation, fraudulent concealment, misappropriation of name and likeness, and deceptive business practices, among other civil grounds. Following this announcement, a video was uploaded to the BangBros YouTube channel, showing an unknown person standing over a pile of hard drives – containing the information compiled on PornWikiLeaks – along with a bottle of lighter fluid and a lighter.

• Website owners Michael James Pratt, 36, and Matthew Isaac Wolfe, 37, and porn actor Ruben Andre Garcia, 31, were sued by 22 women who claimed they were deceived and coerced into making explicit sex films without knowing the images would be posted on the internet.
• A recent report from Common Sense Media found that half of the teen participants were receiving 237 or more notifications a day from messages and apps.
• The sex for the video shoots was rough and caused many victims pain, and in some cases bleeding.
• Theodore “Teddy” Gyi had been a cameraman and interviewer, who had been hired by Matthew Wolfe in the mid-2010s to take over his job filming for the company.

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Michael Pratt was the original founder of the company, who served as the cameraman for the first few dozen episodes, which he started releasing in 2009. In 2011, he brought in his old friend Matthew Wolfe to begin doing that job – interviewing and filming – while he took on a more “big picture” role in the company (per his admission). Wolfe would bring in Andre Garcia in 2011 to begin filming with the women, but Garcia quickly exceeded his role as an actor very early on, becoming a full-fledged participant in the deceptive scheme, recruiting women on his own to appear in the GirlsDoPorn videos. Wolfe eventually handed off camera duties to other individuals a few years later, and it seems like he, Pratt, and Garcia were all working on recruitment over an extended period of time…

She broaches the subject of sex first

• “No,” said Jonathan, who insisted that this footage would only be distributed throughout Australia and the United Kingdom on DVDs for private collectors.
• However, Girls Do Porn distributed the films shortly after shooting, and the videos ended up on hugely popular sites like Pornhub and YouPorn, garnering millions of views apiece.
• Theodore “Teddy” Gyi, a cameraman who filmed about 120 of the videos, was sentenced to four years in prison.

At the time of the filing of this criminal complaint about one year ago (2019), authorities were still in the process of reaching out to the several hundreds of women affected by this scheme – as well as figuring out the various entities that money from this scheme had been funneled through. One woman (Jane Doe #4) would claim that in her 2013 shoot, she suffered an extreme amount of pain during the shoot and asked the two men present (Andre Garcia and Matthew Wolfe) to leave. They told her that they would not stop shooting until they were done, and continued filming for several minutes. Afterward, they cut her pay from $2,000 all the way down to $400 and then locked her out of the hotel room – forcing her to find other accommodations on her own.

Since their arrests, Garcia, Wolfe, and several others have pleaded guilty to sex trafficking. Michael Pratt was recently captured in Spain, while his victims, their attorneys, and federal prosecutors await his extradition to the U.S. Over the past year, the GirlsDoPorn website – as well as its affiliates, MomPov and GirlsDoToys – have been permanently shuttered. The same goes for all of its fake modeling websites, such as BeginModeling.com, which were used to trick women into thinking they were a legitimate company. The sites were finally taken down in January of this year (2020), following the resolution of the civil case.

Now with two children, she said she worries what she will tell them if the video ever surfaces again. The offer “presented the opportunity to spare DOMI the expense, burden, and risks of trial for the low price of $16,478,” according to the lawsuit. But the lawsuit alleged that Pratt and Wiederhold couldn’t agree what decision to make, and the attorneys failed to convince Pratt to settle. One of those related actions involved Domi Publications — Domi being a combination of the names Douglas and Michael — that Wiederhold and Pratt co-founded in 2015. After the San Diego Superior Court judge ruled in favor of the 22 women who sued GirlsDoPorn, Domi Publications was one of the entities on the hook for paying the judgment.

“I ended up trying to kill myself many times. I ended up in mental hospitals,” Serena Fleites, the lead plaintiff in Bowe’s 34-plaintiff trafficking suit, said 2021, while testifying at a hearing before the Canadian Parliament, according to Mickelwait’s book. The mother of two began her fight against the online porn empire in early 2020, as horror stories began to mount. He awarded the women $9.45 million collectively in compensatory damages and $3.3 million in punitive damages. “He used deceit and lies and vindictiveness to torture the young women he caught in his snare,” FBI Supervisory Special Agent Renee Green said in a September news release announcing Pratt’s inclusion on the list and the $100,000 reward for information leading to his arrest.