In mid-September, the owner of the San Diego-based adult video production company, Girls Do Porn, fled the country. New Zealand native Michael Pratt had been due to testify in an ongoing class-action lawsuit in which 22 unnamed women accused him, his company, and several associates of an elaborate racket to coerce young girls into shooting porn under the guise of anonymity. For months, Pratt and his colleagues denied wrongdoing. Then, Pratt ignored his subpoena to testify in court and disappeared across the ocean.
“It’s like catching the murderer at the border with a beard and dyed hair,” the plaintiff’s attorney, Brian Holm, said in court. “It would be relevant to the consciousness of guilt if you are talking about leaving the country you have lived in for 12 years because of a civil lawsuit.”
In all likelihood, Pratt will not testify in the trial, which is scheduled to end later this month. But his former administrative assistant, Valerie Moser, provided testimony in transcripts obtained by The Daily Beast that shed light on what working for him was like. Over the course of two days, Moser detailed what she had seen during three and a half years at the company, painting a grim portrait of Pratt, whom she described as an irritable, paranoid guy, prone to “man tantrums,” who often “smashed phones and keyboards.”
“I have seen Michael Pratt attack an employee. [Another colleague] has shown me scars where Michael Pratt stabbed him,” Moser said in court transcripts. “I have seen him at his drunkest. I have seen the worst parts of him. I know what he’s capable of. I think I understand the way his mind works and that’s scary.”
The 22 Jane Does claim Pratt conned them by promising that their videos would remain anonymous, that they would be distributed only to private buyers in Australia and elsewhere abroad, and that they would earn thousands of dollars, which rarely materialized. For less willing candidates, Pratt allegedly paid women to pose as references and promise the prospective models that everything would turn out fine.
Moser began working for Pratt in March of 2015, when she answered an advertisement on Craigslist. She told the court she was hired for her organizational and meticulous note-taking skills—traits she illustrated at trial with stringent accounting from her years at the company. Her role primarily involved organization tasks: overseeing modeling contracts, receipts, expenses, and keeping the company in steady supply of prepaid credit cards, as standard credit cards can get banned by Craigslist if flagged for pornography. She also alleged she was responsible for picking the models up from the airport, getting them in makeup—or “hosing them off,” as Pratt called it—and dropping them off at hotels for shoots. If asked about her role, Moser remembered, Pratt told her to say: “I’m just an Uber driver.”
Another one of Moser’s duties, she claimed, was taking something Pratt called “Panda Pics.” These were nude photos Moser would take of each model after she arrived, so-called because of the location they were taken: in front of a portrait of a panda holding two guns in one of the defendants’ apartments. Although Pratt typically promised the models a specific rate before flying them to San Diego, Moser said rates were usually determined by how good the girls looked by the panda.
When she was first brought on, Moser never learned the name of the company, Girls Do Porn. Instead, she called the company “BLL Media,” one of several alternate names for Pratt’s businesses. The BLL stood for “BMW, Lamborghini, Land Rover,” because Pratt reportedly had one of each. But sometime into her employment, Moser overheard Pratt use the real name in conversation. He then instructed her not to mention the name “Girls Do Porn.” If asked, she was to call it “Plus One Media,” a name which turned up a tamer website. As part of her hiring, Moser had signed a non-disclosure agreement. Pratt allegedly indicated that if she told models the real name of the company, Moser would violate the agreement.
Not long later, the assistant said she overheard another conversation, this time when Pratt was talking to a potential model. Moser testified in court that on this call, she overheard Pratt make many of the claims the plaintiff’s allege they were told: that the footage would be sent on DVD and mailed to Australia; that it would be sold in an adult film store; that the identity of the model would remain private; that the sex “would involve nothing weird.” At the time, Moser thought all this was true.
But she later learned that none of those claims were honest. Pratt allegedly had her create a Google Hangouts number to correspond with candidates and thereby “avoid getting harassed by the models” on her real phone. There, at least a dozen young women messaged her with complaints about their videos, which were uploaded directly online and often viewed hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of times. Girls begged Moser to remove their videos, offering to return their earnings or pay extra. For the first year at Girls Do Porn, Moser would forward these messages to Pratt. He often told her to block their numbers. She did.
Then, in August of 2016, Girls Do Porn got served with the class-action lawsuit. According to Moser, the complaints from models never stopped, but the way the company handled them did. Instead of sending messages to Pratt, Moser said, she forwarded them to the company’s lawyer, who knew the company by yet another different name than Girls Do Porn. When the girls would call that lawyer, Moser said, he often had no idea what they were talking about. “They were sent in circles,” she told the court.
After the lawsuit began in earnest, Moser said, Pratt asked her to delete every message she had with models. He asked her to destroy any hotel receipts indicating that alcohol was purchased, as some of the women claimed they were intoxicated upon signing their contracts. He talked about selling his car or home to avoid having them accounted for in the lawsuit. Another employee and a co-defendant in the case, Matthew Wolfe, asked Moser to shred documents that showed him wiring company money to accounts in New Zealand. According to Moser, Pratt told her: “Disclosure of company secrets would result in a lawsuit.”
Moser said complied with most of their demands. But at the same time, she started what the court documents refer to as her “CYA Journal,” short for “Cover Your Ass.” In it, she took notes from conversations with Pratt, inventoried and dated every conversation she had with a model, and took notes on her treatment at work.
When Pratt found out about the journal, he was furious. One day, just a few weeks before she was fired, Moser said she came into work to find her desk trashed—furniture knocked over, papers ripped, supplies in disarray. Moser said she saw one of her colleagues following her home on two separate occasions.
Not long later, Moser was told to start working remotely. She had a “bad attitude,” the company said. By the fall of 2018, Moser received an email from Pratt’s lawyer, terminating her employment. He offered severance, but only if she signed an NDA. She declined.
Just before her firing, Moser had a text conversation with Pratt about the lawsuit, which was read during trial. In an exchange from September, he told her the plaintiffs thought he had money in off-shore accounts (her response: “most smart businessmen do.”) He complained that “anything is better than being in this lawsuit, LOL,” and insisted that both the plaintiffs and their lawyer would “get nothing.” For her part, Moser seemed sad about losing her job. “I promised myself I will get another Corvette one day,” she wrote, “one day.”
“You have plenty of time,” Pratt told her. “I just want to get mine in case I have to leave the United States. Haha.”
