In 2000, a New Zealand high school grad named Michael Pratt entered the pornography business with the launch of three websites: Wicked Movies, TeenieFlixxx, and Kute Kittens. At the time, Pratt had a pretty standard business model. His pages were affiliate websites, or pages that preview free adult clips and earn commission by linking to paid subscription services. One of his sites, TeenieFlixxx, linked to a platform called Exploited Teens, a porn distributor that trafficked in videos of inexperienced girls in hotel rooms. (The slogan: “The Story of One Man, His Video Camera, and LOTS of Amateur Teenage Girls”). It was a simple idea, but it stuck with Pratt. Six years later, he moved to the United States and started his own production arm with an identical premise and a cavemanish grunt of a name: Girls Do Porn.
Pratt’s gimmick hinged on the idea of amateur girls who had never done adult shoots, and never would again. (“This is the one and only time they do porn,” the site bragged). He posted ads on Craigslist to find inexperienced recruits—ages 18 to 23—looking for fast money from a one-time gig. For two years, Pratt and his male talent, Doug Wiederhold, shot scenes in hotel rooms across the country, before finally setting up shop in San Diego, California, and launching the service in 2009. It was wildly popular: according to court documents, clips of their videos have been viewed more than 1 billion times across the major tube sites and hundreds of millions more times through pirated versions. By 2014, Pratt had set up two spinoff pages: Mom POV, featuring older actresses, and the self-explanatory sister-site Girls Do Toys.
But a class action lawsuit filed against Girls Do Porn claims Pratt and his company took advantage of the inexperience of their actors, alleging coercion, fraud, and misrepresentation. The lawsuit, first reported in-depth by alt-weekly The San Diego Reader, represents 22 women who maintain that Pratt and two colleagues, Matthew Wolfe and Andre Garcia, convinced them to participate in the videos without disclosing that they would be sold and distributed across the internet. (Pratt denies the charges; in an answer to the complaint, his attorney wrote the women had “failed to exercise ordinary and reasonable care on their own behalf,” and had waived their rights to claim damages). The women, identified only as Jane Does 1-22, state in court declarations that they responded to Pratt’s Craigslist ads under the impression the job was for modeling. After learning the company produced porn, the women claim they were promised the footage would be sold only on DVDs to “private collectors” and “small video stores” in Australia, New Zealand and Europe.
The case, which is scheduled for a six-week trial that began Aug. 20, has been a long, drawn-out process, bogged down by repeated delays from Pratt. The suit had originally been scheduled for a late January trial, but got postponed when Pratt filed for bankruptcy—a move that text messages from Pratt entered into discovery and first obtained by NBC 7 suggest was an effort to stonewall the trial (“as soon as i bankrupt the business they are fucked [sic],” one message reads, “the case gets held.”). When the new date arrived in June, it was postponed four more times after additional filings from Pratt. When the trial finally arrived on Aug. 20, it was the culmination of three years of discovery, hearings and declarations.
For the 22 plaintiffs in the case, as well as more than 100 other women interviewed by attorney Brian Holm, their interactions with Girls Do Porn started with a Craigslist advertisement for modeling. The ads, which were posted in major cities like Los Angeles, Las Vegas, San Diego, and Dallas, as well as larger counties in Florida, Tennessee, Louisiana, North Carolina, and Canada, appeared to come from San Diego-based modeling agencies called Bubblegum Casting, Explore Talent, and Begin Modeling. They led to a form that required the women to list their age, body dimensions, personal info and to submit photos of themselves. According to the complaint, the company nominally accepted women ages 18-22, but occasionally took 23-year-olds if they promised to lie about their age. Younger was always better. “Just finished shooting a girl still in high school,” the company wrote on their Instagram in 2014.
After submitting the form, the Does would allegedly receive a phone call from either Matthew Wolfe, or a man who identified himself as “Jonathan,” which the complaint claims was an alias for Girls Do Porn actor Andre Garcia (in his court deposition, Garcia refused to answer any questions, including those about his alias, invoking the Fifth Amendment). On the call, Wolfe or “Jonathan” would explain that the modeling gig was in fact for “adult” shoots. They’d promise the women around $4,000 for the hotel scene, and an additional $1,000 for a toys scene, as well as a paid trip to San Diego, with a room at one of several relatively high-end hotels where the company conducted business. Most importantly, the women were said to have been ensured anonymity. In court documents, Jane Doe 15 submitted an email she received from “Jonathan” on February 14, 2017, which read: “None of your personal information will be given out in the video or afterwards, no names etc. are used in the video.”
To help convince prospective actresses, Girls Do Porn allegedly often sent references—women who posed as former models, or who actually were former models, and could attest to the working conditions and to the privacy. In the same email to Doe 15, “Jonathan” referred her to a 19-year-old named Kaitlin, who had done two shoots with the company (“We pretty much paid for her breast job,” he wrote.) In a text submitted to the court, Kaitlin told Doe 15, “lm sure you’re nervous or maybe even sketched out a little bit but you seriously have nothing to worry about! It’s completely legit.” When Doe asked about the distribution, Kaitlin responded: “Yeah, so it goes out to wealthier countries; yea DVDs and stuff like that but nothing online!”
Once convinced, the actresses would fly to San Diego and meet Pratt and his staff in a hotel room. They were provided a contract, in which Pratt claims they agreed to the terms of the shoot and its distribution, but which the Does say they were discouraged from reading. Many of the women report abusive behavior during the shoots, and receiving a check for far less than they were promised. One Doe, who says she received $2,000 in payment, rather than the promised $5,000, alleges she was told they had knocked her pay due to “bruises.” Another, who received just $400 instead of $2,000 of agreed pay, claims she had experienced extreme pain and tried to cut the shoot short. In the lawsuit, she alleges she was told she couldn’t stop until the scene was over, and was then locked out of the hotel room and forced to find her own place to stay.
When the shoots were filmed and edited, they were allegedly posted directly online, rather than distributed through private buyers. The lawsuit claims the website was wildly popular—by 2016, its videos have been viewed 667,612,456 times on PornHub. The complaint alleges that Pratt and his colleagues made explicit efforts to increase traffic by operating their own blogs for discussing the amateur actresses, including a Reddit page and a site called Forum.DoPorn.com, where they posted photos and clips of the stars and where more than 50,000 registered users could discuss them at length. The website developed “a cult-like following of hobbyists/stalkers who obsess over the amateur women featured in the videos,” and allegedly generated dozens of forums dedicated to publishing their real names, hometowns, social media accounts, and photos.
Arguably the most famous and controversial blog associated with the company was a website called Porn Wikileaks, which wreaked havoc on the adult industry in the 2010s when it began publishing the personal information of any star involved in “crossover” work, or performing both straight and gay scenes. In 2015, according to the complaint, the personal information of dozens of Girls Do Porn actresses appeared en masse on Porn Wikileaks. The Does’ lawyer, Brian Holm, who obtained documents from the domain registry GoDaddy.com, claimed that around the same time, the website changed administrative control to a user with the email mike@bll0media.com, an address associated with Pratt.
Days after the lawsuit was filed, the Does’ personal information disappeared from the site. But by that point, the videos had already been “shared and viewed amongst everyone in the victim’s college, high school, hometown, and place of employment.” Some victims lost their jobs, others were expelled from religious universities. Most prominently, a Miss Teen Delaware winner was stripped of her crown.
In their case, the Does’ attorney seeks a declaration to void all the actresses’ contracts which they claim were the product of fraud. They also seek compensation for emotional distress, undetermined punitive damages, the rights to all of their video and photographic content, and a cut of the profits made from them. Last, the lawsuit requests an injunction requiring Pratt to provide extensive disclosures before hiring any other women.
