Tuesday, a team of San Diego lawyers delivered the closing remarks in a years-long legal battle against the adult video company Girls Do Porn. The class action suit, filed by 22 women, identified only as Jane Does 1-22, claims the website coerced and defrauded young, low-income women into performing adult scenes by promising the DVDs would go only to private buyers abroad. Instead, the women claim, the company underpaid them and posted the tapes online, resulting in identification, harassment, and doxxing. Many of the women also claimed that the male star of the films, Andre Garcia, sexually assaulted them. Pratt and his associates have denied any wrongdoing, alleging the women signed away any rights to the footage before filming.
In December, a judge will deliver his verdict, bringing the four-month trial to an end. But in that time, the man at the center of the case has never testified. Michael Pratt, a New Zealand man who moved to the United States in September of 2007, fled the country mid-trial. Pratt’s disappearance came just before the U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of California unsealed an indictment, charging him and two other employees with several sex trafficking-related offenses. In a subsequent complaint, prosecutors added counts of child pornography and child sex trafficking. Pratt remains a fugitive wanted on a federal warrant.
Because the porn producer never appeared in court, Pratt’s only testimony came from two depositions conducted in December of 2018 and a subsequent recording made in May of 2019, after Pratt filed for bankruptcy in an apparent attempt to stall the trial. (“As soon as I bankrupt the business,” Pratt wrote in texts later submitted as evidence, “they are fucked.”)
The depositions, recently obtained in transcript by The Daily Beast, sketch some of Pratt’s biography, some of which appeared elsewhere in court documents. Born in 1982 in Christchurch, New Zealand, Pratt entered the porn industry while in high school by founding a company called Tech Media Limited. He built simple HTML pages and used them to promote bigger adult websites, uploading sample videos and photo galleries and taking a percentage of any sales. After high school, Pratt worked in porn full-time until he moved to Australia in his early twenties. While in Brisbane, Australia, Pratt met a hefty porn producer named Kevin Holloway. “I don’t know, I’d describe him as like—looks like a boxer, kind of, like someone that would be boxing,” Pratt said in a deposition delivered on December 7, 2018. “Maybe 350-400 pounds. A big guy… 5’8” to 6 feet.”
When Pratt began producing his own adult videos in 2006, he claimed, Holloway financed all his equipment. Pratt returned the favor by licensing all the content he produced to Holloway. In 2007, Pratt moved to the United States and began shooting videos for what would become Girls Do Porn. He returned to Australia briefly, but stayed in the United States permanently in 2009, when the business officially launched alongside two additional sites: Girls Do Toys and a mature website called MomPov.
Pratt described Holloway as a “business partner” and “mentor.” In court documents, the plaintiffs argued that Holloway “is simply a person that sets up foreign entities and bank accounts for people looking to evade taxes and launder money.” In the years since going into business with Holloway, Pratt has founded and been involved with a long list of companies—all affiliated with Girls Do Porn, but many of which, the producer claimed in depositions, he did not understand and knew almost nothing about.
Michael Pratt
YouTubeAccording to Pratt’s deposition, those businesses include: BLL Media Inc., the primary company under which Pratt conducted business (which the plaintiffs claim Pratt used so potential models would not find the website where their videos would ultimately go); BLL Media Holdings; Merro Media Inc., founded by Pratt’s business partner Matthew Wolfe; M1M Media LLC and M1M Media, Inc., founded as a joint enterprise between Pratt and Wolfe; E.G. Publications Inc., a company founded to conduct payroll for the business after several bank accounts associated with the other companies were shut down; DOMI Publications, LLC, a company founded by Pratt and another associate, Doug Wiederhold, to run MomPov.com; and UHD Productions, LLC, which Pratt claimed not to know the purpose of.
In a lengthy part of the deposition, the questioning attorney grilled Pratt on basic facts about his companies—the names of shareholders, CEOs, top executives; the dates of founding and annual meetings—and Pratt repeatedly denied any knowledge of their corporate structure. At one point, the attorney asked if Pratt had been the sole shareholder of one of his entities. “Like I said before,” Pratt said, “our company structure was completely messed up and we were in the process of fixing everything [before the lawsuit]. So maybe I was [the sole owner], but I’m—I don’t think it was supposed to be set up like that, as far as I know.”
The plaintiffs allege Pratt was also involved with two additional companies: Oh Well Media Limited and Sidle Media Limited. Pratt denied any affiliations. “I don’t contact anybody there. I don’t contact anybody there,” he said of Oh Well Media Limited. Both of the companies, as well as several others later struck from the complaint, involved properties in the Republic of Vanuatu, an island Bloomberg described in 2017 as a “secretive tax haven.” In his depositions, Pratt claimed these companies belonged to Holloway. Accordingly, plaintiffs’ attorneys served Holloway to look into those entities. He died a month later. “When Plaintiffs alerted Defendants that they had served Mr. Holloway,” the Jane Does’ attorneys wrote in the complaint, “Defendants falsely claimed that there were actually two Kevin Holloways—the Wichita Kevin Holloway, who was involved early (indeed his name and Wichita address are on Pratt’s corporate filings) and had not been involved recently, and a second Kevin Holloway who lives in Brisbane, Australia. The ‘second Kevin Holloway’ theory is as ridiculous as it sounds.”
The attorneys went on to argue the alleged lie was a “clear effort by Pratt to protect the video rights he has transferred” to the companies he claimed Holloway owned. “Importantly,” they continued, “Kevin Holloway set up Pratt’s Vanuatu entities as part of his web of international entities and illegally owned entities and bank accounts for Pratt until Pratt was able to get his U.S. citizenship.”
Over 10 years of producing videos, Pratt claimed he orchestrated between 800 and 1,000 shoots across all of his companies. In his depositions, Pratt confirmed some aspects of the plaintiffs’ claims about how Girls Do Porn operated and vigorously denied others. Pratt confirmed that the business primarily recruited models on Craigslist, Backpage, Instagram and Model Mayhem, in the continental U.S. and Canada. He confirmed that he had posted some 40 percent of the advertisements, and that 99 percent of the time he used pseudonyms to contact prospective candidates: Mark, Matt, Mike and Jordan.
But Pratt disputed several allegations outlined in the complaint. He claimed that he did not use a grading system to determine girls’ pay based on their attractiveness; that he did not reduce their pay after they performed the shoot; and that he did not hire actors to pose as veteran models to assure candidates that the business practices were sound. He denied offering women money not to testify in the lawsuit. He also rejected having promised models that the tapes would end up only with private buyers. In one line of questioning, the attorney listed off various things the plaintiffs claimed they had been told about their videos:
“Did you ever tell a model [her tape] would only be given to fishermen who are out in the Pacific fishing for long periods of time?”
Pratt: “No.”
A large part of the plaintiffs’ complaints hinge on the fact that, after their videos were distributed online, they were identified, doxxed and harassed. Pratt said in his deposition that he was aware of this problem and attempted to remedy it: “People post their names,” he said, “like [on] Pornhub, people put them in the comments. We remove them from some of those places. You know, as soon as someone sees a girl they know on the internet they feel the need to comment and say her name and then the next thing you know, trolls are finding their social media, et cetera… Whoever these trolls are, I guess, if you can call them trolls. I don’t know what you would call them honestly. Creepers.”
One of the largest contributors to the problem was a website called Porn WikiLeaks, notorious in the early 2010s for doxxing adult performers who acted in both gay and straight scenes. When Girls Do Porn began to gain traction, Porn WikiLeaks opened a forum dedicated to identifying the women involved. The plaintiffs claim that Pratt, who temporarily owned the Porn Wikileaks domain, played a role in the harassment in retaliation for both their complaints and the lawsuit. Pratt claimed he bought the domain specifically to intervene in the operator’s campaign against the models. Pratt said he paid the operator of the site somewhere between $15,000 and $20,000 to remove the forum dedicated to Girls Do Porn. “Basically, it was an extortion,” Pratt said.
Pratt’s deposition also shed light on some of the finances behind his companies. Girls Do Porn operated as a subscription-based site, where users paid $14.95 for the first month, and $29.99 for each month after to view content. According to Pratt, the less popular Girls Do Toys generated about $1,500 each month, while Girls Do Porn brought in between $2.5 and $3 million each year. According to Pratt, DOMI Productions, which produced MomPov and in which Pratt had a 50 percent stake, paid him a salary of $4,000 a week or $208,000 a year (in later estimates, he claimed it was $20,000 a month, or $240,000 a year)
Pratt estimated that each video was worth about $30,000 to $40,000, and that Girls Do Porn had about 500 videos. By contrast, each video cost roughly $7,000-$8,000 to make, budgeting $5,000 for the model, $300 for the hotel room, $600 for the flights, and referral fees for whoever found the talent. Pratt claimed he did not use Google Analytics to determine how many people watched their content, but videos on Pornhub submitted as evidence had racked up between 2 and 4.6 million views. Pratt also claimed to advertise his content on between 300 and 500 affiliate websites, which each took 50 percent of the sales they generated.
When Pratt filed for bankruptcy in 2018, he claimed the lawsuit left him with virtually nothing. But until then, records and his deposition indicate Pratt lived a lavish lifestyle. He sold his house, which he initially purchased for $1.9 million and did approximately $400,000 in renovations. (A former Girls Do Porn employee, Val Moser, testified that Pratt told her to destroy all documents pertaining to his house; Pratt denied doing so). After the sale of his house, Pratt moved to a place in Escondido, California, that he rented for $4,600 per month. Over the years, he also owned several luxury cars, including a Mercedes (which he recalled buying for $180,000-220,000), a Land Rover (which he claimed cost $105,000), a BMW Alpina (which he said cost $100,000 and sold for $40,000), a Cadillac Escalade (which Pratt said belonged to his company), and a Lamborghini (which Pratt said he bought for $400,000-500,000, shipped it from Miami for $1,000, and sold for $80,000 right after selling his home).
Near the end of the May deposition, the questioning attorney asked Pratt why he had been transferring funds to New Zealand. “Do you have any intent to return to New Zealand?” the attorney asked. Pratt responded: “Maybe.”
