When she flew to San Diego in October 2013 with her boyfriend who found a modeling ad on Craigslist, Jane Doe 7 believed she would get $2,000 to do a nude photo shoot. And that photo shoot would only come out in Australia.
Instead, she found a very different reality. Jane Doe 7 ended up filming a porn video forcibly in a hotel room where furniture blocked the door, preventing her from leaving.
First, Jane Doe 7 discovered that the photo shoot was actually a video recording when she was picked up at the airport by Matthew Wolfe, a videographer who worked for the porn website GirlsDoPorn. Doe didn’t know that either.
She asked where the video would be broadcast at least 20 times before agreeing to do it. Both Wolfe and porn actor Andre Garcia assured her that the video would not go online, but would instead be released on DVD in Australia. It was a believable lie given Wolfe’s New Zealand accent and the duo’s consistency of telling the same story.
When Doe agreed to film the video, she was rushed to sign a contract and told us to do it. Wolfe and Garcia soon set up furniture in front of the hotel room door during filming; Jane Doe 7 said she couldn’t leave and was scared.
“I was coached and I felt like I had to do it,” Doe said later during the trial.
The sex was so hard that Doe bled. She locked herself in the bathroom while Wolfe and Garcia tried to lure her out. Finally she finished the shoot and took a shower. But shortly after the incident, she was harassed at work – the video of Jane Doe 7 was posted online. While she only looked at it on one website, others told Doe that the video was now all over the internet.
“I’m too scared to google it,” Doe said.
Jane Doe 7 was far from the only woman duped into filming pornography for the subscription website GirlsDoPorn. Her experience eventually led to a Superior Court room in San Diego where — one at a time over the course of several months — 22 millennial women replied in the affirmative when GirlsDoPorn’s attorneys asked them if they’d ever watched porn online. But in this fraud lawsuit, these women all claimed that they believed that the porn videos they made, which were published in GirlsDoPorn’s library of hundreds of porn movies with over a billion views combined, would never be posted online.
How could millennial women, living in an age when porn is viewed almost exclusively online, ever believe that their own videos would never be posted on the internet? For starters, it takes a well thought-out criminal plan where the perpetrators were committed not to leave a paper trail. But the successful manipulation of GirlsDoPorn was possible because large sections of society still label women who participate in sex work as cultural pariahs. The GirlsDoPorn operators knew this, and they bet that the Does’s shame over appearing in porn would ensure that these victims wouldn’t hold the site’s management accountable for this fraud.
But in the end, the massive success of those viral GirlsDoPorn internet videos led to the site team’s demise. The Does were eventually able to find each other – and in doing so, they collectively found the strength to come forward and build a successful lawsuit against GirlsDoPorn.
The fraud: three men and accomplices dodge a paper trail
GirlsDoPorn’s owners and operators knew that the kind of women they wanted to see in their amateur porn videos—middle-aged millennials—wouldn’t agree to casually participate in the porn industry. After all, these women grew up in the internet age, where amateur porn has been widely available for years. In addition, many cases of sexual exploration of their peers through sexting had gone down several slippery slopes, including cases where teens had been criminally charged for sharing x-rated media they had taken. himself.
In 2019, a Maryland appellate court ruled 6-1 that child pornography laws apply when a teen is both the subject and sender of sexually explicit media. According to the ruling, in which the judicial panel encouraged lawmakers to change the law, the appeals court upheld a lower court’s decision condemning a 16-year-old girl as her own pornographer.
The prosecution of minors under child pornography laws, the American Academy of Pediatrics warned in 2019, “could have serious legal consequences for teens” as sexting among young people — and prosecution of them under child pornography laws — continues to increase.
That’s exactly why GirlsDoPorn owner Michael Pratt, videographer Matthew Wolfe, and actor Andre Garcia have created an ace-and-switch scheme to have the women appear in their videos.
That plan, revealed during the months-long trial in the courtroom of San Diego Supreme Court Justice Kevin Enright, led to criminal trafficking charges by the US Attorneys Office in the Southern District of California.
Garcia pleaded guilty last year (PDF) to conspiracy and sex trafficking charges involving five Doe victims. He faces 15 years to life in prison. Wolfe is in federal custody awaiting trial. Pratt is a fugitive who is on the FBI’s Most Wanted list and there is a $10,000 reward for information leading to his arrest. He may have fled to his native New Zealand, where authorities are looking for him and have agreed to extradite him to the United States if he is caught.
FBI
GirlsDoPorn’s racket started with strategic targeting. All three men were involved in recruiting college students to make their first porn videos, and generally sought out low-income women who might need money for things like rent, books, and tuition.
From there, the scheme grew digitally. These women were recruited through Craigslist modeling ads and then directed to fill out contact forms on benign websites such as BeginModeling.com and CaliforniaModeling.com. They were then contacted by Garcia, who revealed that applicants were actually recruited to film a 30 minute porn video for which they would be paid several thousand dollars to film.
Overall, the GirlsDoPorn trio had to quell natural skepticism at this point while avoiding much of a paper trail. Garcia would proactively tell the women that the videos were either for a private collector or to be sold on DVDs in adult retail stores abroad in places like New Zealand and Australia. The videos would never be posted online and their names would never be associated with the videos, Garcia claimed.
Once women had certain questions about where the porn videos were being distributed, Garcia would take the conversations offline. He called and face-timed the women, evading specific questions by instead offering to book airline tickets immediately — even before women had agreed to participate in the filming.
At trial, Garcia pleaded for the fifth and did not testify.
Wolfe was the only one of the three to testify in person. He said at the trial that he filmed about 100 videos for GirlsDoPorn and moved to the US in 2011 to help Pratt, his childhood friend from New Zealand. Wolfe, who was identified as the “most qualified person” to testify on behalf of the company, is also an owner of GirlsDoPorn’s affiliate website, GirlsDoToys.
According to Wolfe, Garcia was still recruiting women to make videos for GirlsDoPorn during the trial. But Wolfe said he was not aware of the policy in place during the trial to tell the women that their videos could end up on GirlsDoPorn’s website.
“Have any contracts been offered to models since the June 2016 lawsuit referenced websites?” Attorney Brian Holm asked Wolfe.
“No, I don’t think so,” Wolfe said.
“Is it fair to say that the contracts used in recruiting today are the same as the pre-trial contracts?” Holm asked.
“I think so,” Wolfe confirmed.
“Have the contracts been altered in any way to reference GirlsDoPorn.com?” Holm pressed.
“No,” replied Wolfe.
When Wolfe was asked about the use of the word “website” on a version of the modeling talent release form that GirlsDoPorn had a number of models sign, Wolfe said he was not aware of any questions or concerns expressed by the women who were recruited to produce movie videos for DVDs sold abroad. But he made an aside:
“That’s where almost all the pornography produced goes,” Wolfe said.
“It was only on the internet? It only went on websites?” Holm asked.
“Yes,” Wolfe confirmed.
When asked if women had insisted on knowing where the videos were published, Wolfe said he would have told them it had been posted online, but would not have disclosed GirlsDoPorn’s name “due to online trolls that the employees of Harass GirlsDoPorn”.
“Most people know that porn is going online,” he said.
Just as GirlsDoPorn’s lawyers asked the women one by one during their months-long trial if they had ever watched porn online, the Does’s own lawyers asked each of them a different question: Would they have agreed to be featured in the videos of GirlsDoPorn? GirlsDoPorn had they known the truth – that the videos were posted online?
One by one, the women each had the same answer: they would… not have appeared in the videos.