Police failed to respond to complaints by women who said they were victimized by the operators of the Girls Do Porn website, made as far back as 2015. The owners of the adult website were charged with sex trafficking in October.
They were allegedly tricked into signing a contract, forced into prolonged and painful sex acts, then blackmailed with x-rated footage sent to relatives, but now it’s emerged that the young women who were unlucky to choose the group behind Girls Do Porn as a beginning of their modeling career might have also been failed by the police.
Three women filed complaints about the men running the porn website four years ago, but police never followed up on them, The Appeal reported. One woman even alleged that she was raped by a man working for the website, but her case was closed on the very day that it was filed.
Site owner Michael Pratt was charged with sex trafficking by force, fraud and coercion last month, along with his lead videographer Matthew Wolfe and actor Ruben Andre Garcia. They also face charges of conspiracy to commit sex trafficking with their administrative assistant Valerie Moser. While Wolfe, Garcia and Moser were all arrested, Pratt is still a fugitive.
At least 22 women whose videos were featured on Girls Do Porn sued the owners, claiming they were tricked into filming videos after being assured that they would remain anonymous and the content would be shared only with private buyers overseas and not appear online. Some said they were lured into it having responded to ads seeking models on Craigslist.
In reality, the videos were posted online, along with the women’s personal information, which they said was used to blackmail them. At least one woman, who filed a police report, became suicidal after links to her videos were sent to faculty at her law school in 2015.
The woman who claims she was raped by Garcia said it happened after she replied to an ad linking to a website called Begin Modeling, but the report was never followed up on. An officer wrote at the time that he was closing the case based on a “lack of identifying information” and inability to determine the location of the crime or to find a person matching the suspect description in police databases.
That was despite the woman having provided police with Garcia’s name, as well as emails and texts from him. Garcia is now accused of sexually assaulting six of the women involved in the case, as well as other women who are not plaintiffs.
In the same year, another woman found herself tagged in an Instagram post advertising her porn video. She filed a police complaint, saying she did not consent to the video being made public, but the footage was released six days later. She also claimed that she was not allowed to leave during the filming when she was in pain and asked to stop, the criminal justice website reported.
Viewers then posted the link of her video to the Yelp review page of a salon her mother worked at – and she eventually dropped out of school because she became too scared to go to class after her ex-boyfriend’s fraternity played the video during a meeting.
A San Diego Police Department spokesperson told The Appeal that it does its “due diligence” on sex crimes cases, but if there is no case, “we can’t make it appear.”
Attorneys for the 22 women suing the website also claim they have been harassed, intimidated and blackmailed for two years, with Pratt allegedly even photoshopping the lawyers’ faces into porn and spreading it around online, Vice reported.
An ex-girlfriend of one of the sites producers testified last week that she was paid $300 a week to harass attorneys representing the women. She denied knowing exactly why she was being paid to torment the attorneys, and said she did it because she was unemployed at the time and needed to support her son.
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
