Alleged ‘GirlsDoPorn’ sex trafficking boss extradited in San Diego Los Angeles Times

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Scanlan, who conducted the analysis into the chatbot trial, says there were some complexities with the work. The data provided by Pornhub, the IWF, and the Lucy Faithfull Foundation wasn’t always complete, and there weren’t any figures from before the warnings were introduced to compare the results against. However, Scanlan says the results show the method could be one part of broader education and deterrence efforts against people finding CSAM online. “If someone’s doing that sort out of curiosity, you want to nudge them away from it before they get involved in it, because we can’t arrest our way out of the problem,” Scanlan says. In the past, Reid has been very open about her experiences in the adult entertainment world revealing how much money she earned on specific shoots and shared candid advice for anyone wishing to get into the industry. Talk with your teen on a regular basis about what they are seeing and hearing both online and in person.

• In several cases, the women filmed for GirlsDoPorn would be propositioned outside of the video shoot.
• About two-thirds of the participants (60.7%) had expressed that they are religious, and more than two-thirds (69.4%) of participants always used contraceptive methods.
• The men present at the hotel told them that that wasn’t their fault, it all had to do with the executives at the company; but if she backed out now, she would get paid nothing.
• But legal repercussions from those pre-purge days — including federal monitoring and an ever-growing number of lawsuits — are still rippling through Pornhub and its network of user-generated porn sites.
• A law enforcement source told BI last week that an announcement will be made soon.

GirlsDoPorn.com Lawsuit — $13 Million Award

And since Michael Pratt, the site’s founder, had yet to be located, that argument seemed to carry some added weight. Andre Garcia – the third of the men alleged to have participated in this long-running scheme – was called to the stand but refused to testify, pleading the fifth to every question asked of him. All the while, the popularity of GirlsDoPorn continued to grow, with each new case of harassment giving the website a splash of publicity. Word-of-mouth was helping GirlsDoPorn become a common name in porn, and the dozens of women whose lives they ruined were just casualties. Her life, she says, is irrevocably changed, and her hopes of a legal career have been ended. Jane Doe 1 also gave evidence about the enormous impact online publication and subsequent WikiPorn leak had on her life.

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Like the other charges, Pratt has pleaded not guilty to this allegation through his lawyers, but he remains a wanted fugitive to this day, and his whereabouts remain unknown after more than a year. GirlsDoPorn and GirlsDoToys were sex trafficking operations whose leaders admitted that, from 2013 to 2019, they convinced victims to make adult videos by lying that their imagery would only be sold to private collectors abroad and not posted online. They’d then post the videos on the GirlsDoPorn and GirlsDoToys websites, which presented themselves as consensual amateur adult sites. In 2021, teens spent an average of eight hours and thirty-nine minutes on screen use, not including time spent for school, and 62% of teens responded that they use social media every day and eighty-four percent of young adults report ever using social media. Nearly 100% of teens report having access to a smartphone or home computer, and nearly half of teens report that they are online “almost constantly”. But it’s important to remember that the measure of average time includes multi-tasking time, and teens aren’t necessarily spending that long looking at a screen.

The lawsuit seeks at least $10 million for each plaintiff in compensatory and punitive damages and to bar Aylo from ever again hosting the victims’ videos. Garcia’s sentencing is a groundbreaking moment in the fight against sex trafficking, but it’s not a sufficient end to the story. Fifty GirlsDoPorn victims are now suing Pornhub, demanding more than $100 million in damages for their pain and suffering. GirlsDoPorn’s victims were doxxed, harassed and humiliated, and they felt they had a full-time job they never asked for – trying to get the videos of their trafficking removed from the internet.

“You can hear the woman yelling to stop because it hurts,” she said recently of the video, which includes a tag showing it’s been on the site five years. In August 2023, as part of the Pornhub network, Aylo launched UViU, a platform for creators to sell content directly to fans.[91] Designed with creator input, UViU helps diversify income and increase earnings. Fans can discover and browse creators’ content, while creators can manage their Pornhub and UViU accounts from one dashboard. Pauline Repard covers legal affairs, crime and public safety news in San Diego County. She joined The San Diego Union-Tribune in 1988, and since then has reported police, fire and court news in every corner of the county. Repard grew up in San Diego County and earned a journalism degree at California State University Fullerton.

Sexting behaviors by adolescents and young adults are correlated with riskier sexual behaviors. The transmission (including the receipt) of sexually explicit texts may be illegal for children under the age of 18 in many states and the sending of sexually explicit photos of minors may be considered sexual exploitation or child pornography under the law. While your teen may trust the person on the other end of the conversation, it’s important that they understand the risks of sexting. A videographer for the porn production company Girls Do Porn testified in court this week to lying to women who say they were lured into having sex on video after being allegedly promised the videos would never be widely distributed or posted online. Ruben Andre Garcia, 31, the producer of GirlsDoPorn site has pleaded guilty to federal charges after it was revealed he tricked and forced women into appearing in sex videos. Lured to San Diego by online ads seeking models for photo shoots, nearly two dozen women say they were pressured to sign dense contracts in hotel rooms where they were given drugs and alcohol and pushed into doing porn.

The company reached settlements with the women in both lawsuits and also agreed to pay over $1.8 million to resolve a probe by federal prosecutors who alleged the company knew or should have known it was accepting money that originated from sex-trafficking operations. Considering the impact of gender, knowledge about STD, and sexual attitude on forced sex, educational interventions among the youth especially girls are required to provide complete and proper information about sexual and reproductive health and rights and correct the sexual attitudes of the youth. The chatbot was designed and created by the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), a nonprofit which removes CSAM from the web, and the Lucy Faithfull Foundation, a charity which works to precent child sexual abuse. The trial counted the number of sessions on Pornhub, which could mean people are counted multiple times, and it did not look to identify individuals. The report says there was a “meaningful decrease” in searches for CSAM on Pornhub and that at least “in part” the chatbot and warning messages appear to have played a role.

It’s unknown when, exactly, Pratt fled the country, but lawyers for the numerous Jane Does allege that during the civil trial last year (2019), Pratt visited South America before he was scheduled to provide testimony. After this mysterious vacation, he flew from Tijuana, Mexico to New Zealand, and his trail has gone cold ever since. In that regard, the case continues to remain unsolved, because this is a problem that will never truly go away for the women that had to live through it. Reminders of this incident will continue to haunt them as long as the internet exists… And until those that did them harm are finally convicted for their alleged crimes.

That money, once attorneys fees are paid, will go toward the judgment for the women who prevailed in their civil lawsuit. Garcia, the actor who had sex with the women in the videos, was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison. Theodore “Teddy” Gyi, a cameraman who filmed about 120 of the videos, was sentenced to four years in prison.