Pornhub Lawsuits: 300 Say Site Profited From Trafficking, Abuse

Choose a Girl

One woman said that for years afterward, her video was the first result that came up if her name was searched online. She said she’s spent several years and thousands of dollars attempting to get the videos scrubbed from the internet. Judge Kevin Enright described in his findings how the need to keep finding young women new to the porn industry drove the “deceptive, coercive and threatening behaviour” used by the defendants. The women told the court they had replied to ads on Craigslist asking for “beautiful college-type preppy girls” aged 18 to 22 interested in modelling.

• Your therapist or counselor likely will offer recommendations for reading material or couples’ exercises.
• Now, the women in each clip owned their footage, allowing them to choose what to do with it.
• Simply searching for a term such as \”girls do porn\” on a website is not illegal and generally does not constitute criminal activity.

Pornhub Pulls Out of Nebraska

In September of 2020, the FBI would announce a $10,000 reward for any information that led to the arrest of Michael James Pratt, who stands about six feet tall, weighs upwards of 200 pounds, with brown hair and hazel eyes, and may have a tattoo on his left arm. He is known to be a private and paranoid person who is prone to emotional outbursts that may turn violent, so please use caution. Very few photos of him exist on the internet, but the ones that do will be posted on the podcast website as well as our social media accounts. Wolfe would end up shooting more than a hundred videos for GirlsDoPorn, before going on to launch a spinoff venture in 2014 called “GirlsDoToys” (which is exactly what you think it was). Doug Wiederhold – one of Michael Pratt’s original male performers – had gone on to launch a spinoff of his own in 2011 called “MomPov” (which, if you’re catching onto the subtleties of their clever naming conventions, was centered around older women).

Hosting child sexual abuse material of child sex trafficking victims

Jonathan made the final arrangements, and Jane prepared to be treated like a celebrity for a day. A short time later, she received a written response from an individual calling himself “Jonathan N” (who responded using the email address). In this email, Jane was offered $4,000 for a first photoshoot – just regular modeling, mind you – but was told that she could be paid an additional $1,000 for an additional video shoot…

• The issues that can boost a sex drive or wipe it out are almost innumerable.
• Business Insider has found lawsuits on behalf of nearly 300 plaintiffs who allege that back before the 2020 purge, videos of their abuse were uploaded to Pornhub without their consent and remained on the site for weeks or months after they were flagged.
• San Diego Superior Court Judge Kevin Enright, who presided over a four-month-long bench trial, decided in favor of all 22 plaintiffs and against 13 defendants.
• Studies show that in heterosexual relationships, women frequently take the blame for a dip in sexual activity that’s actually the result of a host of problems related to both members of the couple.
• However, the stigma against pornography and other sex work, the aptly-described “oldest profession,” will undoubtedly always exist for a myriad of reasons.
• “[As] the only millennial female reporter to cover the trial in-person … I don’t think this trial could have had this result and I don’t think the Jane Does’ attorneys could have built a case and gotten them to agree to testify were it not for the #MeToo movement in the US.

GirlsDoPorn sentencing is win for trafficking victims. But justice isn’t yet fully served.

In April, the website blocked visitors from the UK after lawmakers in the country announced plans to make it a criminal offense to create nonconsensual explicit deepfakes. Multiple legal proceedings against the creators of GirlsDoPorn, people affiliated with the website, and Pornhub’s parent company are ongoing or have been completed—with criminal charges being issued against several GirlsDoPorn organizers in October 2019. The dozen videos—which ran up to 21 minutes long and racked up tens of thousands of views before they were taken down following WIRED’s inquiry—used footage originally posted to the GirlsDoPorn website and had celebrity faces added using artificial intelligence. It appears that a startup’s face-swapping tool may have been abused to transform the videos into deepfakes, according to watermarks on the footage. When Benson confronts the university’s president and accuses her of victim blaming, the president says that Evie is being expelled for making violent pornography videos, not for accusing Daniel and Matt of rape. Benson’s meeting at Hudson gets the attention of Dodds, who reprimands her for overstepping her bounds, but she asks Dodds if his concern has anything to do with Hudson University being the largest landlord of the city.

Michael James Pratt disappeared in the summer of 2019, just before he was indicted on federal conspiracy and sex trafficking charges stemming from what prosecutors said was a decade-long scheme to con hundreds of teens and young women into appearing in adult videos for the website he owned. The website’s activities also spurred dual lawsuits from more than 100 women against the parent company for porn-streaming site PornHub for allegedly profiting off of GirlsDoPorn’s trafficking by hosting its videos. 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. Douglas Wiederhold is the latest defendant to plead guilty in the criminal cases against the website’s owners and operators, whom prosecutors say engaged in a years-long sex trafficking conspiracy in which women were coerced and tricked into appearing in pornographic videos under false pretenses.

The founder of Girls Do Porn, a website that published videos of women who said they were coerced into making sex tapes, was arrested in Spain this week after being on the run for years from sex trafficking and child sex abuse images charges. Nearly two dozen women won $12.7 million in a fraud lawsuit against the owners and operators of a San Diego-based pornographic website, GirlsDoPorn, a Superior Court judge ruled Thursday. If the women ever changed their minds about filming or completing the scenes, the defendants threatened to sue them, cancel their flights home or post footage that had already been filmed online, federal prosecutors said. Pratt and his co-defendants allegedly paid other women to pose as “reference women” to falsely assure the victims that their videos would not be uploaded to the internet.

According to prosecutors, the producer promised models who answered ads that videos they appeared in would remain anonymous and would be sold only as DVDs, not distributed on the internet. A PORN website producer has been sentenced to 20 years for conspiracy and sex trafficking. One defendant alleged that she’d asked not to go through with the shoot at all, but the company threatened to withhold her hotel reservation and plane ticket home, knowing she couldn’t afford to pay for them herself. As a result, the friends and relatives of the victims saw the videos online, leading to harassment and estrangement from their families, according to the DOJ. Most recently, she said, she reported to state authorities the Pornhub video showing a woman shouting in pain and asking not to be filmed.