She Was 18 and Says She Was Tricked Into Doing Porn: ‘This Ruined My Life’
Over the next month, for the first time in a years-long legal process, up to 22 women, identified in court documents only as Jane Does 1-22, will appear in court in San Diego to testify against the popular adult video service Girls Do Porn.
The class action lawsuit—which has been dragged out by bankruptcy filings, intentional subpoena dodging, and half a dozen miscellaneous delays—accuses the company of bilking millions of dollars in an alleged scam to coerce young girls into filming porn scenes.
On Monday, the first of these women, identified as Jane Doe 15, finished her testimony. During three days of examination, Doe 15 recounted for the court a nightmarish sequence of events, which started with a Craigslist ad in 2016 and ended in doxxing, harassment, job troubles, expulsion from her cheerleading squad, fleeing her college town, and fractured relationships with her family, classmates, and boyfriend.
Girls Do Porn, a San Diego-based adult subscription service formed in 2006 by New Zealand man Michael Pratt, trafficked in XXX videos with amateur actresses, ages 18-22. They sought inexperienced models on Craigslist, promising viewers that each clip was “the one and only time [the girls] do porn.” But Doe 15 and the other 21 plaintiffs in her class allege Pratt and several associates defrauded and underpaid hundreds of low-income women, most too young to drink.
According to the complaint, the plaintiffs claim they consented to the shoots with the understanding that the videos would not include any identifying information and would be sold only to private collectors abroad. According to Doe 15’s testimony and the declarations of her peers, they later discovered the tapes had been widely distributed online—alongside their names, phone numbers, and personal information.
“If I had known that, not only was it going on the internet,” Doe 15 said in her testimony, “but that they were posting it on the internet, that my name would be attached to it, that it would be in the United States, and that I wouldn’t be paid $5,000, but $2,000 less, and insulted because I was pale and bruised; if I had known that it was more than 30 minutes of filming, if I had known any of that, just any one of those; if I had known that other girls had been harassed and kicked out of school for it, if I had known that I would be kicked off the cheer team; if I had known any of that, I wouldn't have done it.”
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Pratt and his co-defendants deny any misconduct, claiming the women understood the terms of the deal and signed away any rights to collect damages. “The plaintiffs in their testimony show that they are aware of the inherent risks. They were aware of Paris Hilton, Kardashians, release of sex tapes,” Pratt’s defense attorney Aaron Sadock said in his opening statement. “In other words, the plaintiffs’ social-media presence, activities online, posting videos themselves make it clear that they inherently knew the risks of being filmed in an adult video.”
Doe 15, who began her testimony on Aug. 21, first encountered Pratt’s business in February 2016. She was 18 at the time, in college, and looking for a job on Craigslist. She had been applying to jobs for a few months—some at local restaurants and sandwich shops, some for random gigs, but mostly for modeling or brief acting jobs. She found one listing titled “Exceptionally Cute Ladies Wanted.” It linked to a website called BeginModeling.com, an unremarkable-looking webpage with several professional photos of women and a contact form. Doe 15 said she filled out the form—identifying her height, weight, hair color, and eye color—and attached a few pictures. She got a response not long later, but didn’t reply. “It was pretty clear it was adult work,” Doe 15 said, “and I wasn’t interested in doing that.”
Not long after the first email, Doe 15 was contacted again—this time, by a man who called himself “Jonathan N.,” which the plaintiffs’ attorney, Brian Holm, and several witnesses claim was a pseudonym for both Pratt and his male actor, Andre Garcia. Doe 15 says she FaceTimed with “Jonathan N.” because he suggested that there was an option to do clothed modeling shoots for $300 each. But on the call, “Jonathan N.” kept returning to the topic of nude modeling.
“He said it would be 30 minutes of filming sex,” Doe 15 recalled in court. “He said it would be $5,000 dollars. He said specifically about five positions, five to seven minutes each. He would fly me out to San Diego, pay for a hotel. And then he just repeatedly said, ‘Not online, not online, not in the U.S.’ It would be on DVDs to Australia, the UK. And then he said a few other really remote countries, I don’t remember. And then I asked if I could just do regular modeling, and he said no, it had to be both.”
Doe 15 said she had concerns, but the fee seemed hard to turn down. Five thousand dollars was a lot of money. She was in school, without a job. Her mom was helping her, but she also had two other kids in college. Asking her for money was “the last thing I wanted to do,” Doe 15 said. But “Jonathan N.” promised she could talk to other actresses. There were supposedly more than 200 women, many of whom were Instagram models or sorority girls, who had taken the job and never been found out. On the phone, “Jonathan N.” also mentioned that he had already booked a flight and hotel. He could cancel, he said, but he wanted to get the reservation just in case. The flight left in four days.
In an email response dated Feb. 22, 2016, Doe 15 wrote: “I am just hesitant on my face being out there or my name… Mostly if someone important in my future sees this.”
Jonathan followed up with the names and numbers of two female references: Amberlyn Clark and Kaylin Wright, both of whom had allegedly acted with him and neither of whom had been discovered. One was even a professional cheerleader—much more recognizable than Doe 15. (Clark testified Aug. 21, just before Doe 15, and stated under oath that she had never filmed scenes with Girls Do Porn, and had been paid by Garcia to tell prospective candidates that their videos wouldn’t be put online, but would go to private collectors outside the U.S.. She said she was paid roughly a couple hundred dollars per person, depending on the “grade level” of the girl. “There was a grade level A, B, and C, pretty much on the scale of attractiveness of the woman,” Clark said. “Pretty much I would get paid more for an A-level girl than a C-level girl.”)
Doe 15 texted Wright about her concerns. “I mean, I asked her all of my worries about it,” she said in court. “I wanted to make sure that as another woman who had done it, it wouldn’t be online. It wouldn’t be in America and that my name wouldn’t be used in it. I mean, not just that text alone, but I mean all of the texts together really smoothed my worries that, you know, it would be safe, and it wouldn’t be going anywhere in the United States. It would be going where they told me. It smoothed almost all my worries.”
Kaylin responded: “Yeah. So it goes out to wealthier countries, yeah, DVDs and stuff like that, but nothing online.”
On the early morning of Feb. 28, 2016, Doe 15 flew to San Diego. The deal was to shoot for 30 minutes—five positions, five to seven minutes each—for $5,000. The tape would not go online. It would not be in the United States. It would be sold only on DVD in Australia and the U.K.. Doe 15 had grown up in Southern California, and had been to San Diego once or twice for soccer tournaments, but she didn’t know the area well. When she got to the airport that day, Doe 15 said, she was stranded for over an hour. After a while, she was picked up by Teddy Gyi, the company’s cameraman. Doe 15 said she was surprised by the disorganization—they drove around aimlessly for hours, picking up food, stopping in an apartment, switching cars, and meeting at the wrong hotel, before winding up at the shoot. In the hotel elevator, when a stranger commented on the camera, Gyi said they were “filming a wedding in town.”
Once in the hotel room, Doe 15 went to makeup, chatting nervously with the artist. Then the male talent, Andre Garcia, walked in. “When he comes in, he just immediately goes to the bathroom and throws up for maybe five to ten minutes,” Doe 15 recalled. “Teddy said that they had been drinking the night before, so I figured that was why. When he’s done, though, he just kind of puts the toilet seat down and sits on the toilet and then pulls out a joint and offers it to me.”
Doe 15 smoked with Garcia—a key sticking point in the trial, as her attorney would later claim it undermined her ability to sign contracts. She tried on the three outfits she’d brought, before Garcia settled on one. She signed some papers without reading them closely. (All the stuff she’d agreed to—anonymity, private distribution—that was all in there, the crew allegedly promised. Plus, Doe 15 recalled, they were under a time crunch; she needed to make her evening flight home.) But one thing Doe 15 did notice was her pay. Garcia paid her only $3,000, not the $5,000 previously agreed upon. He said she had bruises; she was pale. Doe 15 texted “Jonathan N.,” but didn’t know what else to say.
In the first moments of the shoot, the crew interviewed Doe 15 in front of the camera. It was a personal interview, covering intimate topics like, “my sex life, how I lost my virginity, where I had had sex before.” She shared details only her sisters and close friend knew; made a joke about an ex she never thought he would hear. Doe 15 said she was told to “play up” the fantasy of it, but didn’t think the interview would ever be public. Now that it is, Doe 15 said, “I feel humiliated.”
After the shoot finished, Doe 15 told the court, she was upset. The adult portion had gone much longer than she had been told, and involved more than she was comfortable with. The feeling got worse when Garcia and Gyi, who was still filming, blocked her from taking a shower and insisted on another interview. “At that point I just kind of broke down and started crying,” she said in her examination. “And then [Garcia] just kind of motioned for him to cut, and [Gyi] was like he was going to say something. But I just tried to be strong at that point and I tried to say, ‘No, I'm done.’ And I couldn't stop crying and then Andre just said, ‘I’m done, let her go.’ And so I just grabbed my stuff, and I left for the airport.”
When Doe 15 left the shoot, she asked “Jonathan N.” for a copy of her contract. She never received a copy. She never even heard the name of the company, “Girls Do Porn,” until April 2016, when she says she received a screenshot from a friend of her porn video online.
In April 2016, after Doe 15’s video appeared online, it seemed unavoidable. In the week after it aired, the video spread quickly across her friend group, family, workplace, and school. Her video was not only on GirlsDoPorn.com, but on major tube sites like PornHub, and on forums, like ImagePost and Girlsdoporn.blogspot.com, where users posted photos of her taken from social media and class presentations she hadn’t made public. She was kicked off her cheerleading team; she began having panic attacks at work; once, she overheard a table of students talking about her video in the school cafeteria. “I had many different links sent to me and my friends,” she said in court. “It pretty much seemed like it was everywhere online.”
Doe 15 hadn’t mentioned the gig to her boyfriend, who she had been only casually seeing at the time of the shoot. But once it went public, she told him immediately. “It was terrible,” Doe 15 recalled in court. “I just knew that I wanted him to hear it from me instead of someone else, and as soon as I told him, I tried to explain, and he just said that he didn’t want to see me, he didn’t want to talk to me, and he didn’t think I was that type of person… He gets upset by it. I know that he’s heard about it from other people because he was on the baseball team at the time, and he says that he still has to deal with people talking to him about it, and that it embarrasses him a little bit. And it just causes strain between us because he says that since it came online, that I am just not the same person, my personality has changed, and there’s been times when he said that I’m just too depressed, and he can’t be around it, just stuff like that.”
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Doe went to great lengths to escape the harassment. She moved 20 minutes away from her college campus to avoid everyday interactions. A psychiatrist prescribed her sertraline for the anxiety. And after hundreds of job applications went without a single response, she started putting her middle name on job applications, so the video wouldn’t come up in search engine results.
But the tape followed her around. In one application, for Doe 15’s current job as a legal assistant, an employer hired a private investigator to look into her background. After learning about the video, he claimed it didn’t bother him, so long as she was a good worker. But it came up in their conversations, through subtext and innuendo. “The most recent one was before I came here,” Doe 15 said during cross-examination. “He implied that he had watched it, and he said, ‘Oh, I didn’t like the way they treated you,’ and then, like, kind of half-smile broke across his face, and I just left the room.”
She texted and called “Jonathan N.” about taking the video down, but nothing went through. She emailed him, but he never responded. She texted Kaylin Wright, the reference who had assured her about privacy. She felt betrayed that another girl had convinced her to make herself vulnerable. “Hey, you lied to me, and they lied to me,” Doe 15 wrote in a text message entered in evidence. “It’s on a website now and my whole town back home knows. This ruined my life.”
Her only recourse was Google. Online, she read about another girl who had been exposed on the same website. The other girl had deleted her social media, and no one seemed to know her number. But Doe 15 did some digging. She Googled one of Girls Do Porn’s parent companies, BLL Media. “I Googled BLL Media lawsuit, just to be hopeful that somebody was doing something about it, and I found an article and I sent it to my mom,” she told attorney Brian Holm, who represents the 22 plaintiffs in court. “And she called you.”
In the final minutes of Doe 15’s testimony, the judge, Kevin A. Enright, sent her out of the courtroom so he could confer with the lawyers. Pratt’s defense attorneys wanted to screen the video of her in front of the courtroom—the video in which she is nude and stoned; the one she recorded believing it would be private—and have her narrate the scene to the public. Holm, her lawyer, called the request “undue harassment”—a microcosm of the central concern of the case. “Given what this case is about and keeping privacy,” Holm told the court, “she’s now going to be in a courtroom… discussing and watching a very private moment being completely nude. That’s exactly what the bill of lies she was sold [said] would never happen.”
On at least that front, the judge agreed.
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