After three years on the run and a stint on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list, the leader of GirlsDoPorn, Michael Pratt, pleaded guilty to sex trafficking charges in San Diego on Thursday, authorities said.
Pratt used force, fraud and coercion to recruit hundreds of women, many of whom were in their late teens, to perform sex acts on camera, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
The women were often lured under the pretense of modeling gigs and were later told they would be filming adult videos, which Pratt and his business partners falsely promised would not appear online, prosecutors said. If the women refused to finish filming, Pratt would threaten to sue them, cancel flights home and post the videos publicly.
The videos would then be uploaded to GirlsDoPorn.com, where Pratt made more than $17 million in profits from 2012 to 2019, prosecutors said.
The consequences for the young victims were devastating. In court hearings, victims detailed how they had lost jobs, been evicted, dropped out of school or been disowned by friends and family. Some attempted suicide.
In court, Pratt admitted to coming up with the idea for GirlsDoPorn, recruiting women to appear in the videos, sometimes transporting them to and from the site of a video shoot and sometimes manning the camera, prosecutors said. He faces a potential life sentence and is scheduled to be sentenced on Sept. 25.
He was initially indicted in October 2019 alongside his business partners.
But before Pratt could answer for his crimes, he disappeared.
For years, while his business partners entered guilty pleas and victims testified in court, Pratt was nowhere to be found. The FBI placed him on its top 10 list and offered a $100,000 reward in return for information leading to his arrest.
Authorities finally nabbed the elusive sex trafficking ringleader in Spain in December 2022, where he was held in custody until his extradition to San Diego in 2024, according to the Department of Justice.
Pratt’s former business partners Ruben Andre Garcia, Matthew Wolfe and Theodore Gyi have already been convicted and are serving sentences of 20, 14 and four years, respectively. Valorie Moser, the former GirlsDoPorn bookkeeper, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit sex trafficking and is scheduled to be sentenced in September, prosecutors said.
The charges against the sixth person in the indictment — a woman who was accused of helping recruit women to film the adult movies — were dropped in 2021, according to reporting from the San Diego Union-Tribune.
Pratt directed Garcia, a male adult-film performer, to recruit “reference girls” to falsely convince young women that the videos they were filming would not appear online and that their friends and family would never see them, prosecutors said. The reference girls were paid per model they tried to recruit. At least one of the models was underage.
“I can remember being so worried to tell him [Garcia] that I was just 17,” a woman told the court during a hearing for Garcia. “But he was not mad or concerned. Instead he was excited and was eager to start.”
The women were often flown to San Diego from out of state to participate in the adult films. Pratt and his business partners would attempt to hide their connection to GirlsDoPorn from the models, having them sign contracts with innocuous-sounding business names such as “Begin Modeling,” “Bubblegum Casting” or “BLL Media,” prosecutors said.
Pratt pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to sex-traffic from 2012 to 2019 and one count of sex trafficking a victim in May 2012, prosecutors said.
Times staff writer Sonja Sharp contributed to this report.
