In August, we wrote about a group of 22 models who sued the owners of the porn site GirlsDoPorn for fraud. The models say the company told them that pornographic videos of them would only be distributed on DVDs outside the United States. Instead, the videos were published by GirlsDoPorn, a site with plenty of American viewers.
Bianca Bruno, a reporter for Court House News, has been producing invaluable day-by-day coverage of the ongoing trial in San Diego. On Wednesday, the court heard from Matthew Wolfe, a GirlsDoPorn associate who handles day-to-day operations on the site. Wolfe said that GirlsDoPorn is still trying to recruit new models—and it’s still not giving new recruits the full story about how the videos will be used.
When asked whether the contracts signed by new models mention GirlsDoPorn, Wolfe responded, “No, I don’t believe so.” In fact, he admits that the contracts don’t mention any websites at all. He said that if models asked where the videos would be published, he would say the videos would go online but wouldn’t mention a specific site.
Wolfe said most prospective models “didn’t ask” where their videos would appear. Wolfe confirmed that videos shot by the company were never published on DVD.
If site owners are now telling models that videos will go online, that’s an improvement from the behavior alleged by plaintiffs. The models say they were told videos would never be posted on the Internet.
“If I had known that they were posting it on the Internet, that my name would be attached to it, that it would be in the United States, 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, I wouldn’t have done it,” one of the victims testified in court in August.
After her video appeared online, she texted a woman who had helped recruit her to shoot the video.
“Hey, you lied to me, and they lied to me,” she wrote in a text message. “It’s on a website now and my whole town back home knows. This ruined my life.”
The principal owner of GirlsDoPorn, Michael Pratt, apparently left the United States last month.
“We have been informed that [Pratt] is no longer in the jurisdiction and is no longer available to testify, even though he is under court order” to appear in court, an attorney for the 22 plaintiffs said in mid-September.
https://arstechnica.com/?p=1579435