Prosecutors want to send GirlsDoPorn ringleader to prison for 22 years

Federal prosecutors are seeking a prison sentence of nearly 22 years for the owner of the San Diego-based GirlsDoPorn website, according to court documents filed Friday.

The site featured pornographic videos of young women who were forced or coerced into appearing in the films under false pretenses,

Michael James Pratt, described by prosecutors as “the ringleader in a wide-ranging sex-trafficking conspiracy” surrounding the now-defunct website, pleaded guilty in June to charges of sex trafficking and conspiracy to commit sex trafficking.

Pratt fled the country after the civil trial got underway, spent more than three years on the lam, and was at one time on the FBI’s Top Ten Most Wanted list. He was arrested in Spain in late 2022.

At his Sept. 8 sentencing hearing in San Diego federal court, prosecutors will ask U.S. District Judge Janis Sammartino to sentence Pratt to 260 months in prison, according to a sentencing memorandum.

Pratt was the last of several former GirlsDoPorn employees to plead guilty in the long-running prosecution and is among the last to be sentenced.

Prosecutors said the website’s operators led women to believe the videos in which they appeared would be distributed only to private customers living outside of the country and that their identities would not be exposed. But the goal was always to post the videos on the internet as part of the scheme, which netted Pratt “millions of dollars in profit,” prosecutors said.

Victims were given false promises by Pratt and other GirlsDoPorn.com employees, which included “reference girls” who falsely assured victims that they had participated in past videos that were never posted online.

After victims were flown out to San Diego – where the majority of the website’s content was filmed – they were presented with contracts that concealed the true purpose of the scheme, prosecutors said. Rather than stating the videos were for GirlsDoPorn, the companies were referred to as Bubblegum Casting, BLL Media, or other misleading names.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office said some victims were forced into sex acts or told they could be sued or their flights home canceled if they didn’t complete the videos.

After their videos were posted online, many of the women said they pleaded with GirlsDoPorn’s leadership to take down their videos, but their requests were refused or ignored.

Along with criminal charges, the website’s operators also faced civil suits from 22 women featured in the videos, leading to a nearly $13 million verdict against GirlsDoPorn in early 2020.

Sammartino has already sentenced several of Pratt’s co-defendants, including porn actor Ruben Andre Garcia, who received a 20-year sentence, and Pratt’s ex-business partner, Matthew Isaac Wolfe, who was sentenced to 14 years.

Another co-defendant, Alexander Brian Foster, was sentenced to one year in prison for creating a video meant to harass and publicly identify the 22 women who sued GirlsDoPorn.

Prosecutors said the video – which was never completed or released – was made at Pratt’s direction, and that he instructed Foster to include clips of the women’s recorded depositions from the civil case, their Instagram posts and footage of them leaving the courthouse.