After a stint on the FBI’s 10 most wanted fugitive list for three years, Girlsdoporn leader Michael Pratt pleaded guilty to sex trafficking charges in San Diego on Thursday, authorities said.
According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Pratt used power, fraud and coercion to recruit hundreds of women, many of whom had sex on camera in their late teens.
Women are often seduced by pretending to be modeling gigs and later told that they would shoot adult videos. If the woman refuses to end the filming, Pratt threatens to sue them, cancels the flight to her home and releases the video.
The video was then uploaded to GirlsDoporn.com, and Pratt made more than $17 million in profits from 2012 to 2019, prosecutors said.
The outcomes for the young victims were devastating. At the court hearing, the victims detailed how they lost their jobs, were kicked out, dropped out of school, or were denied by friends and family. Some suicide attempts.
In court, Pratt came up with the idea of a girl Dopawn, recruiting women to appear in the video, sometimes going in and out of video shoot sites, and sometimes placing cameras, prosecutors said. He faces a potential life sentence and is due to be sentenced September 25th.
He was initially indicted in October 2019 along with his business partner.
However, before Pratt answered his crime, he disappeared.
For years, his business partner entered a guilty plea and the victim was testified in court, but Pratt was nowhere to be found. The FBI put him on its top ten list and offered him a $100,000 reward in exchange for information that led to his arrest.
Authorities eventually arrested the mastermind of Spain’s elusive sex trafficking in Spain and were held until custody in 2024 when they were handed over to San Diego.
Pratt’s former business partners, Reuben Andre Garcia, Matthew Wolf and Theodore Guy, have already been convicted, serving 20, 14 and 4 years in prison, respectively. Valorie Moser, a former Girlsdoporn bookkeeper, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit sex trafficking and is due to be sentenced in September, prosecutors said.
According to a report from the San Diego Union Tribune, the sixth charge in the indictment was a woman accused of helping to recruit a woman – dropped out in 2021.
Pratt instructed Garcia, an adult male performer, to recruit “reference girls” to falsely convince them that the video they were filming would not be displayed online and that their friends and family would never meet. Reference girls were paid for each model they were trying to recruit. At least one model was a minor.
“I remember I was very worried about telling him. [Garcia] I was only 17,” the woman told the court during Garcia’s hearing. “But he wasn’t angry or worried. Instead, he was excited and wanted to start.”
Women often flew from out of state to San Diego and participated in adult films. Pratt and his business partners have said they’ll be trying to hide their connections with GirlsDoporn from the models and will be signed with business names that sound harmless, such as “Start Modeling,” “Bubblegum Casting,” and “BLL Media.”
Pratt pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy against sex trafficking from 2012 to 2019, and to one count of sex trafficking in May 2012, prosecutors said.
Times staff writer Sonja Sharp contributed to this report.
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