SAN DIEGO — A San Diego man formerly employed by GirlsDoPorn pleaded guilty yesterday to stalking the 22 former models who sued the website and its owners and employees before a criminal sex trafficking investigation shuttered it.
Alexander Brian Foster, who once had served as cameraman for GirlsDoPorn, “was hired by the website's owners to create a video that would publicly identify 22 women who sued GirlsDoPorn for coercing them into appearing in pornographic videos under false pretenses,” the local NBC affiliate reported.
According to the U.S. attorney's office, the intent of the video — titled “22 Whores + 5 Shady Lawyers VS GirlsDoPorn” — was “to intimidate the women who had brought the lawsuit and retaliate against them by identifying them in a very public manner.”
The prosecutors also said that GirlsDoPorn owner Michael Pratt and his main associate, Matthew Wolfe, hired Foster to create the video, which was apparently never released on the internet.
During the civil and criminal actions, victims’ lawyers and prosecutors alleged that Pratt at some point controlled the website Porn Wikileaks in order to blackmail the models with threats of exposure.
In July 2022, Wolfe pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit sex trafficking and admitted as part of his plea that “he was aware that the names and social media accounts for some women were posted on another website controlled by Pratt, resulting in severe harassment of the women by internet trolls. Still, Wolfe and others continued to assure recruits that their videos, and identifies, would remain secret.”
The website “controlled by Pratt” was identified in other court records as Porn Wikileaks.
One of 'America's Most Wanted'
In December 2022, Pratt was captured in Madrid, Spain, after escaping the U.S. in 2019 and becoming one of the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives since 2021.
As of last month, Pratt was being held in Madrid by Spanish authorities pending extradition to the U.S.
The FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives page devoted to Pratt summarized the criminal case against him and GirlsDoPorn as follows: “From approximately 2012 to 2019, Michael James Pratt and others allegedly participated in a conspiracy to recruit young adult and minor women to engage in commercial sex acts by force, fraud and coercion. Pratt and a co-conspirator owned and operated a pornography production company and online pornography websites, ‘GirlsDoPorn’ and ‘GirlsDoToys.’ Pratt and his co-conspirators allegedly recruited young women from around the United States and Canada by posting false internet advertisements for clothed modeling jobs, which the victims later discovered were pornographic productions.”
Pratt, the posting continued, “also allegedly paid other young women working at his and his co-conspirators’ direction to act as references and provide false assurances to the women that, if they filmed a pornographic video, the video would not be posted online. Some women were allegedly not permitted to leave the shooting locations until the videos were completed, others were allegedly forced to perform sex acts they had declined to perform, and some women were allegedly sexually assaulted.”
For XBIZ's ongoing coverage of the GDP case, click here.
