Michael James Pratt, the ringleader for Girls Do Porn, pleaded guilty to multiple counts of sex trafficking last week.
Pratt initially pleaded not guilty to sex trafficking charges in March 2024, after being extradited to the U.S. from Spain last year. He fled the U.S. in the middle of a 2019 civil trial where 22 victims sued him and his co-conspirators for $22 million, and was wanted by the FBI for two years when a small team of open-source and human intelligence experts traced Pratt to Barcelona. By September 2022, he’d made it onto the FBI’s Most Wanted List, with a $10,000 reward for information leading to his arrest. Spanish authorities arrested him in December 2022.
“According to public court filings, Pratt and his co-defendants used force, fraud, and coercion to recruit hundreds of young women–most in their late teens–to appear in GirlsDoPorn videos. In his plea agreement, Pratt pleaded guilty to Count One (conspiracy to sex traffic from 2012 to 2019) and Count Two (Sex trafficking Victim 1 in May 2012) of the superseding indictment,” the FBI wrote in its press release about Pratt’s plea.
Special Agent in Charge Suzanne Turner said in a 2021 press release asking for the public’s help in finding him that Pratt is “a danger to society.”
Samantha Cole
A vital part of the Girls Do Porn scheme involved a partnership with Pornhub, where Pratt and his co-conspirators uploaded videos of the women that were often heavily edited to cut out signs of distress. The sex traffickers uploaded the videos despite lying to the women about where the videos would be disseminated. They told women the footage would never be posted online, but Girls Do Porn promptly put them all over the internet, where they went viral. Victims testified that this ruined multiple lives and reputations.
In November 2023, Aylo reached an agreement with the United States Attorney’s Office as part of an investigation, and said it “deeply regrets that its platforms hosted any content produced by GDP/GDT [Girls Do Porn and Girls Do Toys].”
Most of Pratt’s associates have already entered their own guilty pleas to federal charges and faced convictions, including Pratt’s closest co-conspirator Matthew Isaac Wolfe, who pleaded guilty to federal trafficking charges in 2022, as well as the main performer in the videos, Ruben Andre Garcia, who was sentenced to 20 years in jail by a federal court in California in 2021, and cameraman Theodore “Teddy” Gyi, who pleaded guilty to counts of conspiracy to commit sex trafficking by force, fraud and coercion. Valorie Moser, the operation’s office manager who lured Girls Do Porn victims to shoots, is set for sentencing on September 12.
Pratt is also set to be sentenced in September.
