Victims of GirlsDoPorn’s Sex Trafficking Operation Now Own Their Videos

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The lawsuit alleges that “as early as 2009, and definitely by fall 2016, MindGeek knew GirlsDoPorn was trafficking its victims by using fraud, coercion, and intimidation as part of its customary business practices to get the women to film the videos.” Victims said in lawsuit filings that GirlsDoPorn and GirlsDoToys lured them into conversations by posing as a modeling agency in Craigslist ads, with links to fake sites, offering modeling gigs in cities throughout the U.S. and Canada. They eventually offered thousands of dollars to make adult videos and connected potential victims with fake performers who convinced them that they’d enjoyed the experience, according to the suit.

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Ruben Andre Garcia was sentenced last week to 20 years in prison for participating in a sex trafficking scheme called GirlsDoPorn. The new lawsuit follows a lawsuit filed last month by Kristy Althaus, Girls Do Porn victim and former runner up for Miss Teen Colorado. In 2014, her Girls Do Porn appearances went viral after appearing on Pornhub and other free porn sites, and she was stripped of her title and faced public shaming while still in college.

GirlsDoPorn victims sue Pornhub for hosting “sex trafficking” videos

They were then contacted by Garcia, who revealed applicants were actually being recruited to film a 30-minute porn video that they would be paid several thousand dollars to film. All three men were involved in recruiting college students to shoot their first porn videos, and by and large they sought out women who were low-income and may have needed money for things like rent, books, and tuition. Prosecution of minors under child pornography laws, the American Academy of Pediatrics warned in 2019, “has the potential to have dire legal ramifications for teens,” as sexting among young people—and prosecution of them under child pornography laws—continues to rise. A former pageant queen is alleging she was raped and forced to film pornography in a new lawsuit against Pornhub and its parent company, MindGeek, which changed its name to Aylo in August.

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“There was a grade level A, B, and C, pretty much on the scale of attractiveness of the woman. Pretty much I would get paid more for an A-level girl than a C-level girl.” In fact, almost everyone involved with the production of the video seemed to have ghosted her – dropping her like a bad habit the moment she stopped being profitable for them. A popular subreddit had already begun to pop up on Reddit, and the site would officially launch its own forum in 2014. On both, commenters began to question how the operators of GirlsDoPorn were able to find such attractive young women to appear in their videos with regularity, uploading at least one new video every single week.

• SAN DIEGO (CNS) – A videographer for the now-defunct San Diego-based pornographic website GirlsDoPorn.com was sentenced Wednesday to four years in prison for taking part in a sex-trafficking conspiracy that coerced hundreds of women to appear in online pornographic videos under false pretenses.
• They’d then post the videos on the GirlsDoPorn and GirlsDoToys websites, which presented themselves as consensual amateur adult sites.
• The complaint also alleged that Andre Garcia had sexually assaulted at least two of these women, either before or after the recording of their videos.
• Some of the victims say they were sexually assaulted and physically prevented by the defendants from leaving the San Diego hotel rooms and short- term rentals where the videos were filmed.
• A new report analyzing the test, shared exclusively with WIRED, says the pop-ups led to a decrease in the number of searches for child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and saw scores of people seek support for their behavior.
• He allegedly did so by telling the women and girls that they would be paid $3,000 to $5,000 for a one-day pornographic video shoot.

In one case, he had told the victim that he needed to take her for a “test drive” before shooting a video the following day, and in another, he told her to “stop being a whiny little bitch” when she asked to take a break because of the pain she was in. Another woman altogether claimed that she was forced into performing oral sex on Garcia during their shoot, and afterward, was driven by Garcia to an isolated location where he had forcibly raped her in the backseat of the vehicle. Multiple women also claimed that Garcia had given them STDs, which he had failed to inform them about. It was also learned during these court proceedings that the defendants had engaged in a bizarre conspiracy in an attempt to silence these victims and their legal counsel, after the filing of the lawsuit in 2016.

It corroborates the stories of multiple women—plaintiffs in the case as well as women Motherboard spoke with directly—who said they only did the videos with the assurance of the director and owners that these images would be isolated to adult stores on the other side of the world. In 2020, 40 women — victims of the “Girls Do Porn” sex-trafficking operation — sued Pornhub in federal court in California, alleging the company knowingly profited from illegal videos of their abuse. Further, he ordered the defendants to take down the women’s sex videos and take steps to get them off other porn sites they don’t control but allowed to post clips, ads or entire films.

In December 2020, nearly 60 women featured in GirlsDoPorn videos sued PornHub’s parent company, which was then known as MindGeek. The two sides settled the suit about a year later on terms that both sides agreed not to disclose. As a part of the conspiracy, Garcia and others would at times coerce victims into completing the videos once they were underway. Garcia and other co-conspirators threatened to sue the victims, cancel flights home, and post the videos online, if the victims did not complete the sex videos. Hotel room doors were at times blocked by camera and recording equipment, and the victims felt powerless and unable to leave. Garcia and other members of the conspiracy took active steps to ensure the victims did not find out that he and the other members of the conspiracy operated GDP and GDT.

Yet in this fraud trial, these women all claimed they believed the porn videos they shot, which were published among GirlsDoPorn’s library of hundreds of porn flicks viewed collectively over one billion times, would never get posted online. The plaintiff-victims, some of whom were paying their way through college or needed money for rent, were lured into the defendants’ pornography scheme through phony ads on Craigslist.com for clothed modeling gigs. Victims were promised thousands of dollars for 30 minutes of adult film work and guaranteed that their identities would remain anonymous and that the videos would never be posted online or distributed in the U.S.