SAN DIEGO — "It's hard to explain desperation and just wanting to crawl under a rock and die. It's been more than a decade but I still can't escape this video even now," said "Jane" one of 61 women who fell prey to the owners and operators of San Diego-based company, Girls Do Porn, and are now suing the owner of Pornhub and other popular porn tube sites, among the most viewed websites in the world, for refusing to remove their videos.
Much like her fellow plaintiffs, as well as the approximately 500 other women who traveled to San Diego to appear in a sex video that they were told would only be viewed by private collectors and never on the internet, Jane says her life changed from the moment her video was posted on Girls Do Porn's website and downloadable trailers were posted on Pornhub for tens of millions of people to access.
It continues to follow her to this day.
"This has turned my life upside down. This company, the one that owns Pornhub, exploited us," said Jane. "They totally knew what they were doing. They ignored me for years. For me, a big part of this lawsuit is an effort to make sure that no one has to go through what I did."
The scheme
For Jane and hundreds of other women, it all began with an ad on Craigslist, seeking 18-to-22-year-old women for modeling jobs. The modeling websites and the agencies they purported to promote were fake and instead were created by Michael Pratt, Matthew Wolfe, and Andre Garcia, the owners and operators of a small, San Diego-based amateur porn website, Girls Do Porn.
After answering the ad, the women were told the job was not traditional modeling but was to perform in a sex video, which would go only to private collectors in Australia and South America on DVD format. Pratt, Wolfe, or Garcia offered to pay the women anywhere from $2,000 to $5,000 for a few hours of work, as well as a paid trip to San Diego.
After landing in San Diego and arriving at a nearby hotel, the women were ushered to a hotel, where they were given drugs, and alcohol, and their hair and makeup were done.
The men then began filming.
They handed the contract to the women but were told they had to sign it quickly.
Then filming began.
After it ended, the women were handed their money, often times, according to a civil suit and federal sex trafficking case, much less than promised, and were told to leave.
A month or two later, their friends, family, teachers, and bosses began confronting them about the videos which, in spite of what Pratt, Wolfe, Garcia and others said would not be seen by anyone other than private collectors, were posted to one of the world's most popular porn websites, Pornhub.
The fallout
"Just a single clip from my video had millions of views," said Jane.
Jane said the harassment was constant and immeasurable. What began just two months after she shot her video has lasted more than a decade.
"It is degrading. Everybody seeing me in my most vulnerable state and not knowing the backstory," said Jane. "People across the world fantasizing about my video, when it's like, it's evident that I was in pain. I was not having a good time, getting choked, the degrading comments, it is nothing like I can ever explain."
Jane told CBS 8 that she contacted Pornhub and its parent company Mindgeek, which has since been acquired by Aylo, to get her video down. She told the website administrator that she was lied to and the video should have never been posted to the website.
Jane, as well as the other 60 women in the newly filed federal complaint, left messages on Pornhub's site.
"I was scammed," read one woman's message. "This company lied to me about this being on the internet. They told me it would only be available on DVD in Australia. My work friends and family all know and this very link is being sent around. I want to just die."
The women, according to the complaint, say nothing happened and Aylo continued to profit off the Girls Do Porn clips.
Attorney Brian Holm has led the charge on behalf of the women first against Girls Do Porn's owners as well against Pornhub's parent company for profiting off of the women's pain. In 2021 Holm and 50 other women settled a similar lawsuit against what was then-Mindgeek for an undisclosed amount of money.
For Holm, he won't rest until the victims find the justice they deserve.
"While the entire videos were published on Girls Do Porn's site behind a paywall that you had to subscribe to, the trailer versions were pushed throughout the Pornhub network on all of their tube sites where they were viewed billions of times on a global scale. Every view is a penny to them. When you add up billions of views, it's a lot of money," said Holm.
According to the lawsuit, website admin from Pornhub continued to refuse to respond to the women's take-down requests until October 2019 when the FBI arrested Girls Do Porn's main recruiter and actor Andre Garcia, part-owner and videographer Mathew Wolfe, and other lower level employees on sex trafficking charges.
"It's too little too late," said Holm of the company's decision to remove the videos. "Aylo spent a decade with these traffickers and helped push their videos and exploit these women. You shouldn't have to wait for someone to be thrown in jail when you know the crime has been going on."
And while Aylo and Pornhub removed the videos in 2019 women such as Jane continues to pay.
"I spent hundreds of hours flagging and flagging to get my video down. I had a video on Pornhub that had millions of views on it. I flagged it so many times. I never received any emails back. It was just like you would flag it and it would go off into the abyss and nothing would happen," said Jane.
Jane says even now she still has strangers contact her, some of which have tracked her down on family members' social media pages.
"Some way there are people that find me, just strangers across the world. One recently found me through my dad's Facebook account or something that is completely private. Me and my husband will get messages from strangers all across the world. It's never ending," said Jane.
CBS 8 reached out to Aylo for comment but did not get a response.
The lawsuit will now move forward. It is the second lawsuit that women have against Aylo since the Girls Do Porn scheme came to light. The first lawsuit was settled in 2001.