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Porn Site Owner Charged With Child Sex Trafficking Amid Fraud Trial

GirlsDoPorn owner Michael Pratt, a fugitive believed to be in New Zealand, was charged Thursday for allegedly producing child porn and sex trafficking related to a 2012 incident involving a 16-year-old.

SAN DIEGO (CN) – GirlsDoPorn owner Michael Pratt, a fugitive believed to be in New Zealand, was charged Thursday for allegedly producing child porn and sex trafficking related to a 2012 incident involving a 16-year-old.

The new criminal indictment was unsealed in the Southern District of California Thursday at a hearing attended by Pratt’s co-defendants, GirlsDoPorn videographer Matthew Wolfe, actor Andre Garcia and administrative assistant Valorie Moser.

U.S. District Magistrate Judge Linda Lopez entered a not guilty plea on behalf of the three defendants.

The new charges allege Pratt coerced a 16-year-old on Sept. 1, 2012 to produce a porn flick. The Department of Justice also charged Pratt on a count of sex trafficking of a minor for allegedly transporting the same minor across state lines.

The charges are subject to New Zealand’s extradition treaty with the United States. Pratt, a New Zealand native, is believed to have fled to his home country via Mexico, according to testimony by Wolfe.

If convicted on the charges, Pratt and the others will have to forfeit the domain names to GirlsDoPorn and two other affiliated sites, GirlsDoToys and BeginModeling, which were used as recruiting tools to capture womens’ personal information, according to the indictment.

The criminal case against Pratt and his employees was filed in the midst of a civil fraud trial in state court where 22 Jane Does claimed they were induced to shoot porn videos based on the representation the videos would be sold on DVDs overseas.

In reality, the films were uploaded to GirlsDoPorn’s subscription-based website, with clips and some full-length films uploaded to some of the most trafficked websites in the world, including PornHub.

Many of the Jane Does have testified in Superior Court Judge Kevin Enright’s courtroom they were told to lie about their age to appear younger than they were when they filmed for GirlsDoPorn.

One woman – who was 22 at the time she filmed – testified she was paid thousands less than she was promised because she “looks old.”

The newly unsealed criminal indictment also added two new defendants not named in the original complaint: one person whose name is redacted and Amberlyn Dee Nored aka “Amberlyn Clark.”

Clark is a “reference” woman who testified during the civil trial she was paid to tell skeptical women the porn videos would not appear online and would be sold to private collectors outside the United States to convince them to shoot videos with GirlsDoPorn.

Moser, who is out on bond, successfully petitioned Lopez Thursday to take her off house arrest, which was initially included as a condition of her release.

Wolfe and Garcia are in federal custody.

The civil trial is ongoing. The next hearing in the criminal case is scheduled for Dec. 13.

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Categories / Criminal, Entertainment, Media, Trials

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