A group of 22 unnamed young women have won a legal battle against the porn-maker GirlsDoPorn and have been awarded $12.8 million, with a judge ruling that the girls were tricked into appearing in several online porn videos.
The porn-maker and website GirlsDoPorn claims to feature women during their first or only exclusive porn videos, with several of the women being college students and young individuals in need of money. But then, most women aged 18-23 in the videos were promised that the videos would never appear online and were being filmed for private collectors or overseas DVD distribution.
However, the videos were posted online – on both the GirlsDoPorn website and also a few free porn sites across the internet. The website markets itself to feature women who weren’t pornstars and were also one-time only actors, meaning that there was a constant demand for fresher faces to appear on the videos.
So as to keep up with the constant demand, the website makers sought to fraudulent practices to recruit newer models. The San Diego court ruled that GirlsDoPorn took several “calculated steps to falsely assure prospective models that their videos will never be posted online, come to light in the United States or be seen by anyone who might know them.”
Furthermore, the website-owners had further promised that the names of the models wouldn’t appear online. Nonetheless, the court stated that there was strong evidence of the fact that the real identities of several models was compromised on third-party forums, resulting in the young women and their families being harassed online.
To curb any suspicions about the videos being posted online, potential models for GirlsDoPorn were persuaded by former models through words of reassurance that it wouldn’t happen so. What’s more, models were known to be offered alcohol and cannabis before signing an eight-page contract on the day of filming.
Judge Enright ordered the website’s chief executive Michale Pratt, videographer Matthew Wolfe and pornstar Ruben Garcia to take the videos down from GirlsDoPorn’s subscription-based website and take necessary measures to remove the content from other websites as well.
The plaintiffs were offered $9.48 million in compensatory damages and $3.3 million in punitive damages. The judge has offered each parties fifteen days to appeal against the ruling.
READ: The Court Verdict
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