Judge awards women $13 million in massive lawsuit against GirlsDoPorn

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The operators of the popular GirlsDoPorn website owe nearly $13 million to 22 young women who were tricked and coerced into shooting pornographic videos, a California judge ruled on Thursday. It took Judge Kevin Enright 187 pages to enumerate the many ways owner Michael Pratt and two co-conspirators mistreated the women.

"Plaintiffs have suffered and continue to suffer far-reaching and often tragic consequences," the judge wrote. "Collectively, they have experienced severe harassment, emotional and psychological trauma, and reputational harm." Damages include "lost jobs, academic and professional opportunities, and family and personal relationships." Their lives were "derailed and uprooted," with several plaintiffs contemplating suicide.

The group behind GirlsDoPorn recruited women by advertising clothed modeling gigs on Craigslist and elsewhere. When a woman responded to an ad, they were told that the job was actually shooting porn. However, the women were told that they could make $5,000-sometimes even more-in a single day of shooting. And these women were then assured that their videos would never appear on the Internet. Instead, footage would be burned to DVD and sold to private collectors in Australia and New Zealand. All of this turned out to be lies. Within weeks of shooting, the women's videos appeared on GirlsDoPorn and various free pornographic "tube sites."

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