SAN DIEGO, Calif.—News continues to trickle out regarding the testimony of more of the 22 Jane Does who are currently suing adult website GirlsDoPorn.com, its owner Michael Pratt, videographer Matthew Wolfe, and actor/director Andre Garcia for reneging on promises of privacy and anonymity regarding the hardcore scenes the women agreed to shoot for the company. The trial, before Superior Court Judge Kevin Enright, is now in its fifth week, with no end in sight.
Last week, AVN reported on the testimony of Jane Doe 1, who alleged that she was tricked into appearing in three hardcore scenes for the company based on promises made by Pratt and Garcia that the footage would never be shown in the U.S., but rather would only appear on DVDs sold in Europe and Southeast Asia/New Zealand. However, according to investigators, GirlsDoPorn not only posted the scenes on its own website, it licensed them to several other adult sites accessible in the U.S., and released the woman's real name to the recently shuttered pirate website Porn WikiLeaks.
On Tuesday, September 24, yet another plaintiff, Jane Doe 16, took the witness stand, recounting how, after having been similarly recruited from Craigslist by GirlsDoPorn personnel using pseudonyms and a false business name, the self-described "small-town girl" prepared for her sex scene by downing several rum-and-cokes until she felt relaxed enough to get it on with Garcia in a posh San Diego hotel room in 2014.
Doe 16 testified to her shock and horror to find out, in the Spring of 2015, that not only had GirlsDoPorn (a name she said she hadn't previously heard) posted her sex scene on its website, but her scene had gone viral, with one person from the high school where Doe 16 worked had created a website devoted entirely to the scene, leading the woman to attempt to get the website taken down. Doe 16 also stated that her three sisters and one sister-in-law had been emailed links to the footage, with the in-law receiving the link on her middle-school email account.
But things got worse from there. According to an article on Courthouse News, "After the video came out, Doe said she was ostracized by her friends and received harassing messages on social media," and said she was shocked that even an elderly man from an assisted living facility across from her work said he recognized her from the scene.
"I said, 'That wasn't me,' but you could tell he knew it was me," Doe said. "I couldn’t take this wide variety of people who had seen me naked and I wanted to leave."
Doe 16 appealed to Pornhub to remove the video from its offerings, which it did—until someone re-posted the video on the site some days later. The notoriety surrounding her video appearance became so oppressive that Doe 16 turned to alcohol to fight her anxiety and depression, and when that didn't work well, she actually joined the military to get away from all the townsfolk who had seen her in flagrante delicto.
But military service didn't work for her either, and she was discharged after several months—and it was back to boozing, which led to her arrest for DUI, and later, she took an overdose of one of her prescription medications and wound up in the hospital for two weeks—the first of many short hospital stays over the next three years.
Finally, in 2018, Doe 16 worked up enough courage to tell a psychiatrist about the situation.
"I had a hard time believing someone would sympathize with me and see my side of the story," Doe told her attorney Cara Van Dorn on the witness stand. "It stayed inside and festered for years and I lost almost my life because I didn’t feel I could talk about it."
When it came time for cross-examination, defense attorney Aaron Sadock tried to impeach Doe 16's allegation that she'd been drunk when filming the scene, showing the court a videotape of Doe 16's pre-scene interview and asking her to show how someone could tell she was intoxicated? Doe 16 pointed to her tone of voice and certain body movements that she said, for her, were not normal.
Not included in Courthouse News' account was any information about the whereabouts of Michael Pratt, who as of mid-last week had left the country, even though he was under court order to attend the trial proceedings.
Pictured, l-r: Andre Garcia, Matthew Wolfe and Michael Pratt.
