SAN DIEGO—As the fraud/breach of contract trial pitting 22 Jane Does against adult website Girls Do Porn and its principals and employees continues, yesterday saw some interesting revelations from the witness stand, including the allegation that one Girls Do Porn producer, Kevin Gibson, arranged for plaintiff's attorney Brian Holm to be "deepfaked" into a photo of three naked people.
On the stand was Jamia McDonald, who testified that she dated Gibson for two years, spending weekends at the home Gibson shared with Michael Pratt, Girls Do Porn's owner, who remains a fugitive from both the law and the civil trial, and is reportedly now hiding out in New Zealand. McDonald also testified that Gibson paid her $300 per week to making harassing phone calls to Holm several times per day, and to text the altered photo to Holm's cellphone—and that he refused to tell her why he was having her do this. In fact, when McDonald questioned Gibson about the calls, he shut her down, threatening to break up with her if she continued asking.
"He refused to give me any real information about what I was doing, just that I needed to do it or he would get someone else to,' McDonald said, adding, "I was out of work at the time and needed money to support my son."
McDonald also stated that Gibson had excused the phone calls to Holm by charging that, in fact, Holm and his co-counsel "were the ones stalking and harassing him"—and that Gibson had hired some of his friends to target one of the Jane Does, who worked at a San Diego nightclub, for harassment.
According to an article by Bianca Bruno, reporter for Courthouse News, McDonald's testimony was interrupted by frequent objections from defense attorney George Rikos, but neither he nor co-counsel Aaron Sadock or Daniel Kaplan cross-examined McDonald at that time, but said that they would call her as a witness during the defense's case.
And that defense case might commence as early as later this week or next. On Monday, the last Jane Doe plaintiff, Jane Doe 7, testified. In questioning on cross-examination by Sadock, she stated that before performing her sex scene, she'd asked videographer Matthew Wolfe and actor/director Andre Garcia "at least 20 times" where the finished scene would be published—and was each time assured that it would only appear on a DVD to be sold in the Australian market, that it would never be seen online, and that her identity would be protected—none of which turned out to be true.
"Based on the conditions of the agreement, it was easy to believe them because they had repeated the conditions 'not online, not in the U.S.,'" Doe said. "I asked them over and over and over again. The agreements were no online, no family, no one was going to find out."
In fact, the scene was posted to the GirlsDoPorn.com website, and appeared on several hardcore sites including Pornhub—and Doe 7's identity was leaked to the recently closed pirate site PornWikiLeaks.
As part of his examination, Sadock played video from Doe 7's sex scene, and the woman cried through most of the playback, testifying that the sex with Garcia had been so violent that it had caused her to bleed. In fact, that bleeding caused Doe 7 to pause the scene while she went into the bathroom to take a bath because "I was in so much pain, I couldn’t take it anymore"—and that Wolfe, talking through the door, tried to convince her that in order to stop the bleeding, she should let Garcia "have sex with you harder."
"I don’t want to see it; I don’t want to hear it,” Doe 7 said as she turned away from the video screen, according to a Courthouse News report by Bruno.
But despite Doe 7's having signed a contract to do the scene, which contract she said she was given almost no time to read, Wolfe and Garcia used furniture to barricade the door of the hotel room where the scene was being filmed, leaving Doe 7 feeling trapped.
"They put furniture in front of the door, so what was I going to do? Jump over the balcony?" Doe 7 asked rhetorically when Sadock questioned her about whether she felt she was free to leave. "If they already paid you $2,000 and you’re in a hotel room with two guys, I didn’t really feel I had a choice. I was being coached and I feel like I had to do it. I was afraid."
Doe 7's experiences with Girls Do Porn were so upsetting that Doe's friend, who had also answered the company's Craigslist ad, declined to film a scene with the company after speaking to Doe 7 about what had happened on set.
But while plaintiffs' attorneys have estimated that the trial before U.S. District Judge Kevin Enright could be completed by mid-November, that end date seems optimistic in light of the fact that defense counsel have filed yet another motion to delay the civil trial based on the fact that federal Judge Joel Wohlfeil, who has been presiding over the hearings in the federal criminal case against the company and its principals, issued an order freezing the assets of Girls Do Porn, as well as those of owner Michael Pratt, Wolfe and Garcia, ordering that "all funds, documents or assets in foreign countries" that belonged to the defendants be repatriated to the U.S. within five days, and that any of Girls Do Porn's payment processors not allow any funds—dollars or crypto—collected on behalf of the company to be deposited into any new account. He also scheduled a hearing on this issue for November 19.
Judge Enright will decide sometime today whether to agree to the defense motion to delay the civil trial based on the asset seizure order, though at this point, that delay seems unlikely.
And finally, since this involves an adult producer being put on trial, of course the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE) had to get into the act, issuing a screed late last week, charging that "the porn industry is desperately trying to distance itself from the fact that it profits off of and is inherently intertwined with sexual exploitation, abuse, and trafficking."
As is par for the course in missives from this anti-industry group, the rhetoric soon heads into left field: "If it were true that the porn industry is a safe and progressive bastion, then why is content from trafficked children constantly popping up on industry-leading porn sites like Pornhub? If it were true that the porn industry is a safe and progressive bastion, then why does story after story of performers being trafficked into the porn industry continue to be uncovered?"
Neither charge, of course, is true.
Then there's this oddball statement from NCOSE, citing a years-old post on the virulently anti-porn PinkCross.org website: "Those defending the pornography industry have attempted to spin a narrative that blames capitalism for the exploitation that runs rampant in its systems. ... If the greed of capitalism were removed, porn apologists claim, then the porn industry would become a virtual utopia of consensual sexual delight as people create and distribute their own content free from exploitation."
Wow! Sounds like a platform Democratic Socialist Bernie Sanders could add to his presidential run!
For more from NCOSE, click here.
