SAN DIEGO, Calif.—It's been many weeks in coming, and some of the 22 Jane Doe plaintiffs have been waiting years to hold adult website GirlsDoPorn.com, its owner Michael Pratt, as well as cameraman Matthew Wolfe, actor/director Reuben "Andre" Garcia and office assistant Valorie Moser accountable for the lies and fraudulent claims the company and its personnel made to them, but today, Superior Court Judge Kevin Enright issued his 187-page "[Proposed] Statement of Decision" on the matter—and in it, he proposed awarding the women more than $12.7 million to compensate them for their pain and ignominy.
After laying forth in great detail the defendants' deceptive recruiting practices—phony Craigslist ads, "bait and switch" contracts, phony "reference women" vouching for the company, and, perhaps worst of all, allowing the hardcore videos the women made, which the company promised would only be seen abroad, to be posted to websites easily accessible in the U.S. where the women's friends and relatives could see them—Judge Enright then set forth in equally great detail the harms the plaintiffs had suffered. Some of these include the women's boyfriends, co-workers and parents confronting the women about having acted in hardcore scenes; the women's careers and college studies being impacted by the revelation that they'd appeared in porn; their social lives being destroyed by embarrassment when their porn "careers" became public; being accosted on the street by strangers who'd seen the videos; receiving threatening phone calls; attempts to blackmail the women into having sex, or for money; and the women being forced to change their appearances and even their places of residence to avoid being recognized.
"Jane Doe 4 was forced to transfer to a school in another state to find a 'fresh start,'" Judge Enright noted. "Upon starting school in Florida, Jane Doe 4 joined a sorority, but she was kicked out three weeks later because someone found the video. The video spread quickly, and she soon received text and social media messages about it, especially on the school's message board. One of her roommates posted a tweet saying, "MY ROOMMATE IS A PORNSTAR" and played the video over the speakers in the house so that Jane Doe 4 would hear it. Someone vandalized her car by painting male genitalia on the windows.
"Soon, people from her hometown in New Jersey discovered the video when someone posted it on her high school's Facebook page. Both her immediate and extended family found out," Enright continued. "Although her parents have been very supportive, her extended family has not been so forgiving—she no longer has much of a relationship with her extended family and avoids family gatherings...
"Collectively, they have experienced severe harassment, emotional and psychological trauma, and reputational harm; lost jobs, academic and professional opportunities, and family and personal relationships; and had their lives derailed and uprooted," the ruling later continues. "They have become pariahs in their communities. Several plaintiffs have become suicidal."
In all, Judge Enright devoted 44 pages of his [Proposed] Statement of Decision to each woman's experiences with the company and its employees, with as much as a full page of each woman's section describing the damages and other suffering experienced by each of the 22 plaintiffs.
Judge Enright then went into the mass of shell companies used by Pratt and his associates to obfuscate the fact that the women were working for a well-known adult website and its affiliates—and how Pratt used those entities to hide the money the company made from the plaintiffs' videos, with one entire section captioned, "The Record Shows Pratt's Intent to Use the Entities to Escape Liability and Protect his Assets," which references corporate accounts created in such distant locales as Vanuatu. He also detailed each Girls Do Porn employee's relationship to both the main company and its shells.
In the final section, "Legal Authorities And Findings," Judge Enright states, "Plaintiffs assert four causes of action that sound in fraud or deceit: Intentional Misrepresentation (First Cause of Action); Fraudulent Concealment (Second Cause of Action); False Promise (Third Cause of Action); and Negligent Misrepresentation (Fourth Cause of Action). The Court finds Defendants are liable on each of these claims." He then goes into great detail as to how the defendants perpetrated their crimes on each of the plaintiffs.
For example, referring only to the defendants' "right of publicity" violations of the plaintiffs, Judge Enright states, "Here, Plaintiffs' evidence of damages is strong. The content at issue does not consist of run-of-the-mill likenesses but hardcore pornographic videos and still images extracted from those videos. Plaintiffs have provided extensive testimony and evidence about how their lives have been affected and destroyed by the unauthorized publication and dissemination of this content via the internet. The Court finds Plaintiffs' accounts to be consistent, credible, and compelling—warranting significant damages.
"Plaintiffs are also entitled to recover the profits Defendants' received from the unauthorized use," he continued. "The parties stipulated that Plaintiffs' videos generated $1,025,831.50 in profits for Defendants. None of this revenue was generated by an authorized use of Plaintiffs' videos as Defendants only earned money from posting the videos online."
The judge noted that all of the defendants are liable for the injuries to each of the plaintiffs, and he provided a chart detailing what amounts of "economic damages" and "non-economic damages" are owed to each of the Jane Does: $46,628.70 in economic damages, and amounts ranging from $250,000 to $500,000 in non-economic damages. He also created a series of rules going forward that GirlsDoPorn must operate under if it wishes to shoot further hardcore videos, requiring that they make it clear that such videos will be posted on the internet, and that they refrain "from using or disseminating Plaintiffs' names or personal information in connection with their images, likenesses or videos."
Judge Enright framed his ruling as a "proposed statement of decision" to allow any of the parties to file objections, which they must do within 15 days. Depending on the disposition of such objections, if any are filed, the ruling will go into effect in mid-January.
"We are weighing our client's options, which include filing objections to the court's tentative statement of decision and an appeal if the decision becomes final," defense attorney Aaron D. Sadock said in a statement to CNN.
Of course, that might be a bit difficult, since Sadock's main client, Michael Pratt, remains on the run in New Zealand and is unlikely to return willingly, considering the federal sex trafficking charges he still faces.
"These women have suffered hellaciously from this dastardly scheme," lead plaintiffs' attorney Ed Chapin told NBC-7 News, "the severity of which goes to the most private and most personal subject matter."
