SAN DIEGO, Calif.—Some of the best reporting on the GirlsDoPorn trial has come from The Daily Beast's Tarpley Hitt, who posted earlier today that although it's now been confirmed that GirlsDoPorn owner Michael Pratt had indeed fled the U.S. for his native New Zealand shortly before the trial of the lawsuit charging fraud, intentional misrepresentation, false promise and breach of contract against his company began, Pratt's former administrative assistant Valerie Moser knew plenty of the company's dirt, which she revealed in transcripts of testimony obtained by the Newsweek-owned website.
Hitt reported that Moser, who began working for Pratt in early 2015—a job she found through a (surprise! surprise!) Craigslist ad—described Pratt as "irritable" and "paranoid," who frequently smashed office equipment in fits of pique which she called "man tantrums." She also discussed one of the reasons that Pratt often paid his performers less than they were promised for their hardcore scenes: It depended on how good they looked posing nude in front of a photo of a panda in one defendant's apartment. Moser also described how she was never to refer to her employer as GirlsDoPorn, but by one of the other companies named as defendants in the lawsuit filed by 22 "Jane Doe" performers. This scheme worked so well that when threatened to sue GirlsDoPorn, Pratt had Moser send the women to the company's lawyer, who apparently had no idea he was working for GirlsDoPorn, but another of Pratt's bogus business entities—so when the women spoke to the attorney, "he often had no idea what they were talking about," Hitt wrote.
Moser also confirmed much of what the Jane Does who had already testified at the trial had said.
"Moser testified in court that ... she overheard Pratt make many of the claims the plaintiffs allege they were told: that the footage would be sent on DVD and mailed to Australia; that it would be sold in an adult film store; that the identity of the model would remain private; that the sex 'would involve nothing weird,'" Hitt reported. "At the time, Moser thought all this was true. But she later learned that none of those claims were honest."
Pratt also had Moser set up a phony phone number to "avoid getting harassed by the models." Hitt reported that at least a dozen of the models "messaged her with complaints about their videos, which were uploaded directly online and often viewed hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of times. Girls begged Moser to remove their videos, offering to return their earnings or pay extra."
Although Moser at first forwarded the messages to Pratt, he often told her to block the women's numbers, which she did.
But once the trial commenced, Pratt doubled down on deception, ordering Moser to delete all messages received from models, destroy any hotel receipts indicating that the models had purchased alcohol during their stay, and discussed ways to hide assets in case the Jane Does were victorious. Pratt's co-defendant, videographer Matthew Wolfe, also ordered Moser to "shred documents that showed him wiring company money to accounts in New Zealand," where Pratt had fled.
Unfortunately for Pratt and the other defendants, Moser testified that she had begun keeping track of the hinky goings-on at the company in what she called a "CYA journal," with "CYA" standing for "Cover Your Ass." Moser kept track of such things as her conversations with Pratt and the models, and also described her own treatment at work. When Pratt found out about the journal, he not only trashed Moser's work desk, but even set other employees to follow Moser home on at least two occasions. She was fired not long afterwards.
But Moser's testimony is hardly the only new development in the case. NBC-7 San Diego reported yesterday that defendant Matthew Wolfe, who underwent more than 12 hours of questioning by plaintiff attorney Brian Holm over three days, testified that Pratt "returned to New Zealand because of 'health issues related to threats he had received' after the publication of news stories about the Girls Do Porn controversy," and that Pratt had taken "a vacation in South America before flying back to New Zealand from Tijuana’s international airport."
Although alcohol use by the models before their sex scenes had previously been brought up, Holm questioned Wolfe about other drug use on the set—which Wolfe denied knowing anything about.
"Wolfe also said he never saw the women—or the male actor in those videos—smoke marijuana before or during the porn shoots," NBC-7 reported. "Wolfe denied that allegation even after he was shown on-location videos that he shot, which showed marijuana containers and drug pipes. Wolfe also denied that he and his colleagues downloaded the models’ names to the Porn Wikileaks website, an action that exposed the women to more ridicule."
Wolfe also admitted that he'd transferred some of his funds to an off-shore holding company on the island of Vanuatu, a popular place to hide funds from creditors and plaintiffs.
"NBC 7 Investigates found offshore shell companies tied to Girls Do Porn were previously charged with laundering billions of dollars for a Mexican drug cartel and trafficking illegal weapons," the station also reported last May, providing more detail in another story here.
And finally, Wolfe admitted that GirlsDoPorn is still making amateur videos using women recruited from Craigslist and elsewhere, and that they're still being promised that the videos won't be posted online—and that the contracts that the performers sign no longer include any reference to GirlsDoPorn. In short, same shit, different day.
The trial is now in its eighth week, with no end in sight.
