San Diego Porn Site Owner Now Faces Child Porn Charges, Per New Indictment

A new indictment unsealed Thursday against the owner/operators of San Diego-based pornographic website GirlsDoPorn.com alleges that co-owner Michael James Pratt — who remains on the lam on federal sex trafficking charges — also produced pornographic content involving a 16-year-old girl.

Pratt was charged in a complaint last month along with three others with sex trafficking by force, fraud and coercion for allegedly filming victims under the guise of distributing the videos only to private clients, then disseminating the videos online without the victims’ knowledge or consent.

The new indictment adds two additional defendants and charges of production of child pornography and sex trafficking of a minor against Pratt alone, with the incidents allegedly occurring in September 2012.

The indictment also names website co-owner Matthew Isaac Wolfe; porn actor Ruben Andre Garcia; administrative assistant Valorie Moser; Amberlyn Dee Nored, allegedly one of the reference women accused of lying to victims about the nature of the work; and a sixth defendant whose name is redacted.

According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, numerous young women who initially responded to ads for modeling jobs were allegedly deceived by the defendants to appear in adult films.

Once the victims learned the work involved pornography, the defendants allegedly told them the videos would be distributed to private clients — usually living overseas — and not disseminated on the internet. To help convince the women to participate, reference women like Nored were allegedly hired to lie to the women and claim they had also filmed pornographic videos for the defendants, which were never posted on the internet.

Prosecutors allege the women were “pressured into signing documents without reviewing them and then threatened with legal action or outing if they failed to perform.” Others were not allowed to leave the shoots — which were conducted at various San Diego hotels — until the videos were completed, which sometimes involved sex acts the victims initially declined to perform, prosecutors allege.

The defendants are also currently involved in a San Diego civil trial involving a lawsuit filed by 22 women who appeared in videos on the site. The allegations in that trial — which began in mid-August — mirror the new federal charges.

In that case, the victims are seeking more than $22 million in damages and ownership rights to the videos they appeared in.

A motions hearing in the federal case is scheduled for Dec. 13.