CONTENT WARNING: The following blog contains mature subject matter concerning pornography, sexual abuse, sexual coercion, and human trafficking offences that may be triggering to survivors of sexual abuse and to those recovering from sexual addictions linked to pornography use. All hyperlinks are SFW (“safe for work”), but nonetheless refer to material of a similar nature.
Say what you will about the pornography industry – they can be remarkably good at collecting their own analytics. And, if that data is to be believed, pornography users are beginning to show a significant preference for “amateur pornography”: content which seems more believable and natural, which presents more plausible sexual encounters than high-budget productions often do. This, among other things, makes pornography production more accessible. In the words of PornHub’s sexual health experts, this appears to send the message that “anyone can be a porn star!”
Enter, then, a woman spending her summer as a clerk at a law firm after her first year at law school, realizing the need to make some additional money. She decides to consider modeling, and looks – successfully – on Craig’s List for a modeling job. After exchanging emails with a contact from her job prospect, the contact asks to speak with her on the phone. There, he explains that they will shoot a pornographic DVD for a man in Australia which “couldn’t be copied.” Her name would be held in the strictest confidence and would never be attached to the project; if she had any questions, she could speak to a previous model who would affirm that the organization’s assurances of privacy were legitimate. She speaks to this reference alumna, and her concerns are satisfied. When she arrives at the hotel room where the video is to be shot, she is offered alcohol to help “calm her nerves” before being shown a contract for the first time. Her inebriated requests to read the contract thoroughly before signing and beginning shooting are met with frustrated reminders that “we’ve been over this” and “there is no time.” She signs the contract and shoots three videos.
This pornographer’s aim is for viewers “to be left with the impression that the women in [the] videos are everyday women that they could encounter in their communities, campuses and daily lives,” in the words of a reviewing justice. The actress is presented as an ordinary young woman with an otherwise un-extraordinary life, quite proximate to the ordinary lives of the viewers and people whom they may know, taking a one-time adventurous risk of shooting a “sex video.” The “adventure” this aspiring model subscribed to was assuredly risk free:
“Your family and friends will never hear of the video, your boyfriend will never know, and we certainly will not tell your supervising associate at your law firm.”
What this anonymous participant misunderstood – a misunderstanding deliberately preserved by producers – was that the videos belonged to an enormously lucrative and high profile pornography enterprise called Girls Do Porn. The three videos of her appearing entirely naked and performing explicit sex acts would be posted online within months of shooting, and her friends, relatives, colleagues, employer, and significant other would later be contacted and directed to the video so as to drive traffic to the business. The model she had spoken to previously had been paid to lie to her; the producers not only never intended to protect her privacy, but they deliberately sought to destroy it, correctly understanding they would profit in doing so.
On January 2, 2020, Judge Kevin Enright of the Superior Court of California issued a proposed statement of decision concerning a civil action against Girls Do Porn and its founder, one Michael Pratt, brought by our anonymous law student and twenty one other women with similar stories. At the time of the action, Girls Do Porn was an eminently lucrative endeavour, earning the defendants an estimated $2.5 million per year on its own, let alone an affiliated related enterprise called Girls Do Toys which earned the defendants an additional estimated $18,000 per year. In Pratt’s deposition, given remotely while evading a warrant for his arrest, he indicated that he still possessed approximately 200 unpublished videos each with a fair market value of between $30,000-$40,000. Girls Do Porn, additionally, had a successful distribution relationship with PornHub, the largest “tube-style” pornography corporation in the world, with each Girls Do Porn video attracting up to 35 million views per video for a total of nearly 600 million video views at the time of the action.
The twenty-two plaintiffs to this action were all women who participated in just such videos, each with stories that successfully substantiated their civil action for fraud and coercion on the part of Pratt, his colleagues, and the corporation Girls Do Porn. The court found that the plaintiffs’ allegations of force, fraud and coercion were true, awarding the plaintiffs over $12 million in compensatory and punitive damages, in addition to ordering the defendants to “return to Plaintiffs all of the Plaintiff’s property they took, including images, likenesses, videos, and/or copyrights [sic].” This latter award – ultimately vesting copyrights associated with the materials in the actresses themselves – is perhaps the most extraordinary, as it fundamentally empowers the plaintiffs to do whatever they like with the content they were coerced to create, including – if they like – destroy it. As of writing, a reporting trend now refers to this once-industry giant as a “sex crime operation,” with clear justification for so doing. Mr. Pratt has since fled the country, evading an arrest warrant, and the United States Department of Justice currently identifies him as a fugitive. His whereabouts remain unknown, and the United States have indicated that they will pursue extradition if Pratt is found abroad so that he can be properly prosecuted in the United States. Pratt’s arrest warrant flowed from four criminal charges, three counts of “Sex Trafficking by Force, Fraud and Coercion” and one of conspiracy to commit the same, each carrying with them maximum penalties of life imprisonment and fines of $250’000, an equivalent offence to the sex trafficking of children.
Policy-analysis prone readers will likely want to quickly file this story into one of two categories: Girls Do Porn represents either the “rule” or the “exception” – the common or the anecdote. Either conclusion could be possible, so let us subject them each to critique.
It would simply be untrue to assert that the Girls Do Porn fiasco represents the whole of the pornography industry, as if to opportunistically suggest that pornography is in any sense monolithic. In her essay in The Feminist Porn Book, writer and adult film star Lorelei Lee reminds readers that pornography is a “microcosm” of our societies diverse sexual interests and tastes, as complex and varied as human sexuality is generally. Accordingly, one must concede that not all pornography production depends on this kind of exploitation, and that not every viewer goes looking for exploitative (or “obscene”, to turn a justiciable term) content whenever they ask their favourite search engine to produce something to watch while masturbating.
However, one cannot now dismiss the overlap between pornography and human trafficking – often described as a form of modern slavery – in the face of so visible and mainstream a fall from grace as Girls Do Porn’s newfound and deserved infamy. This overlap is no moral panic devised to subversively attack the sex industry; it happens, to the chagrin social conservatives and feminists alike. This blog’s eponymous phenomenon of “pornography trafficking” – the practice of engaging in trafficking offences for the purpose of producing pornography – occurs, and it occurs in scales large enough to justify multi-million dollar settlements, it seems. As far as contemporary internet pornography is concerned, Girls Do Porn is about as mainstream and ubiquitous as it gets. While we cannot rely on a “straw man” argument to assume that this is standard fare for contemporary pornography, we would be equally naïve to assume that to continue to look for more examples of this would be a fruitless endeavour. The question is not, then, “whether” – but, rather, “when”, “where”, and “why” does pornography trafficking happen?
Knowing that “amateur” is the third most popular category of pornography on the largest pornography distribution website in the world helps explain why Girls Do Porn was as successful as it was. There was never any chance that the video Pratt and his colleagues made of our anonymous law student would be kept private. In a word, it was worth too much. Each video, we’ll recall, was worth between $30,000-$40,000. This might be perplexing in view of the fact that PornHub, the primary distribution platform for this material, is a free-to-use service. However, like non-pornographic “Tube” style websites like YouTube, a large part of PornHub’s business model depends on ad revenue. This means that viewing the video itself provides the financial incentive for this content to exist without the viewer ever having to pay a cent. Advertiser revenue is sufficient to make the effort worth the risk.
We are left, therefore, with a dilemma. If we regard Girls Do Porn as the “exception” – as if pornography trafficking hardly ever happens – then the easiest solution is simply to do nothing. Girls Do Porn no longer holds possession of the media in question, Pratt’s colleagues have already been arrested, and Pratt will be prosecuted under existing legal measures upon extradition to the United States. However, to abandon the matter entirely reveals a glaring vacancy in the analysis: Girls Do Porn was enormously successful, and it was only capable of succeeding because there existed a market for its offerings.
An alternative approach, therefore, would be to identify Girls Do Porn as the “rule”, and – consequently – to seek to scorch the pornography industry entirely. If all forms of pornography are entirely outlawed, Girls Do Porn and whatever similar enterprises that currently exist would wither to obscurity. However, to salt the earth raises policy questions of overbreadth and disproportionality. There are, surely, a proverbial ten righteous men – or, in our case, “ethical” pornography productions – which justify preserving this expression of the sex industry.
Accordingly, whether Girls Do Porn represents the “rule” or the “exception” is the wrong question to ask. Knowing that pornography trafficking is a phenomenon that exists within our social contexts, the better question is whether we can calculate a response to address this problem in an isolated fashion for the sake of not only those women who have been, and are being, exploited, but also for the righteous ten who refrain from exploitation.
We will explore what such a calculated measure might look like next time.
Kevin Wilcox Hon.B.A, J.D. is a Master of Laws candidate at the University of Ottawa. He graduated from University of Ottawa’s Juris Doctor program in 2019, and graduated Magna Cum Laude from York University in 2016 with an Honours Bachelor of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies and a focus discipline in Critical Legal Theory. His academic interests include constitutional law, criminal law, the relationship between public policy and the law, and the means by which one informs the other. He has a vocational interest in participating in the efforts to end modern-day slavery and, in particular, human trafficking in the developed and developing world. He is an enthusiastic (if mediocre) musician, the oldest of three children, and an evangelical Christian. For a look at his analysis of the law of Freedom of Religion in Canada, you are invited to check out his ongoing project Seeking the Welfare of the City
The content of this website is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal or professional advice of any kind. The author does not guarantee the accurateness, completeness or quality of any material on this website. Readers are advised to seek legal counsel on specific legal matters and are required not to rely on the content of this website as legal advice in any matter whatsoever. The articles are current to the date of publication.
Seeking the Welfare of the City 
As an Attorney, i find this article to be informative & interesting. The porn industry is lucrative and not many people speak about the dark, illegal side of it. There is certainly a link between human trafficking and porn. Quite sad
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