SAN DIEGO — The San Diego Field Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) released this week a “Wanted” poster offering a reward of up to $10,000 for information leading to the arrest of Michael James Pratt, owner and operator of the now-shuttered GirlsDoPorn website.
Pratt has been a fugitive from U.S. federal authorities since late 2019. Pratt left the country before the October 2019 trial for the civil lawusit filed by 22 former models suing GirlsDoPorn for fraud. The civil trial — which a judge later decided against Pratt and GirlsDoPorn with a multimillion-dollar award to the plaintiffs — was overshadowed during the testimony phase by the unsealing of a parallel criminal case and FBI investigation against Pratt and his associates and employees for conspiracy and sex trafficking.
In late 2019, Pratt was presumed to be in his native New Zealand. Three of his associates are currently in federal custody, including main male talent Ruben Andre “Dre” Garcia, who has been accused of rape and sexual assault by some of the models.
This week’s FBI reward announcement claims that Pratt “has ties to or may visit: New Zealand, Australia, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Turkey, Singapore, Japan, Chile, Croatia and France.”
“From approximately 2012 to October 2019, in the Southern District of California and elsewhere, Michael James Pratt and others allegedly participated in a conspiracy to recruit young adult and minor women to engage in commercial sex acts by force, fraud and coercion,” reads the Wanted poster.
The FBI alleges that “Pratt and a co-conspirator owned and operated a pornography production company and online pornography websites, ‘GirlsDoPorn’ and ‘GirlsDoToys.’ Pratt and his co-conspirators allegedly recruited young women from around the United States by posting advertisements for clothed modeling jobs on the Internet. Pratt and his co-conspirators advised the women responding to the ads that the jobs were in fact for pornographic videos and that they would be paid between $3,000 to $5,000 U.S. dollars for a one-day video shoot.”
“To persuade the women to participate,” the FBI continues, “Pratt and his co-conspirators allegedly convinced the women they would remain anonymous, that their videos would be provided to private collectors on DVD, and would not be posted on the Internet. Pratt allegedly paid other young women working at his direction to act as references or provide false assurances to the women that, if they filmed a video, the video would not be posted online.”
According to the poster, “some women were not permitted to leave the shooting locations until the videos were made and others were allegedly forced to perform certain sex acts they had declined to do. Allegedly, some of the women were sexually assaulted.”
The FBI added that “Pratt's pornography websites generated more than $17 million U.S. dollars in revenue.”
A federal arrest warrant was issued for Pratt in the United States District Court, Southern District of California, on November 6, 2019.
Pratt’s whereabouts remain unknown.
For more from XBIZ’s coverage of the GirlsDoPorn case, click here.