Days away from finding out his sentence for sex trafficking as the ringleader of Girls Do Porn, Michael James Pratt and his attorney are attempting to paint a picture of a man reformed behind bars, through personal letters and certificates from classes he has passed inside prison.
GirlsDoPorn was a sex trafficking operation posing as a porn studio that Pratt ran from 2009 to 2020. By lying to the women they recruited, telling them that they were being hired for “modeling” gigs and adult video shoots that would never be distributed outside offline private collections, GirlsDoPorn’s operators coerced young, inexperienced women into shooting rough, hours-long sex scenes in San Diego hotel rooms. The videos were distributed on massive porn sites including Pornhub, where GirlsDoPorn was a content partner for years. Women who have come forward for the civil and federal trials against GirlsDoPorn have said their lives were upended by Pratt’s criminal enterprise.
Pratt has been in custody since he was arrested in Spain on December 21, 2022 and extradited to the US. Prior to that, he’d been in hiding since fleeing the US in the middle of a massive civil trial in 2019, where 22 victims sued him and his co-conspirators for $22 million (a case they won). Right after his disappearance, Pratt was charged with federal counts of sex trafficking by force, fraud and coercion, and was on the FBI’s Most Wanted List for years. He initially pleaded not guilty to these charges in 2024, but changed his plea to guilty in June.
Exhibits filed by Pratt’s lawyer Brian White on Sept. 1 include letters, mostly anonymous, from people who knew him when he was younger asking the judge for leniency, including his sister and mother. “Mike's father, Steve Pratt, was not a good role model. He was a drinker and had a controlling personality. I caught Steve smacking Michael uncontrollably on a couple of occasions. I stopped it immediately,” his mother wrote.
“Three years of prison has given me enough time to think about this entire situation,” Pratt wrote in a letter to the court submitted on Monday. “Trying to understand things from other points of view has given me insight into how some victims were really affected by these videos. I put myself in the shoes of the women who participated, trying to see what they have gone through. I myself have been a victim of bullying and know how rough that is on the psyche. I cannot imagine the trauma experienced by a video being published where friends and family could come across it.”
We know, in fact, from years of testimonies and interviews—many while it was still unsafe for them to come forward, when the consequences of speaking up about this abuse risked compounding trauma and continued, violent harassment—how Pratt’s victims were impacted by his actions.
Several of the women who’ve testified in the civil and federal trials, and came forward to speak on the record to journalists, reported violent assault to the point of bleeding or injury, being trapped inside the hotel rooms with no clothing, and being lied to by Pratt and his co-conspirators about who would be able to see the videos. As one of the women targeted by GirlsDoPorn told me in 2021: “There were a few points where I was just like please, I need to stop, I need to stop, because it was just so much pain. I said, I can’t go on anymore… At that point I could have said nothing. I could have been mute. My voice was just not heard at all.” Another woman said while testifying during the civil trial: “They put furniture in front of the door, so what was I going to do—jump over the balcony?” GirlsDoPorn’s attorney at the time, Aaron Sadock, asked that woman on the stand if she had fun. “No, I did not have fun!” she said, crying.
Kristy Althaus, who sued Pornhub in 2023 for disseminating the videos, claimed that Pratt’s conspirators held her captive in a hotel room and filmed her being raped for nine to 10 hours, barricading the doors, ignoring her bleeding and cries, forcing her to consume alcohol, marijuana, and Xanax, and spiking her drink with oxycodone. According to that complaint, when she refused to return for another “shoot,” Pratt threatened her and her family, texting, “You have it coming for u,” “I will cut and kill you bitch,” and “You better be here by noon shoot 2tomorrow or your graveyard,” according to screenshots of texts from Althaus’s complaint.
For many of these women, the trauma and harassment didn’t stop once they left the hotel rooms. In some cases, they were disowned by their families and friends, harassed endlessly, struggled to find jobs in previously-prestigious careers and found it difficult to date or trust anyone intimately again.
In the defendant’s sentencing memorandum, White blames Pratt’s alcoholic, abusive father and his own ADHD; throws his co-conspirators under the bus; accuses the entire pornography industry of being “exploitative and dehumanizing;” and asserts again that the women lied in their testimonies.
The memo paints a picture of Pratt as a precocious child with a difficult upbringing in Christchurch, New Zealand, where he taught himself how to use computers and eventually learned about websites and affiliate marketing. “Mr. Pratt began looking for better ways to generate income, and through the associations he made in the affiliate marketing business, he learned that making videos to direct internet traffic to pornography sites could be financially successful,” the memo says. But when he tried to make a pornography business himself, he wasn’t very good at it, blaming the banning of Craigslist’s erotic ads in 2009 for his difficulties in finding models. He claims he posted ads seeking “models” as a way around the ban.
Pratt's lawyer asserts in the memorandum that his employee, Andre Reuben “Dre” Garcia, the main “actor” in most of the GirlsDoPorn videos, stopped when the women told him to stop. “She said, ‘stop, it’s not going to work.’ Garcia stopped,” the memo says. “The model offered to try a second time and again told Garcia to stop because it wasn’t going to work. Again, Garcia stopped. That was the end of it. Forcing a model to do something against her will was not Mr. Pratt’s intention.” He also claims that when Pratt heard complaints about Garcia from models, Pratt “instituted certain safety measures” like locking the hotel room refrigerators and putting more cameras in the room. Those “safety measures” didn’t include firing Garcia, however.
When he’s arguing that he should have a lower sentence than Garcia’s 20 years, Pratt acknowledges that Garcia sexually assaulted many of these women. “Garcia physically raped a number of the models before and after the video shoots, and multiple women were forced to continue having sex with him on video despite their pleas to stop due to pain or because the sex went beyond the scope of what they had agreed to do,” the memorandum states.
The exhibits filed as part of the memo also attempt to show how productive and busy Pratt has been in prison. His attorney submitted nearly 100 “certificates of completion” issued by the learning platform Edovo, which offers classes for incarcerated people. The classes Pratt passed include “Embracing Unexpected Change,” “Doing Time With Jesus,” several anger management courses, “Media Relations Foundations,” marketing classes for LinkedIn and Facebook, “Augmented Reality Marketing,” “Human Trafficking in the United States: The Truth and What You Can Do About It,” “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence,” and multiple cooking classes, including “Soups” and “Sauces.”
Federal prosecutors seek a 22-year prison sentence, while Pratt’s defense countered with around 17 years; Judge Janis L. Sammartino will hand Pratt his sentence on Monday in San Diego.
