GirlsDoPorn schemer and actor sentenced to 20 years for sex trafficking
A man who forced young women to film porn videos against their will, then lied and spread the videos across the internet, was sentenced Monday to 20 years in prison.
Ruben Garcia, 31, pleaded guilty in December 2020 to the sex trafficking scheme for the website GirlsDoPorn.
Garcia and the company’s co-owners, Michael Pratt and Matthew Wolfe, tricked young women into filming the videos by posting modeling ads and then coercing their victims into filming porn, the Justice Department said in a press release. Wolfe is still awaiting trial, Pratt fled and is on the FBI’s Most Wanted list.
In most of the videos, Garcia was the male actor, but his face almost never appeared on camera, the feds said.
Garcia, Pratt and Wolfe clearly knew their scheme was illegal because they forced victims to sign lengthy contracts and required them to film videos saying they weren’t coerced into making porn, according to the feds.
They also convinced the women that the videos would never appear online, but always intended to post them and spread them wildly, the feds said.
The three men were already ordered to pay $13 million to 22 victims at a civil trial in January 2020. At least one victim testified saying she considered suicide after a video spread among her friends, family and associates.
The civil court judge ordered GirlsDoPorn to remove the videos from its site and convince other sites, including Pornhub.com, to do the same.
“This defendant lured one victim after another with fake modeling ads, false promises and deceptive front companies, ultimately devolving to threats to coerce these women into making sex videos,” U.S. Attorney Randy Grossman said in the release. “Even when victims told Garcia how the scheme had devastated their lives, he showed no regard for their well-being. The crime was utterly callous in nature and there is no excuse or justification for his conduct, which was driven purely by greed. The harm inflicted by this defendant will last a lifetime for his victims. Hopefully today’s sentence will offer them a sense of justice.”
