A 42-year-old Southern California man, founder and operator of two internet porn sites – GirlsDoPorn and GirlsDoToys – that earned him millions of dollars was sentenced to 27 years in federal prison Monday, officials with the U.S. Department of Justice announced.
Michael James Pratt made it onto the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Top 10 Most Wanted List in 2019 when he liquidated his assets and fled the country just months before he was charged in the Southern District of California with sex trafficking crimes, the DOJ said in a news release.
The 42-year-old lived as an international fugitive until his Dec. 2022 arrest in Spain and his extradition to San Diego in March 2024.
Federal prosecutors said that Pratt, along with four co-conspirators, orchestrated a scheme “that deceived and exploited hundreds of women and left a trail of broken lives.”
He and some of his employees, at his direction, posted misleading ads about modeling opportunities to lure in young women, usually between the ages of 18 and 21, from all over the U.S. and Canada before flying them to San Diego and putting them up in short-term rentals or cheap hotel rooms where they were forced into having sex on camera.
“Victims were coerced into finishing shoots under threats of lawsuits, cancelled flights, and exposure,” prosecutors said. “Some were effectively trapped in hotel rooms by camera equipment blocking the exit.”
The now 42-year-old often told victims that their videos would never be posted online or released in the U.S. and that no one who knew the women would ever find out about the footage despite knowing that was all untrue.
His two websites, which billed the videos as young women doing their first pornographic videos, charged subscription fees to view the content and generated millions of dollars in revenue for Pratt.
Clips of many of the videos were posted to free porn websites, including one of the world’s most viewed websites, Pornhub.com, where the videos would get millions of views and drive traffic to his subscription-based sites.
“Even after Pratt learned that victims’ names and personal details were being doxxed on pornwikileaks.com, he pressed forward with his scheme, reaping millions in profit while ignoring desperate pleas from women begging him to take their videos down,” prosecutors said.
Pratt pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit sex trafficking by force, fraud and coercion and committing sex trafficking by force, fraud and coercion on June 5 this year.
Over five hours at his Sept. 8 sentencing hearing, more than 40 of his victims testified, KTLA’s San Diego-based sister station KSWB reported.
Some shared the devastation that being “exploited, coerced, raped, abused and trapped” caused in their lives, while some asked U.S. District Judge Lanis L. Sammartino for the longest possible sentence. Others spoke directly to Pratt in the courtroom.
“The life I was meant to have died in that hotel room,” one woman testified at the hearing.
“Your ego was too big to believe you’d ever get caught, but karma comes around,” another woman said. “It is your turn now to suffer.”
While one of the co-conspirators is scheduled to be sentenced later this week, Pratt’s sentence of 27 years is the longest of the other defendants’ sentences, which range between four and 20 years in federal prison, the DOJ said.
Shortly after his sentencing, in which Judge Sammartino handed down a longer sentence than expected after listening to the victims’ statements, KSWB reported many of the women were seen outside the downtown San Diego courthouse hugging after the emotional ordeal.