Among those accused, Rubén André García, producer and recruiter for GirlsDoPorn, was sentenced to 20 years in prison; Matthew Isaac Wolfe, who admitted to having a “wide range of responsibilities” at GirlsDoPorn, according to the Department of Justice, was sentenced to 14 years; Cameraman Theodore Wilfred Gyi was sentenced to four years; and GirlsDoPorn accountant Valorie Moser pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit sex trafficking and is awaiting sentencing. Finally, in March of this year, the alleged mastermind of GirlsDoPorn, Michael Pratt, was extradited from Spain to the United States to face charges related to the operation. He has pleaded not guilty. In total, those involved in GirlsDoPorn have been ordered to pay more than $35 million in restitution.
Brian Holm, managing attorney of the Holm Legal Group and longtime civil attorney for GirlsDoPorn survivors, confirmed that the videos posted on the deepfake sexual abuse website were originally from GirlsDoPorn. These include, Holm says, survivors who have been involved in legal cases against GirlsDoPorn or Pornhub.
“It’s a real double whammy for trafficking victims to see their videos used in this way,” Holm says, adding that the videos are the tip of the iceberg. “From what I’ve seen on that site, I think there’s 10 times the amount you sent me that I’ve seen there.”
The 12 videos posted by the account seen by WIRED have received up to 15,000 views each, and several have a ‘girlsdoporn.com’ watermark on the footage. The account that posted the videos has a version of “GirlsDoPorn” as a username and included the sex trafficking site in the videos’ titles.
WIRED is not naming the deepfake abuse website because of its role in spreading abusive content or the celebrities who appear in the videos. The website is the largest of its kind, hosting tens of thousands of videos and receiving millions of visitors. In April, the website blocked visitors from the United Kingdom after the country’s lawmakers announced plans to criminalize the creation of explicit, non-consensual deepfakes.
“These creators of sexually explicit deepfakes have no respect for the women and girls who are victims of sex trafficking and who are now suffering even more abuse through this deepfake sexual abuse,” says Clare McGlynn, a law professor at Durham University. , who works to counter image-based abuse.
“This website actively chooses to share recordings of real sexual assaults,” says McGlynn. “These are heinous acts, deliberately and knowingly causing devastating and potentially life-threatening harm. The desire for profit, to promote the non-consensual pornography trade, has no limits. “This shows a disregard for the rights of women and girls.”
Neither the account posting the GirlsDoPorn deepfake videos nor the site’s anonymous administrator responded to WIRED’s questions.
In late March, another user of the website asked if GirlsDoPorn images were allowed, saying it made them “feel bad.” They suggested that some people may not know the history of GirlsDoPorn, but noted: “This… one user clearly knows, by labeling themselves as a rape website.” A moderator responded saying that they were not going to remove the videos, but said that if there was a “list” of confirmed videos that included victims of sex trafficking, they would notify the website administrators to have them removed.