For years now the authorities have been investigating the owners of the Girls Do Porn website. There is a major lawsuit going on. 22 girls are suing them, each seeking $500,000 (per girl) plus legal fees for ….
- Intentional Misrepresentation
- Fraudulent Concealment
- False Promise
- Negligent Misrepresentation
- Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress
- Misappropriation of Name & Likeness [Common Law]
- Misappropriation of Name & Likeness [Civ. C. §3344]
- Negligence
- Breach of Contract
- Promissory Estoppel
- Unlawful & Fraudulent Business Practices [Bus. & Prof. Code §17200]
- Fraudulent Transfer
In January 2019, San Diego Superior Court Judge Joel Wohlfeil issued a tentative ruling finding there was “substantial probability” that the women would prevail and Pratt and his employees “engaged in malice, fraud, and coercion.”
That same day Pratt filed for bankruptcy.
In his bankruptcy filings, Pratt claimed to make over $60,000 a month, or $722,000 a year in salary from GirlsDoPorn. The filings also show Pratt owed $134,000 in state and federal taxes.
Pratt’s bankruptcy, however, was short-lived.
In March, a federal bankruptcy judge ruled that the civil case could proceed despite the presence of Pratt’s bankruptcy case. Just two days before the continued meeting of creditors, Pratt voluntarily dismissed that case. The ruling and subsequent dismissal now allows for the civil lawsuit from the 22 women to proceed. The trial is set for June 24, 2019.
While facing a multi-million dollar lawsuit is bad enough, not something even more serious has surfaced and that is their possible connection to Russian Arms Smugglers and the Mexican Cartel.
As the trial nears, NBC News in San Diego looked into the website’s finances along with its corporate affiliations and found a network of offshore shell companies that prosecutors say were used to fund criminal enterprises.
Michael Pratt purchased the internet domain name GirlsDoPorn in July 2006. By December of that same year, he incorporated Bubblegum Films. BubbleGum Films was created under the umbrella of a larger corporate entity, GT Group Limited.
GT Group was founded by a New Zealand businessman named Geoff Taylor in 1995. The company name comes from Taylor’s initials and, according to a company brochure, specialized in setting up offshore business entities to take advantage of offshore tax breaks.
According to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), one of the companies incorporated by GT Group was SP Trading. It was created by Geoff Taylor’s sons Ian and Michael Taylor and did business with Russian arms smugglers.
n 2010, federal prosecutors in Florida linked another GT Group company to what was called at the time the largest “money-laundering operation in U.S. history.” Instead of Russian arms smugglers, four New Zealand firms, all registered by GT Group, helped the Sinaloa cartel launder billions of dollars, according to the Department of Justice (DOJ).
Court records tied to the laundering prosecution remain under seal, but according to a DOJ news release, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency tied the companies to a Wachovia bank that helped disguise the origins of the funds. Wachovia later agreed to pay $160 million to the federal government to settle the case, according to federal prosecutors.
Back in San Diego, Michael Pratt was busy building the adult website that GT Group incorporated, featuring videos of young amateur girls having sex on camera for the first time,
