A victim of the Girls Do Porn sex trafficking ring is suing Pornhub and its parent company, claiming that it intended to cause her severe emotional distress by hosting videos of her abuse.
In a complaint filed on Monday, Kristy Althaus demands a jury trial. Althaus’ videos were some of the most popular on the Girls Do Porn Pornhub channel, because of the way her identity was outed: In 2012, Althaus won first runner up in the Miss Teen Colorado USA beauty pageant. In 2014, after her Girls Do Porn appearances started circulating while she was in college, she was stripped of her title and faced public shaming.
The complaint details an experience similar to hundreds of women who came forward to lawyers representing victims of Girls Do Porn during the civil trial against the company that began in 2019: that Althaus, at 18 years old, was lured to San Diego by online advertisements promising a paid fashion modeling gig, and upon arrival was coerced and pressured into filming sex on camera with Andre Garcia (who is now serving 20 years in prison on federal sex trafficking charges). Althaus was told the footage would never reach the internet and would only be available as DVD collections sold in Australia, a line that even the cameraman repeated to women to get them to comply once trapped inside the hotel rooms.
She claims that Michael Pratt, Matthew Wolfe, and a fourth conspirator trapped her in a hotel room and filmed her rape for nine to 10 hours, barricading the doors, ignoring her bleeding and cries, forcing her to consume alcohol, marijuana, and Xanax, and drugging her drink with oxycodone.
Pratt threatened her life if she didn’t return for more video shoots, she claims, sending her violent text messages, some of which are included in the complaint:
“Pratt threatened Plaintiff that he would release her video to the Internet if Plaintiff did not comply with his demands,” the complaint states. “Pratt also made threatening statements to Plaintiff about knowing her personal information, such as where she lived and her social security number.”
We now know through legal proceedings that the Girls Do Porn conspirators planned to upload the videos to mainstream porn sites like Pornhub all along, as a method to control and shame their victims into silence. Once on these sites, the content—advertised as the women’s first time shooting porn—spread widely all over the internet, and within their school and home communities, and still follow many of them to workplaces and affect their personal lives to this day.
According to the complaint, Althaus and other Girls Do Porn victims filed reports to Mindgeek about “fraudulent and illegal practices, exploitation of power disparity, harassment, intimidation, threats of force, force, and other forms of assault and coercion which led to the commercial filming of their sex acts,” but that “MindGeek knowingly and maliciously promoted, participated, and profited from the GirlsDoPorn sex trafficking venture, accepting the criminal enterprise into its Content Partner and Premium Viewshare Programs.”
In January 2020, a judge awarded 22 women $12.7 million in a civil trial against Girls Do Porn. In October 2021, 50 victims reached a settlement with Mindgeek, Pornhub's parent company, in a lawsuit that claimed Pornhub knowingly benefited from Girls Do Porn videos on its platform and failed to moderate the abuse videos that circulated on its network of tube sites.
I reported at the time of the civil trial that victims struggled to get videos they appeared in taken off the site, and that Pornhub remained a "Content Partner" with the Girls Do Porn channel for months during the civil trial, and only removed it after the owners and employees of Girls Do Porn were charged with federal sex trafficking counts.
“The safety of our community is our number one priority, so we are proud to have instituted Trust and Safety policies that surpass those of any other major user-generated platform on the internet,” a spokesperson for Aylo (formerly Mindgeek) told 404 Media in a statement. “Our compliance program has helped us set the standard for the tech industry, and we are committed to remaining at the forefront of this important area. Out of respect for the integrity of court proceedings, our policy is not to comment on ongoing litigation. We look forward to the facts being fully and fairly aired in that forum.”
Following the trials, and after Visa and Mastercard dropped services to the site, Pornhub revamped its safety protocols, deleted thousands of unverified videos, stopped allowing uploads from unverified users, and introduced new detection tools for moderating content.
