A Girls Do Porn Cameraman Admits He Lied to Women So They’d Film Sex Scenes

A videographer for the porn production company Girls Do Porn testified in court this week to lying to women who say they were lured into having sex on video after being allegedly promised the videos would never be widely distributed or posted online.

Twenty-two women are suing Girls Do Porn owner Michael Pratt, the company's main videographer Matthew Wolfe, and its main actor and director Ruben “Andre” Garcia, claiming that they were lied to about the films being modeling work instead of porn, coerced into having sex on camera once they got to hotel rooms for filming, and then lied to about how the videos would be distributed.

The lawyers for the plaintiffs said they spoke with at least 100 women involved with Girls Do Porn who gave similar accounts of their experiences.

The women say they were told that the videos would only be available in limited release on DVD, and no one they knew would ever see them. Shortly after they were shot, the videos were posted on the internet, on massively popular websites like Pornhub and YouPorn, and the women were doxed and harassed by viewers using forums like the recently-defunct PornWikiLeaks.

According to NBC 7 in San Diego, where the trial has been underway in San Diego Superior Court for two weeks, videographer Theodore "Teddy" Gyi said in his testimony that he was instructed by the Girls Do Porn owners to tell women that the videos he shot would never appear online. He also testified to hearing actor and director Ruben “Andre” Garcia tell the women numerous times that it the videos would be available on DVD only, in Australia.

In a video deposition taken on January 22 as part of Wolfe's bankruptcy proceedings, Gyi confirmed that he heard Garcia tell women that the videos that they shot would not be posted on the Internet, "maybe five to 10 times," he said.

Gyi is also named in July court documents as someone Girls Do Porn hired to film girl-boy scenes for the company while the primary photographer and part-owner, Matthew Wolfe, focused on recruiting and filming for their spinoff company, Girls Do Toys (solo sex scenes, as opposed to the scenes with a male actor). "Mr. Gyi was present in the hotel room for many shoots," the plaintiff's trial brief states. "However, Garcia would often ask him to leave the room while Garcia paid the models and presented the contracts."

This testimony is hugely important to the plaintiffs' case, as Gyi is one of only a few people who was present at the filming but wasn't one of the Girls Do Porn founders. It corroborates the stories of multiple women—plaintiffs in the case as well as women Motherboard spoke with directly—who said they only did the videos with the assurance of the director and owners that these images would be isolated to adult stores on the other side of the world.

“He said it would be 30 minutes of having sex, it would be $5,000," one of the women testified in court, according to NBC 7, referring to either Pratt or Garcia. "…He repeatedly said not online, not online, he said the videos would be on DVDs in Australia and other countries. I asked if I could do other modeling and he said no."

Last month, Motherboard uncovered a pattern of doxing and harassment that targeted these women once this promise was broken and the videos spread online. Some of the videos on Pornhub, posted to the official Girls Do Porn channel that Pornhub partnered with and publicly promoted for years, reached tens of millions of views. Following Motherboard's reporting, Pornhub removed some of the videos that featured plaintiffs—and as of last week, the site removed Girls Do Porn logos from its partners page.