Dozens, and potentially hundreds, of women say they were harassed and manipulated into shooting sex scenes with production company Girls Do Porn throughout nearly a decade of the company’s operations. Twenty-two of those women took the company to court in a lawsuit that’s been ongoing for three years.
Now, it’s come to light that the company’s founder and associates may also have spent that time harassing and attempting to intimidate the legal team representing its victims.
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The attorney representing 22 women suing Girls Do Porn alleges that its founder Michael Pratt and his associates have spent the last two years harassing, blackmailing, and intimidating him and his family. The attorney says that Pratt photoshopped his face, as well as the face of someone on his legal team, onto porn and spread it around the internet on accounts set up to harass them.
Pratt and Girls Do Porn producer Kevin Gibson allegedly harassed Brian Holm, one of the lawyers representing the women, by photoshopping his face into porn to make it look like he was posing with two male porn actors. The images were spread through social media. Motherboard examined multiple social media accounts and websites impersonating Holm where the photoshopped image was posted. When we contacted the companies hosting the accounts, they were removed.
Last week Jamia McDonald, an ex-girlfriend of Gibson, testified that she saw Pratt and Gibson create the photoshopped photos firsthand, and that they then asked her to text the images to Holm, according to Courthouse News. The image was shown in court, according to Holm.
But Holm told Motherboard that the image shown in court, which was seen by Motherboard, was actually of another attorney for the plaintiffs, John O’Brien—and it’s very similar to the ones created of Holm, which implies that Pratt and his associates could be behind both.
“The testimony of Jamia McDonald certainly suggests [the] defendants are behind the Holm Whore Group accounts, as she watched Michael Pratt photoshop my co-counsel’s face into a similar picture,” Holm told Motherboard. “The only motive that makes any sense is that Michael Pratt was hoping he would convince us to drop the case due to all of the harassment.”
Those accounts which often used the username or URL “Holm Whore Group” and were created to harass and defame the legal team, have been up for years.
Twenty-two anonymous women who appeared in Girls Do Porn videos are suing Pratt, along with associates Andre Garcia and Matthew Wolfe, for coercion and fraud after the sex scenes they filmed and were promised would stay with private collectors were spread around the internet. Last month, Pratt, Garcia, and Wolfe, along with another associate Valerie Moser, were charged with federal counts of sex trafficking. Pratt fled the country and is currently a fugitive, believed to be hiding in his home country of New Zealand.
The image of O’Brien is very similar to a manipulated photo of Holm that’s been posted online since 2017—around the time the lawsuit began—on Twitter and WordPress: a full-frontal nude photo of three erect male porn performers with the lawyer’s face pasted onto the center one. Motherboard investigated several of these accounts. Twitter and WordPress permanently banned the “holmwhoregroup” account on their platforms, following Motherboard’s request for comment.
Holm provided Motherboard with a list of seven different websites and social media accounts that included the photoshopped image of him. One of the websites was called officialmikesouth.com, which appears to be an attempt to impersonate Mike South, a well-known porn industry blogger. (His website’s actual url is mikesouth.com.) One of the posts on that website included photos of Holm’s family members and threats to harass his wife and home community. (South did not respond to a request for comment.)
One of the sites links to a PornWikileaks URL for Holm. Before production company BangBros bought and destroyed it, PornWikiLeaks was a major source of doxing and harassment against porn performers, including many Girls Do Porn victims.
Holm says that, besides the online intimidation, he was harassed and stalked—including someone slashing his and his wife’s car tires—to the point of filing a restraining order against Pratt and Garcia in 2017.
Motherboard was not able to independently tie the websites or social media accounts to Pratt, but McDonald testified that he and Gibson made the photoshopped images. She added that Gibson paid her $300 a week to harass Holm with phone calls.
Throughout more than four months of their civil trial in San Diego, the women suing adult production company Girls Do Porn for coercion and fraud have endured even more harassment and emotional abuse on the stand. During cross-examinations, the defendants’ attorneys have implied that the women enjoyed being forced into hurriedly signing contracts and having sex on camera, confronted with their abuser, and have had their trauma replayed in testimonies and on video in front of the court. The company continued to upload new films to the Girls Do Porn website as the trial got underway.
The Girls Do Porn trial is expected to continue into mid-November.
