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Doe 15, who began her testimony on Aug. 21, first encountered Pratt's business in February 2016. She was 18 at the time, in college, and looking for a job on Craigslist. She had been applying to jobs for a few months—some at local restaurants and sandwich shops, some for random gigs, but mostly for modeling or brief acting jobs. She found one listing titled "Exceptionally Cute Ladies Wanted." It linked to a website called BeginModeling.com, an unremarkable-looking webpage with several professional photos of women and a contact form. Doe 15 said she filled out the form—identifying her height, weight, hair color, and eye color—and attached a few pictures. She got a response not long later, but didn't reply. "It was pretty clear it was adult work," Doe 15 said, "and I wasn't interested in doing that."
Not long after the first email, Doe 15 was contacted again—this time, by a man who called himself "Jonathan N.," which the plaintiffs' attorney, Brian Holm, and several witnesses claim was a pseudonym for both Pratt and his male actor, Andre Garcia. Doe 15 says she FaceTimed with "Jonathan N." because he suggested that there was an option to do clothed modeling shoots for $300 each. But on the call, "Jonathan N." kept returning to the topic of nude modeling.
"He said it would be 30 minutes of filming sex," Doe 15 recalled in court. "He said it would be $5,000 dollars. He said specifically about five positions, five to seven minutes each. He would fly me out to San Diego, pay for a hotel. And then he just repeatedly said, 'Not online, not online, not in the U.S.' It would be on DVDs to Australia, the UK. And then he said a few other really remote countries, I don't remember. And then I asked if I could just do regular modeling, and he said no, it had to be both."
Doe 15 said she had concerns, but the fee seemed hard to turn down. Five thousand dollars was a lot of money. She was in school, without a job. Her mom was helping her, but she also had two other kids in college. Asking her for money was "the last thing I wanted to do," Doe 15 said. But "Jonathan N." promised she could talk to other actresses. There were supposedly more than 200 women, many of whom were Instagram models or sorority girls, who had taken the job and never been found out. On the phone, "Jonathan N." also mentioned that he had already booked a flight and hotel. He could cancel, he said, but he wanted to get the reservation just in case. The flight left in four days.
In an email response dated Feb. 22, 2016, Doe 15 wrote: "I am just hesitant on my face being out there or my name… Mostly if someone important in my future sees this."
Doe 15 texted Wright about her concerns. "I mean, I asked her all of my worries about it," she said in court. "I wanted to make sure that as another woman who had done it, it wouldn't be online. It wouldn't be in America and that my name wouldn't be used in it. I mean, not just that text alone, but I mean all of the texts together really smoothed my worries that, you know, it would be safe, and it wouldn't be going anywhere in the United States. It would be going where they told me. It smoothed almost all my worries."
Kaylin responded: "Yeah. So it goes out to wealthier countries, yeah, DVDs and stuff like that, but nothing online."
On the early morning of Feb. 28, 2016, Doe 15 flew to San Diego. The deal was to shoot for 30 minutes—five positions, five to seven minutes each—for $5,000. The tape would not go online. It would not be in the United States. It would be sold only on DVD in Australia and the U.K.. Doe 15 had grown up in Southern California, and had been to San Diego once or twice for soccer tournaments, but she didn't know the area well. When she got to the airport that day, Doe 15 said, she was stranded for over an hour. After a while, she was picked up by Teddy Gyi, the company's cameraman. Doe 15 said she was surprised by the disorganization—they drove around aimlessly for hours, picking up food, stopping in an apartment, switching cars, and meeting at the wrong hotel, before winding up at the shoot. In the hotel elevator, when a stranger commented on the camera, Gyi said they were "filming a wedding in town."
Once in the hotel room, Doe 15 went to makeup, chatting nervously with the artist. Then the male talent, Andre Garcia, walked in. "When he comes in, he just immediately goes to the bathroom and throws up for maybe five to ten minutes," Doe 15 recalled. "Teddy said that they had been drinking the night before, so I figured that was why. When he's done, though, he just kind of puts the toilet seat down and sits on the toilet and then pulls out a joint and offers it to me."
Doe 15 smoked with Garcia—a key sticking point in the trial, as her attorney would later claim it undermined her ability to sign contracts. She tried on the three outfits she'd brought, before Garcia settled on one. She signed some papers without reading them closely. (All the stuff she'd agreed to—anonymity, private distribution—that was all in there, the crew allegedly promised. Plus, Doe 15 recalled, they were under a time crunch; she needed to make her evening flight home.) But one thing Doe 15 did notice was her pay. Garcia paid her only $3,000, not the $5,000 previously agreed upon. He said she had bruises; she was pale. Doe 15 texted "Jonathan N.," but didn't know what else to say.
In the first moments of the shoot, the crew interviewed Doe 15 in front of the camera. It was a personal interview, covering intimate topics like, "my sex life, how I lost my virginity, where I had had sex before." She shared details only her sisters and close friend knew; made a joke about an ex she never thought he would hear. Doe 15 said she was told to "play up" the fantasy of it, but didn't think the interview would ever be public. Now that it is, Doe 15 said, "I feel humiliated."
After the shoot finished, Doe 15 told the court, she was upset. The adult portion had gone much longer than she had been told, and involved more than she was comfortable with. The feeling got worse when Garcia and Gyi, who was still filming, blocked her from taking a shower and insisted on another interview. "At that point I just kind of broke down and started crying," she said in her examination. "And then [Garcia] just kind of motioned for him to cut, and [Gyi] was like he was going to say something. But I just tried to be strong at that point and I tried to say, 'No, I'm done.' And I couldn't stop crying and then Andre just said, 'I'm done, let her go.' And so I just grabbed my stuff, and I left for the airport."
When Doe 15 left the shoot, she asked "Jonathan N." for a copy of her contract. She never received a copy. She never even heard the name of the company, "Girls Do Porn," until April 2016, when she says she received a screenshot from a friend of her porn video online.
In April 2016, after Doe 15's video appeared online, it seemed unavoidable. In the week after it aired, the video spread quickly across her friend group, family, workplace, and school. Her video was not only on GirlsDoPorn.com, but on major tube sites like PornHub, and on forums, like ImagePost and Girlsdoporn.blogspot.com, where users posted photos of her taken from social media and class presentations she hadn't made public. She was kicked off her cheerleading team; she began having panic attacks at work; once, she overheard a table of students talking about her video in the school cafeteria. "I had many different links sent to me and my friends," she said in court. "It pretty much seemed like it was everywhere online."
Her only recourse was Google. Online, she read about another girl who had been exposed on the same website. The other girl had deleted her social media, and no one seemed to know her number. But Doe 15 did some digging. She Googled one of Girls Do Porn's parent companies, BLL Media. "I Googled BLL Media lawsuit, just to be hopeful that somebody was doing something about it, and I found an article and I sent it to my mom," she told attorney Brian Holm, who represents the 22 plaintiffs in court. "And she called you."
In the final minutes of Doe 15's testimony, the judge, Kevin A. Enright, sent her out of the courtroom so he could confer with the lawyers. Pratt's defense attorneys wanted to screen the video of her in front of the courtroom—the video in which she is nude and stoned; the one she recorded believing it would be private—and have her narrate the scene to the public. Holm, her lawyer, called the request "undue harassment"—a microcosm of the central concern of the case. "Given what this case is about and keeping privacy," Holm told the court, "she's now going to be in a courtroom… discussing and watching a very private moment being completely nude. That's exactly what the bill of lies she was sold [said] would never happen."
On at least that front, the judge agreed.
