While the Harvey Weinstein trial continues in New York, you can thank the #MeToo movement for emphasizing that sexual assault isn’t just a crime. It’s a systemic, cultural problem.
That’s easy to see in Hollywood, where powerful man after powerful man has abused his position of trust and influence. But there’s one space where it’s painfully prevalent, yet hardly anyone talks about it: pornography.
Earlier this month, women abused by the pornography industry scored a major win in the courts — to the tune of $13 million. But the damage has already been done.
“The money’s one thing, but these guys have ruined [the plaintiffs’] lives, and we have to clean this up as much as possible,” the women’s attorney, Ed Chapin, said.
Twenty-two women sued a San Diego-based company that they alleged deceived them into participating in pornographic videos that would appear online. The women were told the videos would never end up on the internet. When they did, the women said their lives were ruined, and one even contemplated suicide.
“The women are mostly students with careers ahead of them who have only even considered Defendants’ solicitations to film a pornographic video due to some immediate and pressing financial need,” a California superior court concluded.
According to the suit, the women applied for modeling jobs at the company, unaware of what kind of “modeling” they’d be doing. When they arrived, they were pressured into making pornographic videos but were told that the clips would never end up on the internet.
The creators of the videos also gave the women alcohol and marijuana before having them sign their ownership rights away in contracts. Once the videos were online, the women said the men at the company, GirlsDoPorn, made sure their family and colleagues saw them.
“Defendants deliberately used deceptive advertisements and websites to mislead women about the nature of the work; defendants aimed to cast a wider net to attract a certain type of applicant — women who would not intentionally respond to a solicitation to appear in a pornographic video,” Judge Kevin Enright wrote. “This is consistent with Defendants’ depiction of GDP models as making a one-time-only stint into pornography.”
These aren’t even the worst allegations against them. Website owner Michael James Pratt, videographer Matthew Isaac Wolfe, pornography actor Ruben Andre Garcia, administrative assistant Valorie Moser, and alleged accomplice Amberlyn Nored have all been charged with sex trafficking by force, fraud, and coercion. Pratt was also charged with filming child pornography involving a 16-year-old girl.
None of this is shocking coming out of the pornography industry. Immensely popular website Pornhub recently found itself defending rape and incest for the sake of one of its top-viewed videos. Even if the film, which graphically depicted assault, “was made by a consenting and very creative sex worker,” the word “consent” can take on a dubious meaning in the context of what the film portrays.
When we talk about sexual assault in the United States, we can’t leave pornography out of the conversation. Women and men are constantly abused by an industry that cloaks itself in statements about “consent” and “empowerment.” As more people are beginning to realize, though, this industry is anything but empowering.
