A former administrative assistant with the San Diego-based GirlsDoPorn.com website, which featured pornographic videos of young women who were forced or coerced into appearing in the films under false pretenses, was sentenced Friday to two years in prison. Valorie Moser is one of the last defenda nts to be sentenced in the long-running prosecution against the website’s owners and operators, whom prosecutors say falsely assured women that their videos would only be featured on DVDs for private customers, but then posted the videos online. Relevant content: Crime and Courts Sep 8 Judge throws the book at GirlsDoPorn ‘mastermind' Apr 11, 2024 GirlsDoPorn ‘actor' who was in 71 videos, falsely assured victims, pleads guilty Prosecutors say Moser, who worked as a bookkeeper and also drove some of the women to and from video shoots, was aware that the victims were being deceived. At Moser’s sentencing hearing, statements from two of those women were read aloud in court, both of whom wrote that Moser assured them nothing untoward would happen. “Her role was to make us women feel more comfortable because women often trust other women,” one of the victims wrote. “She wasn’t just a bookkeeper that didn’t know what was happening. She was a willing participant.” Moser and others were charged in 2019. She pleaded guilty in 2021 to conspiracy to commit sex trafficking. Her defense attorney, Anthony Colombo, said his client was cooperative with investigators at an early stage and that prior to the criminal investigation, she provided testimony in a civil lawsuit brought by 22 victims against GirlsDoPorn’s leadership that he said was crucial in securing a nearly $13 million verdict for the plaintiffs. While none of the defendants went to trial in the criminal case, Colombo said she was prepared to testify against them if necessary, even in the face of what he said were threats she received from GirlsDo Porn’s owner, Michael James Pratt. The attorney read a statement from Moser, in which she said she felt “disgusted, shameful and foolish” for her part in the scheme. “Knowing that I contributed to that will stay with me and it should,” she wrote. U.S. District Judge Janis Sammartino, who previously sentenced Pratt and other defendants in the case, said Moser’s role was minimal compared to her co-defendants, yet she also “played an important part in this process” by providing the women “assurances and comfort.” Pratt, who spent three years on the run before his arrest and was at one time on the FBI’s Top Ten Most Wanted list, was sentenced earlier this year to 27 years in prison. Pratt’s ex-business partner, Matthew Isaac Wolfe, was sentenced to 14 years in prison. Ruben Andre Garcia — who was the male actor in the videos involving the victims in the case — was sentenced to 20 years, and camera operator Theodore Gyi was sentenced to four years in prison. Another co-defendant, Alexander Brian Foster, was sentenced to one year in prison for creating a video meant to harass and publicly identify the 22 women who sued GirlsDoPorn. Prosecutors said the video — which was never completed or released — was made at Pratt’s direction, and that he instructed Foster to include video clips of the women’s videotaped depositions from the civil case, their Instagram posts and video footage of them leaving the courthouse. The lone remaining defendant Douglas Wiederhold, awaits sentencing early next year. According to his plea agreement, Wiederhold appeared as a male actor in 71 GirlsDoPorn videos and also falsely assured at least two women that their videos wouldn’t be posted online after knowing other women’s videos had already been uploaded to the internet. The website’s activities also spurred dual lawsuits from more than 100 women against the parent company for porn-streaming site PornHub for profiting off of GirlsDoPorn’s trafficking by hosting its videos. The company reached settlements with the women in both lawsuits and also agreed to pay over $1.8 million to resolve a probe by federal prosecutors who alleged the company knew or should have known it was accepting money that originated from sex- trafficking operations. ...read more read less