A former employee of San Diego-based GirlsDoPorn.com who appeared in more than 70 of the website's videos pleaded guilty Thursday to a federal conspiracy charge.
Douglas Wiederhold is the latest defendant to plead guilty in the criminal cases against the website's owners and operators, whom prosecutors say engaged in a years-long sex trafficking conspiracy in which women were coerced and tricked into appearing in pornographic videos under false pretenses.
Prosecutors say the website's operators led women to believe the videos they appeared in would be distributed only to private customers living outside of the country, rather than proliferated online, despite always intending to post the videos on the internet.
The GirlsDoPorn Case
Get San Diego local news, weather forecasts, sports and lifestyle stories to your inbox. Sign up for NBC San Diego newsletters.
According to his plea agreement, Wiederhold appeared as the male actor in 71 GirlsDoPorn videos. He 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 plea agreement states.
Court documents indicate Wiederhold's involvement with GirlsDoPorn occurred between 2011-12, a considerably shorter period than many of the other defendants.
Wiederhold is scheduled to appear for sentencing in July before U.S. District Judge Janis Sammartino, who has sentenced all the other defendants in the GirlsDoPorn case other than website owner Michael James Pratt , whose case remains ongoing.
Pratt spent more than three years on the lam before being arrested in Spain in late 2022. He was extradited to San Diego earlier this year and remains in custody.
Others prosecuted include porn actor Ruben Andre Garcia, who was sentenced to 20 years in prison and Pratt's business partner Matthew Isaac Wolfe, who received a 14-year sentence earlier this year. Videographer Theodore Gyi was sentenced to four years in prison, while administrative assistant Valorie Moser awaits sentencing later this year.
Another defendant, Alexander Brian Foster, pleaded guilty to creating a video meant to harass several women who sued GirlsDoPorn and was sentenced to just over one year in prison.
Prior to the criminal prosecution, the website and its operators were sued by 22 women featured in its videos, and a San Diego judge awarded the women nearly $13 million at the end of a civil trial.
The website's activities also spurred dual lawsuits from more than 100 women against the parent company for porn-streaming site PornHub for allegedly 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.
