Pratt is facing charges and accusations of sex trafficking, child pornography, fraud, coercion, and sexual assault in connection with his website.
Between 2012 and October 2019, Pratt, a 37-year-old from New Zealand, and others allegedly participated in a conspiracy to recruit young adult and minor women in the Southern District of California and elsewhere to engage in commercial sex acts by force, fraud, and coercion.
According to the FBI, Pratt and a co-conspirator owned and operated a pornography production company and online pornography websites.
He and his co-conspirators allegedly recruited young women from around the United States by posting advertisements for clothed modeling jobs on the Internet. They advised the women responding to the ads that the jobs were in fact for pornographic videos and that they would be paid between $3,000 to $5,000 U.S. dollars for a one-day video shoot.
To persuade the women to participate, Pratt and his co-conspirators allegedly convinced the women they would remain anonymous, and that their videos would be provided to private collectors on DVD and would not be posted on the Internet. Pratt allegedly paid other young women working at his direction to act as references or provide false assurances to the women that, if they filmed a video, the video would not be posted online.
Some women were not permitted to leave the shooting locations until the videos were made and others were allegedly forced to perform certain acts they had declined to do. Some of the women were allegedly sexually assaulted.
Pratt’s pornography websites generated more than $17 million U.S. dollars in revenue.
Following his disappearance, Pratt and his associates were indicted on a host of civil charges in San Diego federal court, and a $12.7 million civil judgment was handed down in January this year in a case brought by 22 women whose pornographic videos were posted online.
As part of that judgment, the 22 women who helped bring the case were given back rights to their image, and had the videos of them taken down on Pratt’s sites.
According to the FBI, Pratt has ties to, or may visit, New Zealand, Australia, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Turkey, Singapore, Japan, Chile, Croatia, and France.
