Ruben Andre Garcia GirlsDoPorn producer, guilty to sex trafficking
A California man is sentenced to 20 years in prison for duping women into performing pornography.
The Department of Justice announced that a California man was sentenced to 20 years in prison for duping a slew of young women into performing in online pornographic films, subjecting them to rough and painful sex and threatening them if they refused to participate.
Ruben Andre Garcia, a former GirlsDoPorn producer and performer, pleaded guilty in December to sex trafficking by force, fraud, and coercion and was sentenced Monday in the Southern District of California following a series of victim impact statements in which 22 of his victims condemned him for the crimes.
According to Courthouse News, “Andre Garcia convinced a 17-year-old girl to fly across the country so he could have sex with her and profit from her youth.”
She claimed Garcia flew her out to San Diego on her 18th birthday to film a pornographic film and stopped at a grocery store on the way to the shoot to pick up a birthday cake to use as a prop.
Between 2013 and 2017, Garcia and his co-defendants advertised on Craigslist for clothed models for photoshoots, the DOJ said in a news release. The ads included phony websites and email addresses in an attempt to entice young women to accept the gig.
Garcia informed the young women who responded to the ad that they were actually seeking actresses for pornographic shoots, but he assured the young women, many of whom were between the ages of 18 and 20, that the videos would never be released in the United States or posted online.
In reality, the films were uploaded to PornHub, one of the world's most popular smut websites, as well as the GirlsDoPorn and GirlsDoToys websites, where Garcia and his co-conspirators earned millions of dollars, federal prosecutors said.
He offered the women between $3,000 and $5,000 for a one-day shoot and, as soon as they agreed, he booked them a plane ticket within the next day or two to ensure they wouldn't back out.
Once the girls arrived, they were frequently plied with alcohol and marijuana, and if they expressed reservations, Garcia paid other young women to assuage their nerves and reassure them that the videos would not be shared online and that no one they knew would ever learn about them.
When the shoots began, which typically lasted much longer than the 30 minutes promised to the girls, Garcia threatened to sue them, cancel their flights home, and post the videos online if they did not finish.
“At times, camera and recording equipment blocked hotel room doors, leaving the victims feeling helpless and unable to leave,” prosecutors said in a news release.
“The sex for the video shoots was rough, causing pain and, in some cases, bleeding to a number of victims. Several victims requested that the filming be halted. Garcia and others responded by telling the victims that they needed to continue and complete the videos.”
When the girls later discovered their videos had been posted online and attempted to have them removed, their calls were either blocked or ignored.
“This defendant ensnared victim after victim with false modeling advertisements, false promises, and deceptive front companies, eventually resorting to threats to coerce these women into making sex videos,” Acting US Attorney Randy Grossman said in a statement.
“Even when victims expressed their distress over the scheme's devastation of their lives, Garcia showed no concern for their well-being. The crime was heinous in nature, and there is no justification or excuse for his behavior, which was motivated solely by greed. This defendant's harm will last a lifetime for his victims.”