When people ask Mariah Rief about her experience as a survivor of sex trafficking, they tend to start with the Craigslist ad which led the then 19-year-old to a “modelling shoot” at the Hilton hotel in San Diego. For others, the story starts when Rief enters the lobby and meets Theodore Gyi, the “photographer”. Or after they’ve taken the elevator up to a room, Rief standing at the threshold, Gyi behind her blocking her exit – and just inside the door, the silhouette of a second man waiting.
Whenever she talks about it, and whatever the questions, Rief always braces herself for blame, because, to some, it makes no sense. “You get, ‘But why did she answer that ad?’ ‘Why did she walk inside?’ and, my favourite, ‘Where were her parents?’” says Rief. “If you live in an idyllic world, it’s hard to imagine how this could happen.” The true starting point is years earlier. Rief’s beginnings, her childhood, layers of trauma and chaos, fast-tracked her to that hotel room in November 2016, believing that finally, life might be giving her a break. “It’s painful to say it but I was truly the perfect victim,” she says. “I saw that job as an opportunity. When I arrived at that hotel, I thought I was so lucky.”
Rief, 29, is in London to speak in parliament on behalf of UK Feminista. The campaigning organisation is launching a list of recommendations on how the government should use its new powers under the crime and policing act to force pornography sites to implement some fundamental protections. These include verifying that the people in the content they carry are adults, and have consented to its publication.
Until now, pornography sites have been able to act with almost total impunity, free to publish and profit from anything, no questions asked. Rief is one of the few whose case has resulted in criminal convictions. In 2022, Gyi, the cameraman who filmed her, was sentenced to four years for helping to coerce hundreds of women to appear in pornographic abuse videos. Ruben Andre Garcia, the performer who had been waiting for Rief in that hotel room, is now serving 20 years, while the ringleader of the operation, Michael Pratt, is serving 27 years. And yet, their videos and “brand” Girls Do Porn (GDP) couldn’t have been more “mainstream”. GDP, the subscription channel which operated between 2009 and 2020, released a new 45-minute video every week and also distributed content to sites like Pornhub. In 2014, Pornhub’s second most viewed video was made by GDP. Their videos were watched more than 1 billion times.
“They look polished, professional,” says Rief. Even now, some people doubt they could have involved sex-trafficked women, and on some level, Rief can see why. “Sex trafficking” means the use of someone for commercial sex acts by “force, fraud or coercion” – but for years, Rief blamed herself rather than believing she had been a victim of anything illegal. “My view of sex trafficking was the TV show Taken – you’re chased down, you’re hiding under the bed,” she says. “I thought I had done something to deserve it. I knew that I definitely didn’t sign up to do it but I guess I did it. Why didn’t I fight? Why didn’t I decide I’d rather die than do what they wanted? It’s almost 10 years to the day since I walked inside that hotel room and it’s taken so long to really understand it.”
Rief grew up in Missouri, the adopted child of a deeply religious family. “My biological mum was a drug addict who was selling her body to support her addiction,” she says. “To this day, I’m contacted by siblings I didn’t know I had.” At 18, she married a marine she barely knew and moved to his military base in San Diego. Within a year, that relationship was over and Rief was sleeping on someone’s sofa, working as a gym receptionist.
“I was just a teenager, but I was figuring it out,” she says. “I’d found a job, I’d got a car to get to work by putting the first payment on a credit card – and then I heard about this thing called ‘car insurance’. It cost more than I had in my bank account, and I just broke.” Rief called home in tears and asked for help. The response she got was, “Why aren’t you modelling?” She was advised to look on Craigslist.
“All my life, that had been the dream for me,” she says. “I’d been sent to modelling and etiquette classes. At 13, I’d been taught how to contour my face. We used to watch America’s Next Top Model and think, what an opportunity! When you grow up in Missouri, California seems like 1950s Hollywood. You just need to get over there and wait for that big break. Nobody, not even my mom, would have thought there were dangers in that world.”
When Rief went on Craigslist, “my mind was blown by how many modelling gigs there were,” she says. None mentioned nudity, although some were confusingly scant on detail. “I didn’t respond to those because I was raised in the church,” says Rief. After completing a stack of applications, Rief fell asleep in the early hours to be woken the next day by her ringing phone. A male voice, which she thought to be Australian, asked if she could get to the Hilton for a shoot that afternoon. For a few seconds, Rief wavered, so the man offered to put her in touch with someone who had worked with his company in the past.
“Within 10 minutes, I was called by a woman,” says Rief. “She said, ‘They’re safe, they’re legit, and it’s real money, you’ll get paid.’ I’m so stupid, it was happening so fast and I’d applied for so many jobs, I didn’t know which one this was, and I didn’t ask more questions. I just 100% trusted another woman. I don’t know why, but I would never expect a woman to deceive me in that capacity, knowing what I would be put through.” (Rief would later learn that women were paid $100 for making these reference calls.)
Arriving at the hotel was further reassurance. “It was really nice, right on the beach, close to the convention centre, full of businesspeople. I thought, ‘You don’t take a girl somewhere like this to do something bad.’” Gyi was friendly, but when he started to walk Rief towards the elevator, she hesitated. She’d expected the shoot to take place outside. “He told me that there was a lot of money involved. We needed to sign papers so, for my privacy and anonymity, they’d booked a room.” As they approached the room though, Gyi moved closer, and began to shepherd her. Standing at the threshold, the silhouette of a man inside and the smell of marijuana, Gyi said into her ear, “It’s going to be a lot better for you if you just walk in and let me tell you what we’re going to do here.”
“As soon as he did that, I had a very sobering thought,” says Rief. “‘I don’t have a choice. Walking into that room means they are going to get whatever they want and I don’t know what that entails.’ I didn’t know if they had guns. In that moment, I realised I needed to be what they needed. I needed to convince them that I’m not a liability if they let me leave at the end of it all. I wouldn’t be a problem for them. I walked inside and there were six studio lights pointing at the bed. I thought, ‘Oh God. Oh no.’”
Gyi explained that Rief would be performing in a “classy, well-made video” that would only be available on DVD for a select group of wealthy men in Australia. She could choose her wardrobe. A makeup artist arrived to make Rief up, and also cover her tattoos with foundation, supposedly to protect Rief’s anonymity. (“I later found out it was because they wanted us to look polished and adolescent,” says Rief.) When Rief told Gyi and Garcia that she was on her period, Garcia calmly presented her with a menstrual sponge. “I felt like I was 13,” she says. “He literally had to teach me how to use it.”
The shoot lasted eight hours. “The crazy thing is it felt like a blink of an eye,” she says. “Dissociation is really a hell of a drug. I died in that hotel room, I was a walking corpse. I was literally robotic, following every instruction.” At the end, though Rief hadn’t expected to be paid – she just hoped to leave alive – she was given an envelope stuffed with cash. It was $4,500. “I gathered all my stuff, I don’t even know if I put my shoes on, I just couldn’t believe it was over. It wasn’t until I got outside and it was pitch black that I realised how long I’d been there. For a while, I couldn’t even remember where I’d left the car.”
For about a month, nothing happened. Rief found a new job at a country club. She felt she was doing well. “I thought, ‘OK, maybe no one will ever know about this. Maybe I can move on,’” she says. “You try not to think about it. I didn’t tell one person.” Then, at work, a Facebook message arrived from someone she’d been at school with. It said: “How much did you get from it?” “I knew immediately,” she says. “By the end of that shift, my phone had just blown up.” GDP’s standard practice was to send screen shots and links to all the friends and family on a victim’s social media, partly to drive traffic and also to silence them, to beat them down. GDP also bought URLs in some of the victim’s names. That way, anyone Googling them went straight to a site with the videos and screenshots of her, creating the strong impression that it had all been consensual, and she was building a business in the adult industry.
For a while, Rief couldn’t see how life would ever be worth living again. The response from her community was too devastating. “There were memes about me. Elders in the church were saying, ‘we always knew she was no good.’ An aunt sent a message saying I was beautiful on the outside, but God knew I was ugly on the inside,” says Rief. “I had so many messages telling me I was a waste of life, I reached a point where I believed it. Maybe I deserved what happened to me.” Rief knows of 15 GDP victims who have since died by suicide or drug overdoses. She says that God and “spite” kept her alive. “People wanted me to die so bad, it lit a fire in me,” she says. “I decided I’m going to live. And I was going to turn this around.”
By 2021, Rief was a married stay-at-home mother of two young children when she was contacted by the FBI in connection with its case against GDP. Rief’s husband, whom she’d met at the country club, knew about the video – although it wasn’t something they discussed. “For years, I’d hardly talked about it at all,” she says. “When the letter came with this official FBI seal, I thought I’d done something wrong. It never crossed my mind that GDP had done anything wrong. I called the number, and told this FBI victim specialist that I wasn’t a victim of sex trafficking and not to contact me again.” The woman carefully explained their case and how GDP had operated. Then she said that the men were now in custody. “That was the best part,” says Rief. “That still gives me chills.” Rief was invited to attend the sentencing in a few weeks’ time at the San Diego federal building in order to give a victim impact statement.
Doing so changed her life. “I turned up and was shown into a conference room that was filled with young women,” she says. “I couldn’t believe how many there were. We were assigned a letter for anonymity and I was ‘U’. In the court, I got to hear all these girls before me, trembling, shaking, sobbing and describing the same experience in different variations. One had tried to jump out the window. One ran away and they dragged her back and assaulted her. For so long, I’d blamed myself and thought, ‘I should have done this’ or ‘why didn’t I do that?’ Now I had the opportunity to hear how that would have played out and it wouldn’t have gone well.”
Now Rief tells her story whenever she can, even though doing so makes her a target. Her phone is flooded with disbelieving messages, along with screenshots from the GDP video, showing her dead-eyed but smiling. “They’ll say, ‘you’re smiling, you’re not a victim, you’re a whore’,” says Rief, but adds that she doesn’t care. Rief runs her own consultancy to support other survivors and has authored a bill that is moving through the California senate, which would make content removal easier for survivors of online abuse. “My children are seven and four, they went with me to the capital building recently in Sacramento,” she says. “What they understand about my job is that ‘mommy changes the law.’”
“Sometimes I hate that the worst thing that’s happened to me has opened so many doors,” she continues. “It’ll never be worth it. I’ll never be able to say, ‘I’m glad this has happened.’ But I’ve been very intentional to make sure it’s not wasted.”
Information and support for anyone affected by rape or sexual abuse issues is available from the following organisations. In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support on 0808 500 2222 in England and Wales, 0808 801 0302 in Scotland, or 0800 0246 991 in Northern Ireland. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html