The (Hacked) Spy In Your Car

Hello, and welcome to the 404 Media podcast, where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden wheels, both online and IRL.

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I'm your host, Joseph, and with me are two of the 404 media co-founders the first being sam cole hello and the second being jason kebler emmanuel retired after last week as we attained top top podcast status and he's done you won you beat him so

i haven't listened to the episode yet but i i get the emails Actually, I'm not really sure how I saw it, but someone commented on the podcast saying, wow, I love this episode.

because it was just Jason Emmanuel last week.

I love this episode.

It was almost like two kids without their teacher being there.

Was that the vibe?

That was the vibe, first of all.

And second of all, it wasn't just one person, it was like dozens and hundreds of fans being like, Oh my God, you dropped the dead weight.

Get him out.

Get him out of here.

Should we sleep, Joe?

Should we get out of here?

I'll do the solo pod this week.

No, we did miss you.

We did miss you.

But there was, I believe, two people who enjoyed the podcast.

Well, now it's

like, yeah, am I like a tyrannical host?

I mean, I keep the pace going.

I'm just trying to be, you know.

Well, that was the running bit is that we were like, we're going to have to let this segment go for like two hours.

But in the end, the podcast actually was about the same length as always, I feel.

So.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, speaking of moving it along quickly and being a tyrannical host, here is the first story.

It is written by me,

but Jason's going to help me out with the questions.

The headline is this company turns dash cams into virtual CCTV cameras.

Then hackers got in.

Yeah, so this is

a follow-up story to a scoop that you had a few weeks ago, which we'll get into.

But I guess to start things off, what is Nexar and what do they sell?

Yeah, so I'd never heard of Nexar until our earlier story, which involves Flock, and we'll get to that, the surveillance company.

But what Nexar does is that it sells these dash cams to ordinary drivers.

So let's say you're driving around and you just want to, you know, have some record of what happened if you get into an accident.

They do that sort of thing.

They also market the dash cams specifically to rideshare drivers, so Uber, Lyft,

whatever.

And those cameras will look outwards, obviously at the road in case there's a crash, but they'll also look inwards, presumably for driver and passenger safety as well, in case anything bad happens in the vehicle during the ride.

So they sell those sorts of things.

And

I imagine that some listeners might even have a Nexar dash cam in their vehicle.

I got lots of comments and emails from people saying, wow, I had no idea this happened.

I'm a Nexar user, user, blah, blah, blah.

That's the normal business.

The other thing that Nexar sells is kind of like a data broker business where they take footage generated or you know, streamed from these dash cams, they upload it to a public map that anyone can access.

And what Nexar does then is that it basically uses AI or machine learning, something like that.

They don't really specify too much to identify things

inside that image.

So you'll click on this map and it'll bring up an image taken from somebody's dash cam.

It'll be like, oh, there's a road sign here.

That means there's lots of traffic here.

Oh, there's roadworks here, for example.

You know, maybe that's going to be useful information to somebody else as well.

And Nexar then sells that data to a bunch of other companies.

You can see

they're basically trying to do both sides of the transaction.

They're trying to sell the hardware to ordinary drivers, and then all of this data that's being collected, why don't we monetize that as well?

I really wonder if these dash cams are a loss leader.

As in, I looked up these NextR dash cams, and they seem like they're pretty good cameras.

Like, they, I'm like, wow, these have seemingly have a lot of features, and they're quite inexpensive.

And so, you know, I'm not an expert in dash cam economics, but it seemed to me, I was like, this is, this strikes me as like data is probably their main business.

And I feel like when you first,

you know, discover them and wrote about them, and again, they're like a huge company, but I guess it was a company that we hadn't reported on before.

I was pretty,

like, it makes sense.

I guess what they're doing makes sense to me.

It's almost like a distributed, like, Google Street View

vibes in terms of like what they're creating.

And

it's, I don't know, it's pretty alarming.

But, anyways, you tell, tell us about that first story.

You wrote about them, I think, maybe like a month ago or so,

about a partnership that they were doing with Flock, or at least that they're planning with Flocks.

Yeah, somebody like that a month ago or a few weeks ago.

And so, regular listeners will know we cover a lot a company called Flock.

Now, Flock has AI-enabled cameras all over

the United States.

They continuously scan vehicles that pass by them as part of, you know, a surveillance capability called ALPR, automatic license plate recognition.

And you drive past a FLOCK camera, it will get the plate, obviously, but also the color of vehicle, maybe the model or the brand,

potentially the condition of the vehicle as well.

So it gets all of this data.

And then what Flock does is it sells access to that to law enforcement.

We've done a ton of coverage now where we found that local cops were doing searches inside Flock

on behalf of ICE.

Then Jason did something about how Customs and Border Protection actually had direct access to 80,000 of these cameras as well.

And then we also found that a Texas official did a nationwide search on the Flock network for a woman who self-administered an abortion.

Again, regular listeners will know that.

That is what Flock is.

What I reported a few weeks ago, as you say, was that Flock is exploring a partnership with Nexar.

I got this through sources, confirmed it with the company, wrote up that article somewhat quickly.

And that was, of course, interesting because Nexar has all of these dash cams in all of these vehicles and it's trying to partner with Flock, whose business is selling basically intelligence to law enforcement i want to stress like we don't know exactly what flow what flock wants to do with the data what it plans to do with it and again it's only exploring it at this point and that's why it was described to me by sources and then um by the company as well but that's how nexar originally got onto my radar is that well they're planning to integrate and partner with this fairly controversial surveillance company which brings up all of these questions about, well, what are they going to do with this dash cam footage, you know, which is a totally fair question to ask, I think.

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Right.

So, anyways, you write about this company's plans to partner with Flock.

And then, soon after, as seems to be the case often, you get another tip because,

you know, we've signaled to people that we're interested in writing about this sort of thing.

And so, you had a source reach out.

And it turns out that this company was hacked.

What was the hack and what was compromised?

A lot of really, really sensitive stuff.

So, maybe just step back and walk through how it was done.

This hacker who reached out to me, they found that every Nexar dash cam, at least as they described it, contained a key to an AWS bucket, Amazon Web Services.

This is, you know, very common internet infrastructure.

You'll be running a company, you need to store a bunch of data, you will pull it in an AWS AWS bucket.

This hacker found that the key to access that database inside all of these Nexar cameras didn't only allow that individual camera to upload its own footage, which obviously it needs to do.

It needs to be able to access Nexar's servers, right?

They found that the key had two high privileges in that it allowed a third party, a hacker or somebody else, to actually access everybody's dash cam footage, which is obviously really, really bad.

And they found something like 130 terabytes of video inside this AWS bucket.

They didn't, as far as I know, download all of it.

Obviously, that's an absolute ton of data.

They didn't send all of it to me either.

They, of their own accord, just downloaded, I think, a dozen, maybe a couple dozen videos and then sent them to me for verification purposes.

And crucially,

that public map I was mentioning, which has sort of the Nexar dash cam footage and it shows a road sign and road works or whatever, those are

blurred and anonymized somewhat.

Nexar blurs the actual dash of the car in case there's identifying information on there.

It blurs faces.

It also blurs license plates of other vehicles shot in that vicinity.

These videos that the hacker accessed were not blurred at all.

This was basically the raw footage taken from these dash cams all over the states.

Maybe they're all over the world, but I think the vast majority of the ones I saw were definitely in the United States based on the locations and license plates, that sort of thing.

So

just to

clarify, the blur happens at some point after being recorded, obviously, but they were getting it like pre-blur.

The hacker got this

pre-blur.

So

that was one of the reasons I was really interested in the story, was that you go to Nexar's privacy policy and it says, hey, all of the blurring and the anonymization happens on your device.

So even we can't see it.

I'm like, well.

How does the hacker have all of this non-blurred imagery then?

As you're reporting a story, more information comes to light.

And how Nexar described it to me was that, yes, the blurring does happen on the camera.

It's uploaded to one bucket.

What the hacker had accessed here was the backups of the individual user.

It was basically almost the Dropbox of the individual user.

So it does appear that, yes, they do.

blur and anonymize on device as they claim in the privacy policy.

But there's this other database which has it as well because these people want to back up their footage as well.

Got it.

That is, that's very wild, though.

I feel that's very wild.

So, what types of videos are in there, though?

Like, you know, this is sensitive data in that you're getting people's license plates.

You might be getting identifying information from their dash cams.

But, like, what sorts of things did you see?

Yeah, it is very much what you would expect.

A lot of cars driving on a lot of roads with with a lot of other cars in front of them.

That's not really surprising.

I would say there was more information in there than you might expect.

For what one example was clearly somebody answering a call on FaceTime.

You know, there's that very distinctive sound on Apple devices when you pick up a FaceTime call.

I heard that.

And then somebody having a conversation.

In another example, someone was in their car with a crying baby.

I didn't have the full context of what was going on, but obviously, you know, that's a private moment where you don't assume a camera or a hacker may be listening in or a journalist after the fact.

And then there was one where, again, I mentioned the Nexar markets these cameras to rideshare drivers as well.

The camera was pointing inwards to the vehicle.

You could clearly see the Uber or Lyft or whatever driver.

And then the passengers get in and they're having a conversation.

I can hear everything they're saying very clearly, I can see their faces very clearly.

I could probably make out where they were just picked up.

So, this is all information that, sure, maybe it's okay that your Uber driver knows where you got picked up or whatever.

I don't think you anticipate there's a camera in there which is uploading to a server, which a hacker has access, which has then been sent to a journalist.

And of course, this hacker was acting

somewhat in the interests of the company.

And I'll reframe that slightly, in that they didn't steal all this data and post it on the internet.

They came to me because they were considering about, well, how do I get this fixed?

And often hackers or information security professionals will do that through a journalist because the companies will actually fix the issue.

And this wasn't actually in the article.

I learned this maybe a day or two later, but somebody who I already know who's covered, who's done research that we've covered before, they said they also found the same vulnerability.

They reported it to Nexar

before all of this, and they never received a response and it was not fixed, clearly, because the hacker got all the videos and sent them to me.

I mean, I feel like people have really,

people talk shit in cars all the time.

Like

if you're able to hear the conversations that are happening in a car, it's like, I don't know, you go to a party and then you get back in the car with your partner or whatever and you're like, oh my God, can you believe that person said this at this party?

And I don't know.

I feel like that's a very like universal experience.

I feel like that's been part of various sitcoms and things like that.

Like it's such a trope.

And the fact that if you had one of these cameras set up in this way, you know, it was recording and then uploading, as you said, to a cloud bucket that a hacker was accessing.

It's really, really sensitive stuff.

I'm pretty.

It's pretty alarming.

Like there's not that many hacks these days that I find to be surprising, but this one is pretty big.

Yeah, I feel

we've seen every single sort of hack you could possibly imagine.

And oh, well, they found a new one.

They found a new type of hack.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, we said a lot of top secret stuff when we were in Sam's car a few weeks ago.

I recorded all of it.

It's all on video and tape, waiting for the right time to release.

But yeah,

exactly.

So this is bad for the individual users, the people who, you know, may have been saying unpleasant things about their loved ones after a party or whatever.

But there's national security concerns here as well.

Can you talk more about that?

Yeah.

So it's like a whole other dimension to the story.

Like any one of these would have already been a story.

Like it already would have been an article.

Hey, there's a map and this company is uploading anonymized footage from it.

And I spoke to multiple Nexile users and asked them, hey, did you know this

map exists and maybe your footage is on there?

And they had no idea.

That's already a story.

Then you have the hack.

Obviously that introduces another dimension.

Then on top of all of that, some of the dash cams are clearly owned by people who are either visiting or work at very sensitive U.S.

military intelligence agency facilities.

And I won't go through all of them, but there's some US military ones, Air Force bases, all of that sort of thing.

I'll focus on the CIA one.

So the hacker was able to find through that publicly available map, hey, there's a car which is going to the CIA's headquarters.

Okay, that's kind of interesting.

The hacker was then able to find the unredacted, the unblurred footage from that driver in the hacked AWS bucket.

They could do this because I think every video has a unique user ID, like it has the user ID, then some other sort of identifier.

So you can figure out, well, that's from this user that's from this user etc they did that and it showed this person taking the turn off i think the parkway not quite highway towards cia headquarters and then they clearly take the dash cam off the dash and they put it somewhere hidden in their vehicle i presume because the policy is that at cia hey if you have a dash cam please don't drive with it right into our facility.

That said, one of the images on the publicly available map is way closer to the facility than the unredacted footage was.

So why does that matter?

Well, somebody is driving into or near this rarely sensitive facility, and maybe at some point they screwed up.

Maybe they drove in and their dash cam was still going.

Again, I only saw a tiny sample of these videos, but if this person is going to CIA every day, every week, like whatever, they're a contractor, maybe, they're a worker there, who knows, right?

But if they've screwed up even once or a few times, hey, that could be beneficial.

Now, I'm sure Russian and Chinese intelligence operatives don't necessarily need a hack of a dash cam installed in people's cars to get that sort of information.

But I don't know, maybe a lower-tier country might need it, like a lower-level intelligence service.

But regardless, it's not good that these cameras are in people's cars who are affiliated with these sensitive facilities and the hacker was able to get into them.

You know, it's pretty straightforward.

And then

the companies that buy data from Nexar,

you know, also potentially have a reason to be concerned.

Yeah.

So we didn't know.

Again, right at the top, it was, we were mentioning Nexar sells these dash cams, but it also sells this data basically generated from them.

And the hacker also got this list of companies which at least have expressed interest, or they've had a dialogue with Nexar.

Some of them, when I approached them for comment, said, you know,

we've never had a relationship, or some said, we only evaluated it, and some did say that they actually used it.

But there's a lot of companies in there: Microsoft, Apple, Google, a bunch of AI companies.

I mean, the Apples and Googles, you would, especially the Googles, you would obviously expect because Google Maps is updated, obviously, with roadworks information and traffic data.

So you could see how that could be useful.

A bunch of AI companies, as I said, and then one of the more interesting ones to me was Niantic, which is the Pokemon Go creator, which has,

and they talk about it.

It's talking about Saudi Arabia now.

I was going to ask, could you just briefly, to close us off, just explain what that, and I'm not saying this footage is going to Saudi Arabia, blah, blah, blah.

I just think that's an interesting thing that people may have forgotten about.

Yeah, I mean, it was a few months ago, and I haven't, I did write about it at the time, but basically the Saudi,

a company that is owned by the Saudi foreign investment fund, sovereign wealth fund, that's what it's called,

bought Pokemon Go from Niantic.

And so, yeah, it's now tied to the Saudi government in some way.

That's just.

I don't know.

Another layer to this, as you said, it's like lots of companies touch this.

So, yeah, I mean, I find this whole thing to be like incredibly fascinating just because it touches so many different companies, so many different

like attack surfaces.

I find the dash cam,

like the concept of dash cams to be quite interesting.

Like I understand why someone would want to have one for safety reasons.

And also, you know, people drive crazy and it's needed often to like establish fault in crashes and things like that.

But, you know, if you have one that's connected to the internet and that's streaming to these servers, like being used to create big data, it's stuff like this can happen.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I think that if you're a listener and you use a Nexar dash cam, I mean, let me know.

And also let me know if you knew that this publicly available map maybe had your

dash cam images in it.

But yeah, I just think maybe drivers want to keep this in mind when they're putting on a constant ubiquitous surveillance technology into their vehicle.

All right, we'll leave that there.

Thank you for running us through that, Jason.

When we come back, we're going to talk about Sam's reporting trip to San Diego.

Again, only made possible

due to 404 media subscribers, and the sentencing of somebody that she's followed for a very, very long time, a content warning on that one for sexual assault.

We'll be right back after

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All right, and we are back.

Sam, as I said, you wrote this one.

The headline is Michael Pratt, Girls Do Porn ringleader, sentenced to 27 years in prison.

How about I'm going to give

the quickest summary of Girls Do Porn I can possibly do so we can get to you immediately talking about the new stuff and being in the San Diego courtroom and all of that.

So, regular listeners again may know Sam has covered covered Girls Do Porn for a very, very long time.

This was essentially, literally, a sex trafficking ring operating in the open on Pornhub.

Women would travel for what they believe would be modeling or similar jobs.

They would go into the hotel room where they would be forced or coerced into having sex on camera.

They would be told this is just going to be kept to local VHS or DVD collectors, whatever, in New Zealand and Australia, for example.

That was a lie.

The footage was then posted on Pornhub, obviously one of the biggest websites on the internet.

And this, of course, ruined many, many of these women's lives.

You've written a ton about the hunt for Pratt, and I definitely think people should go check that out.

The sort of the private investigator almost side of it.

But after all these years, Pratt goes on the run, eventually tracked down.

And now you get to, I think, be in the same room as him, right?

I think, just first of all, I'll try and do it chronologically.

You're flying to San Diego for the sentencing.

What was your understanding of how long this would go on for?

Like, is it, oh, we're in, he sentenced, we're out.

Like, what was your initial understanding of how long it might be?

I mean, I had never been to

I'd never been in a courtroom

like pretty much ever, I don't think, not in my adult life.

So I'd certainly never been into a federal sentencing in person.

So I had no idea what to expect.

I

thought

that it was going to start at nine.

The judge would come in and say, this is the information that we have.

And based on that, here's your sentence.

See you never, you know, like I thought it was going to be like in and out.

Here you go.

I did know that victims usually give or can give statements and these sorts of things, and they did during

the sentencing of Andre Garcia, who is the main actor in a lot of the Girls DuPorn videos.

He was the main guy doing the actual videos for years.

So

during that one, a lot of victims got to come forward and say how.

he affected their lives in that moment and then going forward.

So I knew that victims might say something, but I didn't expect to be sitting in the courtroom for five hours.

And that's what it ended up being.

We were there.

We took two breaks,

maybe three.

I think maybe three breaks.

I started losing track.

We were there for five hours.

I really thought it was going to be like, we'll get this over with and move on.

But it took so long because

the victims who came were like, it was 40 women

who showed up to say,

this is why this guy should go away for the maximum amount of time.

And almost all of them, all but one

said,

Give him the maximum, give him life.

Like, there's no amount of time that you can give him that would be too much.

So, I was definitely expecting

something shorter and more to the point.

And this was very cathartic for them, very cathartic for anyone who's ever been following the story.

And yeah, he was there in person.

He, they walked him in in the beginning, um,

and he had this like really bushy head of hair which i was not expecting and like looked like he'd been living in the woods and he's been in custody for years um

but

uh just very different than like his bookshots look um and he sat there throughout all of this he gave a little statement in the beginning and said you know mumbled through

a two-sentence apology and said that he never would have come to the United States to do this if he had known this was how it was going to shake out.

It was not a real apology.

Way, way, way, way.

I would not have come to the United States if I knew I was going to be in the U.S.

I'm paraphrasing, obviously, but that was the implication.

He said, I mean, he gave it, it was very short, but he said it was never my intention to hurt anybody and said that he would never have come to this country to make a website if this, he knew that this was the way that

it was going to go.

And he had given an apology, a written apology that was also pretty short previous and filed filed that with the court.

And it was the same sentiment.

It was like, I was just a businessman trying to make a business in America, and he's from New Zealand.

He's like, I just wanted to travel here and start a business and saw an opportunity, and it went sideways.

And I regret that it

basically

blew up the way it did.

I mean,

yeah, it was not a real apology.

It was not really, it was not convincing

remorse.

And it was not convincing to anybody that was there, I don't think, either.

What was it like, and we'll talk about the victims and the impact statements in a second.

I'm just, I'm just curious.

What was it like for you, after covering this person and this case for so long to finally see this person, hear their voice, be in the courtroom?

with them.

I mean, just journalistically, like, oh,

did things fall into place?

Or what was it like for you seeing this person you followed for so long in a way?

I mean, it was definitely

surreal.

It was kind of strange.

I feel

like I've been following him through the other people that have been following him.

So, like, the lawyers who are representing the women in the civil case and the investigators who tracked him down and dragged him back, you know, like they didn't themselves, but then the FBI showed up and dragged him back to the United States.

And the Spanish police locally arrested him.

I feel like I've been seeing him through the eyes of so many different people

throughout this many, many year case.

I think it was

2018 or 2019 when it actually went to civil trial, and then 2020 when it was

end of 2019 when the FBI charged him and his co-conspirators with trafficking.

But

it's been years long

and years coming to actually see him get to this point where he's standing in front of a judge, which was pretty powerful.

And it's also, it's not something that I encounter very often and that happens very often in general is when someone does a crime like this who is producing

non-consensual material and is

distributing abuse material on the internet.

They don't often,

and this is because the scale of this problem is so big and so many people do this, they don't often meet any kind of justice and they don't often answer for this particular sort of crime.

So that was pretty interesting just to see someone who had been doing this and thought that he could do it forever because

he had the internet and

basically was

behind the camera, not in front of it,

to shield him from any kind of

responsibility.

And he misjudged that massively.

And I think that's only because of the efforts of the women who were there that day.

And so many more women who had come forward and said, hey, this is something, something very fucked up is happening here and he needs to answer for it.

So I don't know.

It was very powerful.

It was very, it was a...

It was a long day, like I said, but it really actually felt like I was there for half an hour.

It was like, like a snap

because everyone in the room was so focused on what the women were saying

and just completely wrapped with their stories.

And speaking of those stories, as you say, a large amount of this hearing was dedicated to these victim impact statements.

I'm just curious, what did you learn from those, especially what was new?

Because you were there, you were taking notes, you were sort of updating us in near real time.

Of course, you're trying to, you know, get ready to write an article about what's being said in the news.

What was new that trickled out for you through those statements?

So, a lot of them were the same thing over and over,

which we knew from reporting previously.

They all have a very similar story because the business was built on this very specific sequence of events where the women had to be.

So it was like a formula.

Yeah, exactly.

It was the way that it was the manner of the business.

It was not like a fluke that someone had a bad time.

It was set up to have the same experience over and over and over where they would be very inexperienced and come to San Diego and

basically

be sexually abused and assaulted for hours and hours and then

let go.

and then threatened for the rest of their lives about whether they could come forward.

So

a lot of it was not surprising,

but I did hear from several of them that

as many as 15

women have died since shooting these videos with Girls DuPorn, which I didn't realize that was the number.

I knew that it was maybe one or two, two or three.

These are all kind of like unconfirmed numbers, obviously, but

I didn't really realize that that was the scale of it.

And it doesn't, listening to them, that doesn't actually surprise me.

And it probably is, that number is probably low because there were as many as it was 400 plus women involved in this

and

victims of this scheme.

And so many of the ones who came forward in the sentencing said they were,

they had considered suicide, they had done self-harm, they'd gotten very addicted to substances.

One said she died three times and was brought back to life because she had become addicted to substances.

One was in the hospital, and the prosecutor read the statement for her because when she arrived in San Diego at the airport, she had a PTSD-related seizure and had to go straight to the hospital and didn't even make it to the sentencing.

And she her testimony was that she was brutally raped for nine hours under Pratt's supervision, basically,

because it was his company.

So that was surprising to me that that number was that high, but also not entirely shocking.

One woman came forward and was the mother of a woman who died of an overdose after being a victim of girls do porn.

She, that was the whole room was,

you know, crying as quietly as they could.

through her testimony, but she didn't even realize that her daughter was

a girls duporn victim until May of this year, and she had died years ago.

She didn't know that that was what had turned her life completely upside down originally and made her withdraw and made her abuse substances.

So that was

that was definitely a big theme of this is that these women were saying, we're here and we're able to speak about this and we are

the ones who can come forward today.

And there are so many others who can't for so many reasons and for many of them it's because they are no longer alive um

several of them turned and spoke directly to him which i thought was

um

i don't know it's just it's it was almost shocking that they did and not because i'm surprised at their like bravery in doing that but the vitriol in which they would do that was

something that I think took a lot of people back.

One woman was targeted when she was very young, and she kind of whipped around and looked right at him and said, Hey, pedophile.

And everyone kind of like,

you know,

took a breath.

I don't think he looked any of them in the eye.

I was in the back.

But they would frequently turn around and say, it would ask the judge, can I drive permission to speak to the defendant?

And she would say, yes, of course.

And

they would turn around and speak directly to him and tell him exactly

what

he did to them and the way that their lives had been affected by this.

Several of them said that they had to change their appearances entirely.

They had gotten work done, cosmetic surgeries, gained weight, lost weight, changed their hair to basically go undercover as they're in their own lives to avoid being harassed by people on the street.

So what about the moment of the sentencing?

Do you just briefly want to walk us through that?

Was that over in a flash?

Like what did that look like?

That was compared to the four and a half hours that went before.

The judge was quiet, obviously the whole entire time, listening.

And she has been on this case for a long time.

and was part of quite a few of the other sentencings that were for his co-conspirators.

So she was familiar, and several of the women had seen her before and were like, hello again,

which is just so crazy to have to do this over and over again

for the women, for the victims.

But the judge was so locked in the whole entire time and just listening, completely wrapped, completely

eye contact with these women the whole time, like leaning forward in her seat.

The prosecution representing the United States had recommended 22 years for him based on a bunch of legal math.

It's like there's a lot of stuff that goes into like sentencing and how long someone gets right.

It's a big document usually, and it's like, well, this is a factor that means we should have five years.

This is a factor that means we add 10 years, whatever.

Or like deduct years for his pleading guilty eventually, even though he pled not guilty or you're saying the prosecution did their math, they added up and they came to 22, which

is interesting because that's way less

or a little bit less than what he ultimately got.

So, what did the defense want?

If you remember, I think they asked for 17.

I may need to check that, but they asked for not that much less.

They were like, Yeah,

probably a lot,

probably at least 17.

Um,

so

I think everyone was kind of expecting 22 just just based on the recommendations from the prosecution.

And she just kind of said, I was, I don't know what I was expecting.

I was expecting some kind of like climactic moment where it's like, your sentence is, and like, do a caval bang or something.

I only know court stuff from like Judge Judy, obviously.

Yeah, from TV.

Yeah.

So

she just kind of said it in a sentence.

She was like,

20, she gave it in months.

It was 300 and some months, but it ended up being 27 years plus 10 years of probation, or yeah, 10 years of probation.

And

she said it, and there was a reporter from NBC sitting next to me, and she was,

we were kind of both like,

what?

And because it was a way higher number

than we were expecting.

You know, we're quibbling over the matter of like a couple years between prosecution and defendant.

And she gives a number that's way higher.

So

I think no one was really expecting that at all.

We were also also like,

I was like,

say it again, please, because I don't even think I heard you correctly.

You said it in months.

It's like, you need to say that number again.

And I was checking it with you guys on Slack.

And then I was checking it with her, with this woman next to me.

She was like, did I do that math right?

And I was like, I've done it like a bunch of times.

I think that's right.

And

it was 27 years plus 10 years of probation and then a bunch of other clauses as part of the probation.

It was like, he's not allowed to go to a porn store.

He's not allowed to, I don't even think he's allowed to watch porn.

He's not allowed to consume

adult

content during that time.

So it was a bunch of other things on top of the 27 years.

So it's really like 37 years of like

being surveilled by,

you know, your sentence.

So,

and then after the fact,

it was very clear that like the energy in the room was like relief and also just like,

Again, cathartic because all these things had finally been said to this man who was puppeteering this entire operation and was the reason they were all there, which is something the judge said, was like, it was clear that without you talking to Pratt, we wouldn't be here at all.

So it's obvious that you shouldn't get the same or less than

the actor in

the movies, in the films, because you

hired him.

You know, you knew that he was a rapist and you kept kept him employed.

And that alone deserves more than what he got.

And he got 20.

So I think everyone after the fact was very relieved, very just like

the word isn't like happy because no one's happy to be there, but like

it's the best case scenario that anyone could ask for.

They were very thankful to

prosecution.

They gave like a some of the victims gave statements after the fact and were like out recording with local news outlets and stuff like that.

So, along with like the prosecutors.

So, yeah, it was, it was cool to see.

And I keep saying, and I've said this so many times, but like,

I think people hear the story and they think, oh, this is so dark and brutal and tragic.

And it is.

And none of it should have happened at all.

But it is.

a story

start to finish of these women coming together and saying, we're not going to let this slide.

Like, this is something horrible that happened to so many of us.

And he needs to pay.

Someone needs to pay.

His whole company does.

And they won a civil case back in 2019 or 2020.

Sorry, I get those years confused because they were weird.

And a lot of this happened at the end of December.

It was in that era.

And then

now I think

a lot of them finally feel like

this can be behind them.

He's not only in custody, you know, captured after being on the run, after being on the FKA most wanted, but also

is going to go away for, he's going to go to federal prison for a long time.

And I think that's not,

it doesn't fix what happened in any way, but it is

like the best ending that they could have asked for is for him to see some sort of justice.

So, yeah.

Yeah.

Well, I think that's a perfect place to leave it with that message of justice.

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