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Foreign.
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Welcome to the 404 Media podcast where we bring you unparalleled access, hidden worlds, both online and IRL. 404 Media is a journalist founded company and needs your support. To subscribe, go to 404 Media Co as well as bonus content every single week. Subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments. Gain access to that content@404Media co. I'm your host, Joseph, and with me are two of the 404Media code. The first being Sam Cole.
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C
Hello.
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And the second being Jason Kebler.
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D
Emmanuel retired after last week. We attained top podcast status and he's done.
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C
You won. You beat him.
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B
So I haven't listened to the episode yet, but I get the emails. Actually, I'm not really sure how I saw it, but someone commented on the podcast saying, saying, wow, I love this episode. Because it was just Jason Emanuel last week. I love this episode. It was almost like two kids without their teacher being there. Was that the vibe?
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D
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.
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C
Joe, should we get out of here?
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D
I'll do the solo podcast. No. We did miss you. We did miss you. But there was, I believe, two people who enjoyed the podcast.
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B
But now it's starting to think, yeah, am I like a tyrannical host? I mean, I keep the pace going. I'm just trying to be, you know.
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D
Well, that was, that was the running bit is that we were like, we're gonna have 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.
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B
Yeah, yeah. Well, speaking of moving 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 dashcams into virtual CCTV cameras. Then hackers got in.
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D
Yeah. So this is, I guess, a follow up story to 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?
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B
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 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 dashcam 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, 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 dashcams, 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 dashcam. It'd 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 there, 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?
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D
I really wonder if these dashcams are a loss leader, as in, I looked up these Nexar dash cams and they seem like they're pretty good cameras. Like they. I'm like, wow, these 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 are creating and it's. I don't know, it's pretty alarming. But anyways, you 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.
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B
Yeah, something 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 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 of 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 Nexa. 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 dashcams 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 we don't know exactly 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 by the company as well. But. 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 dashcam footage? You know, which is a totally fair question to ask, I think.
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D
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B
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 dashcam, at least as they described it, contained a key to an AWS bucket. Amazon Web Services. This is 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 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 too high privileges in that it allowed a third party, a hacker or somebody else to actually access everybody's dashcam 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 dashcam footage, and it shows a road sign and roadworks 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 and 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 dashcams 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.
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D
To clarify, the blur happens at some point after being recorded, obviously, but they were getting it like pre blur. The hacker got this in like pre blur.
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B
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 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.
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D
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, this is sensitive data in that you're getting, you know, people's license plates, you, you might be getting identifying information from their dashcams. But like, what sorts of things did you see?
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B
Yeah, it is very much what you would expect. A lot of cars driving on a lot of roads 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. 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 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 accessed, 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 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 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.
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D
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.
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B
Yeah, I feel we've seen. 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.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. We said a lot of top secret stuff when we were in Sam's car.
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A few weeks ago.
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I recorded all of it. It's all on video and tape, waiting for the right time to release.
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But yeah, yeah, sure.
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D
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?
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B
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's uploading anonymized footage from it. And I spoke to multiple Nexar 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, et cetera. 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 dashcam 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 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.
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D
And then the companies that buy data from Nexar, you know, also potentially have a reason to be concerned.
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B
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 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, 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.
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D
And they owned by Saudi Arabia.
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B
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.
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D
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 incredibly fascinating just because it touches so many different companies, so many different attack surfaces. Um, 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, 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, stuff like this can happen.
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B
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 dashcam 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 four or four 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 this.
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D
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E
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B
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 Girls do porn for a rare 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 modelling 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?
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C
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. And 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 9. 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 do porn 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. Um, 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, 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, but just very different than, like, his buckshots look. 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.
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B
Way, way, way, way. I would, I would not have come to the United States if I knew I was going to be in a US I'm paraphrasing obviously, but that was the implication he said.
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C
I mean he gave. It was a, 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, 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 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 was 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, yeah, it was not real. It was not really. It was not convincing remorse and it was not convincing to anybody that was there. I don't think either.
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B
What was it like? And we'll talk about the victims and the impact statements in the second. 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, do things fall into place? Or what was it like for you seeing this person you followed for so long?
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C
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 were representing the women in the civil case and the investigators who tracked him down and dragged him back like they didn't themselves. But then the FBI showed up and dragged him back to the United States and the, 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 2019, 2018 or 2019 when it actually went to civil trial and then 2020 when it was, 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, 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, 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.
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B
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.
- [38:18]
C
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.
- [38:32]
B
Like a formula.
- [38:33]
C
Yeah, exactly. It was, 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 do porn, 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, you know, 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 re porn 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 withdrawal. It 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. Several of them turned and spoke directly to him, which I thought was. I don't know, it's just, it's. It was almost shocking that they did and not because I'm surprised that they're like bravery and 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.
- [42:58]
B
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?
- [43:09]
C
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. 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. 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.
- [44:12]
B
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.
- [44:21]
C
Years for his pleading guilty eventually, even though he pled not guilty.
- [44:26]
B
So you're saying the prosecution did their math, they added up and they came to 22, which is interesting because that's way less, a little bit less than what he ultimately got. So. And what did the defense.
- [44:40]
C
One, 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. So I think everyone was kind of expecting 22 just based on the recommendations from 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 gavel. Bang or something. I only know court stuff from, like, Judge Judy, obviously.
- [45:18]
B
Yeah. From tv.
- [45:19]
C
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 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 predation 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. 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 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 the, 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 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, 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 happens 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 they, 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 FAA most wanted, but also is going to go away for. He's going to go to federal prison for a long time. I think that's not. It doesn't fix what happened in any way, but it is like the, the best ending that they could have asked for is for him to see some sort of justice.
- [49:30]
B
So yeah, yeah, well, I think that's a perfect place to leave it with that message of justice. If you are listening to the free version of the podcast on our Play us out. But if you are a paying 404 media subscriber, we're going to be talking about the Charlie Kirk assassination. Our reporting around that. We've done a couple of pieces. I think you can subscribe and gain access to that content@404 media code. As a reminder, 404 Media is journalist founded and supported by subscribers. If you do wish to subscribe to 404 Media and directly support our work, please go to 404 Media co. You'll get unlimited access to our articles and an ad free version of this podcast. You'll also get to listen to the subscribers only section where we talk about a bonus story each week. This podcast is made in partnership with Kaleidoscope. Another one way to support us is by leaving a 5 star rating and review for the podcast. That stuff really helps us out. I don't have in front of me, but when I was reading reviews the other day there was one that simply said 10 out of 10. So I'll take that over the five stars. This has been 404 Media. We'll see you again next week.
- [50:45]
A
Mike and Alyssa are always trying to outdo each other. When Alyssa got a small water bottle, Mike showed up with a four litre jug. When Mike started gardening, Alyssa started beekeeping.
- [50:56]
B
Oh, come on.
- [50:57]
A
They called a truce for their holiday and used Expedia trip planner to collaborate on all the details of their trip. Once there, Mike still did more laps around the pool.
- [51:07]
D
Whatever.
- [51:08]
A
You were made to outdo your holidays. We were made to help organize the competition. Expedia made to travel.