This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we're discussing how we broke the news of another arrest and indictment of someone involved in a sex trafficking ring, getting inside a situation that's pissed off a lot of game developers, the balance of revealing news and finding narratives, and monumental right-to-repair progress.
SAM: I was in a car headed to go skydiving last weekend when I got a text from a longtime Girls Do Porn source saying that another arrest was made in connection to the case, and that it might have been “Wiederhold,” and was probably in the western district of Michigan, but there weren’t more details than that. When I wasn’t driving or falling out of a plane, I used the court records search tool PACER to look for records with that name, and found minutes for a bail hearing, which contained enough info — that it was a felony charge, and that he was being sent to San Diego to appear in federal court as part of a sealed case — to be sure that it was the same Douglas “James” Wiederhold that acted in Girls Do Porn videos for the first few years of the company’s production and co-owned MILF site MomPOV.com with the main owner of GDP. At that point I needed to get the indictment that I knew was coming very soon.