I have just read an article about the "Girls Gone Wild" founder Joe Francis. It is frankly quite disturbing. LA Times Journalist Claire Hoffman reports on her day spent with Joe Francis.
"He has my face pressed against the hood of a car, my arms twisted hard behind my back. He's pushing himself against me, shouting: "This is what they did to me in Panama City!"
If this is how this man treats a 29 year old professional journalist then how does he treat the drunken 17 year old girls who feature in his videos.
"This much is certain: He's got at least 80 pounds on me and I'm thinking he's about to break my left arm. My eyes start to stream tears."
Thankfully Claire manages to free herself and punches Joe Francis in the face.
Joe Francis has made a fortune from the "Girls Gone Wild" video series which features drunken girls flashing their breasts or french-kissing their girlfriends outside nightclubs across the USA. This business is worth 40 million dollars a year in sales. But Joe has even bigger plans and he wants to move mainstream and create a lifestyle brand which will be used to sell clothes, food, holidays etc.
If so then it is quite probable that "Girls Gone Wild" merchandise such as stationery, bedding and watches will soon be for sale in Argos and WH Smith. The "Girls Gone Wild" concept is an appealing business proposition. Drunken seventeen or eighteen year old girls can be quite willing to flash their breasts in exchange for a t-shirt or the vague possibility of being spotted and becoming famous. The business essentially has a plentiful supply of free labour. Many of those interviewed by Claire enjoy the experience:
Jillian Vangeertry, a 21-year-old student:
"Anybody enjoys the attention. T-shirts, hats—we got all the accessories," she says. I ask if she plans on going wild for the cameras later. She shrugs. "If you do it, you do it," she says confidently. "You can't complain later. It's almost like your 15 minutes of fame."
Kaitlyn Bultema:
"If you do this, you might get noticed by somebody—to be an actress or a model."
Certainly there is nothing illegal in any of this at all. However the concept of grown men hanging around nightclubs waiting for drunken seventeen year old girls who can be lured to the bedroom in the "Girls Gone Wild" bus to reveal all is distinctly sordid.
The story of eighteen year old Jannel Szyszka's encounter with Joe Francis highlights the inherent dangers when adult men deliberately seek out drunken teenagers. (WARNING: DISTURBING CONTENT)
Szyszka tells me later that as she was spinning around the strip pole that night, Francis appeared, grabbed her arm and pulled her toward him. "You are so going on the bus later," she recalls Francis saying. "I was like, 'Um, OK.' I was shocked. I was like, 'Whoa—Joe's, like, trying to talk to me, like out of all the girls in here.'" Francis invited her back to the VIP area to do shots with him, she says, and she said yes.
Szyszka says the more shots she drank, the cloudier her judgment became. She says she agreed to join Francis and his crew on the "Girls Gone Wild" bus. "I thought 'Girls Gone Wild' was like flashing, and I thought I would flash them and be done. And so when I'm walking to the bus, that's all I'm thinking is going to happen."
At first she felt comfortable, she says. Inebriated and excited, she says she was led to the back of the bus, to a small bedroom. The double bed, with its neatly folded iridescent purple sheets, takes up most of the room. A flat-screen TV faces the bed, and cabinets are filled with remote controls, lubricants, condoms, sex toys in plastic bags, baby oil, a DVD called "How to be a Player" and a clipboard full of waivers for girls to sign. A small bathroom is off to the side, with a half-sized shower with faux marble tiling, and on the floor of the shower is a crate holding cheap and fruity-flavored rum, whiskey, tequila and Kool-Aid.
Footage from that night shows a close-up of Szyszka's driver's license, proving she's not a minor. The camera then captures Szyszka lying on the bed. Her nails are chipped, her eyes coated with makeup. Following a camerman's instructions, she shows her breasts and says, "Girls Gone Wild." She seems shy but willing. She smiles. The unseen cameraman asks her to take off her shirt, her skirt, then her underwear. She sprawls on the bed, her legs open. At his suggestion, she masturbates with a dildo, saying repeatedly that it hurts but also feels good. Francis enters the room at certain points and you hear his voice, low and flirtatious, telling her, "You are so adorable." When she says she's a virgin, he responds: "Great. You won't be after my cameraman gets done with you."
When I talk to Szyszka seven days later, she says she "didn't quite realize" she was being filmed. "But I didn't care because I was drunk and who cares?" Then she adds: "It didn't feel good to me at all, but I was totally faking it because I was on 'Girls Gone Wild.'"
Eventually, Szyszka says, Francis told the cameraman to leave and pushed her back on the bed, undid his jeans and climbed on top of her. "I told him it hurt, and he kept doing it. And I keep telling him it hurts. I said, 'No' twice in the beginning, and during I started saying, 'Oh, my god, it hurts.' I kept telling him it hurt, but he kept going, and he said he was sorry but kissed me so I wouldn't keep talking.
Afterward, she says, Francis cleaned them both off with a paper towel and told her to get dressed. Then, she says, he opened the door and told the cameraman to come back, saying, "She's not a virgin anymore".
Szyszka says Francis told her that what happened had to stay between them. She says she agreed, and they walked to the front of the bus. Szyszka remembers that one of the crew returned her driver's license. Another asked if she wanted to hang out on the bus. She declined, she says, but asked for three pairs of "booty short" underwear that Francis had promised her for appearing on camera. "They gave me a weird look like that was too much," Szyszka recalls. "They were, like, 'Three of them?' and I was, like, 'Yeah, three.'"
Within days, Szyszka says, she told her father, who was angry about what she said had happened but kept quiet at her request. A month after the incident, she says, she told her sister and mother.
She's confused, she admits, about what happened. She feels guilty, she says, for getting herself into the situation in the first place. She says she never would have undressed for the cameras if she hadn't been completely drunk. And she is adamant that she said "no" to Francis. She says she's haunted by that night.
"I feel like it was planned," she says. "Sometimes I'm driving along, and I think about it and all of a sudden feel weird."
Six weeks later and Claire rings Joe Francis about the incident. He denies that he had sex with anyone that night.
"If you print that, I will [expletive] sue the [expletive] out of you. If you print that, baby, you just put the nail in your own coffin," he tells me. "You are a [expletive expletive]. You decided to blast me . . . You are a [expletive] bitch . . . I will get my last laugh on you. I will get you."
His lawyer later confirms in an email that Francis and Szyszka has consensual sex.
The
full article is in The LA Times.
