Girls Gone Wild and the collapse of an X-rated empire

13:35The collapse of Girls Gone Wild

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud.

Though unscripted shows have existed in some form since the dawn of television, the turn of the millennium marked the moment when reality TV graduated from a novelty to the norm. 

From the voyeuristic drama of Big Brother to the pressure-cooker quiz-show tension of Who Wants to be a Millionaire to the desert-island Olympics of Survivor, television audiences and network executives alike fully embraced the idea that watching ordinary people thrust into extraordinary circumstances could be just as entertaining as the most expensive, star-studded Hollywood blockbusters. 

Around this time, a young TV production assistant named Joe Francis came up with a novel idea: take the guerilla video aesthetic popularized by unscripted programs like COPS, and add a whole lotta gratuitous nudity.

A fixture of late-night-TV commercial breaks and pre-Google porn searches, Francis' Girls Gone Wild operation hocked low-budget VHS tapes and DVDs of attractive young women on spring break doffing their tops and engaging in other risque activities for leering cameramen. By divesting porn of its cliched pizza-delivery-guy plotlines and showcasing girl-next-door types more wholesome than the typical glammed-up X-rated star, Girls Gone Wild had become a multi-million dollar empire by the early 2000s. 

But the company's meteoric rise gave way to a disastrous crash spurred by criminal investigations into Francis' business activities and lawsuits from women who claimed Girls Gone Wild crews filmed them while they were still minors. The advent of free streaming sites like Pornhub drove the nails further into the coffin — in 2013, Girls Gone Wild filed for bankruptcy.

Since then, Joe Francis has largely stayed out of the spotlight, quietly enjoying the spoils of his riches in his current home of Punta Mita, Mexico. However, an ongoing custody battle with his ex-partner Abbey Wilson has brought Francis out of hiding, and he recently agreed to his first media interview in years. 

Journalist Scaachi Koul flew down to Francis' Mexican villa for a nine-hour conversation, an experience she calls "the strangest interview I've ever done in my career." The result — as documented in her 10,000-word must-read feature for HuffPost — is an epic, stranger-than-fiction saga rife with the sort of reprehensible behaviour, colourful characters, and unsettled beefs that would make for, well, a good reality-TV series. For this extended podcast edition of Commotion, Elamin sat down with Scaachi to get the story behind the story. Here is an excerpt of their conversation. 

Content warning: this interview contains mature subject matter and discussions of sexual misconduct 

Elamin: I've known that you've been working on this story for some time, literally for like a year, and now it's finally here. You start your piece with this opening line: "For women, culture is split into two eras: before you could flash your breasts on camera during spring break for a modicum of fame, and after. For that, you can thank Joe Francis." Set the stage here: Who was Joe Francis back then?

Scaachi: Back then, Joe Francis was a scion of industry. When he launched Girls Gone Wild in the late-'90s, it very quickly became a behemoth within the porn industry. Joe understood something about male sexuality that it took a lot of other people a really long time to figure out: He liked the idea of the approachable, cute girl next door doing something that would make her father really disappointed in her. So he figured that out, and he monetized it. Within the first few years of Girls Gone Wild, he made a profit of about $20 million, which is enormous for what is effectively a call-in company. You used to get these ads on late-night TV. I remember them playing on Channel 8 in Alberta really, really late at night, and you would have to call and then you would be added to a subscription service for a VHS and then they would come to your house, and it's just hours of girls flashing the camera. It was a very successful model for a long time until porn became democratized.

Elamin: In your piece, you talk about how he takes credit for inventing reality TV, because he used to work a little bit on some reality shows, and then he takes the same model and he says, "I couldn't believe anybody else wasn't doing this." To me, that is the part where all of sexuality in the 21st-century got transformed, because of this guy. What did you want to understand about him specifically?

Scaachi: I wanted to talk to Joe specifically about a legal case he had in Panama City Beach, Florida, about 20 years ago. Joe had been talking about this case for 20 years and had been talking about how he had been railroaded there, and he has so many legal issues against him, so it was really interesting that this was the one that he was still hanging his hat on 20 years later. You know, there's still active litigation around Joe Francis around a lot of other cases. He's in a very messy custody battle with his ex-partner, Abbey Wilson. But for some reason [he was still upset about] this arrest that happened 20 years ago — that yielded very little, in fact. Joe was put in county jail for about a month, but the charges laid against him criminally were minimal compared to what they were investigating him for. And then the civil trial that happened a couple years later, he won, free and clear, from an all-female jury. He paid nothing in damages. And yet, he was talking so much about it, and so I wanted to find out what had happened and why he was so obsessed with this case.

Elamin: So you get on the plane, you're on your way to meet Joe Francis... describe the setting: You walk in… what happens?

Scaachi: Joe lives in a gated community in Punta Mita. He owns this sprawling, tens-of-thousands-of-square-feet mansion that has several little properties on it. And so we pull up and it's shrouded in beautiful greenery, and he's got this big fence and then you go in, and it's huge, it's palatial, it's enormous. Joe has a 30-person full-time staff there all the time. There's a landline in every room. And on the landline, every landline has a button that says "ANYTHING," so you can hit it and ask for anything you want. This is a man who lives in paradise and is still kvetching about this thing that happened in 2003. It's exiled rich-person sort of stuff. Joe shows up very late, and proceeds to have the strangest interview I've ever done in my career. I don't think I'll have one as strange ever again. It was nine hours, and I got a few answers, but I left with a lot more questions, for sure.

Elamin: Why do you think Joe would want to speak to you?

Scaachi: Joe lives in a reality that Joe Francis has built. And in his reality, he should be vindicated. And he has a story to tell. And if only someone would take the time to listen to him, he'd be able to tell the truth. And so we offered him lots of time.

Elamin: What was the most egregious thing that he said to you?

Scaachi: We talked a lot about the allegations against him from his ex-partner. She has alleged that he's abused her quite viciously: He's been verbally abusive, he restricted her movements in Mexico and he made it impossible for her to leave. She has since left; she took their children and she relocated to Oklahoma where she, at present, appears to have custody, but that might be sort of up in the air and up in the courts. But, in the course of that conversation, he was talking about her claims and saying they were all false. And then he said, "Well, you can't rape your partner, you can't rape your spouse.' And I had to tell him that, "Yeah, you super-can." And he said, "Oh, you can? Okay."

Elamin: Can we just go back a little bit and talk about the court case [in 2003]? So he's fully cleared in this court case, but he's still talking about it. What is this case and what makes you so interested in it?

Scaachi: There's two parts of it. There was a massive criminal investigation into Joe and into his business in Panama City in 2003. Bay County inexplicably did this investigation as a RICO case. They were looking into him for racketeering. This is the kind of stuff that they were doing with mobsters and gangsters — this is Al Capone stuff. RICO basically allows you a wider berth in your investigation, so you can kind of do more if you're trying to articulate that there's some sort of criminal conspiracy going on. But the reality is that you need several predicate cases in order to file those charges and they didn't have enough. There were issues with how the search warrant was exacted. The Bay County officials believe that Joe Francis had a lot of cocaine in his possession and they didn't find any. What they ended up finding was that he had prescription medication for anxiety. 

It was strange that Bay County did it this way, because they did know that Joe and his crew had filmed minors. It was clear that, in their time in Panama City, they had caught several minors in their footage and were able to identify them. But because they botched the case by running at this like a RICO case, the whole thing falls apart. Joe ends up pleading out no contest to several charges, including child abuse. But he ends up with time served in county jail, and nothing really happens to him. He comes back to Panama City a couple years later for the civil case — two girls had claimed that his crew had filmed them in a shower performing a sexual act with each other and they were teenagers. And then there were another two teenagers who said that Joe Francis gave them $50 each to give him a hand job in the adjoining room. And these girls are 13, 15, 16, 17 — they're really, really young. And so the civil case goes to trial, and it's a thorny case. It takes a couple of days, the jury is all-women, all locals from Bay County. And though the court found that Joe Francis was ultimately liable for what had happened, they awarded the girls $0 in damages.

Elamin: I do want to be clear about this: This is a man who was convicted, served time, and there are all these accounts of underage girls who say that their lives were ruined [by Girls Gone Wild]. Does Joe Francis seem to care at all? Does he show any kind of remorse whatsoever?

Scaachi: Joe Francis maintains he has never done anything wrong or illegal ever, in any context. He claims that if [underaged girls were filmed], it was the work of bad cameramen who he had hired. There were times in our interview where Joe would talk at length about how Mark Zuckerberg would not be held responsible if somebody posted a video of a mass shooting on Facebook. But that is not how the internet works. It is not how Facebook works. And it's not how Girls Gone Wild worked. Joe Francis was that company and every decision that happened there, generally speaking, seemed to go through him. 

So even if he wasn't present during the filming of minors, there were clear issues with the chain-of-custody around how they handled consent and age. Not all those girls were signing waivers. Most of those girls don't have their IDs. You have to keep in mind: They're on the beach, they're partying, they're running around with their friends, they're drinking. They have a flip-phone and maybe a credit card, but they're not really running around with their full ID and their long-form birth certificate. And these guys show up very casually dressed wearing a lanyard and holding a little camera — it's not a big production — and they ask if they can tape you. And you can see it in the tape: Not only is there often a lot of discomfort from those girls, but some of them are sort of just like, "okay, I guess you can do it, but don't put me on the cover, don't put me in an ad." This is pre-internet. They're not thinking of the fact that this stuff lives in perpetuity forever.

It's the most depressing story I've written in a long time, in large part because it still feels apt and it still feels accurate and still feels like it's happening. And the attitudes that you could see in Bay County even back then are still how a lot of people feel now around those girls — like, it's their fault.

Elamin: You use the descriptor that Joe was a "cultural gale-force wind." I think we're sort of living in the post-Joe Francis world. Where do you see his influence now?

Scaachi: Oh my God, you can see it all over the place. Joe Francis built Girls Gone Wild during a time when the internet wasn't as open as it is now. This is pre-Instagram, this is pre-Facebook, this is pre-Twitter, this is pre-Only Fans, this is pre-Pornhub. It's before somebody could commodify their own body online the way that they wanted to do it. And so if you had any interest in engaging in that kind of sex work, the only way to do it was to go through an arbiter like Joe Francis. So not only does Joe Francis have to find you attractive, but you have to try to navigate that space with Joe. But it's also worth pointing out that Joe's not going after people who are particularly interested in sex work, he was going after women and girls who were just hanging out on the beach on spring break. It wasn't that these girls were professionals; it's that they were 18 years old, they're coeds, they're vacationing, they're a little drunk, they're vulnerable, and they're pretty. That was part of the appeal.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with Scaachi Koul produced by Jessica Low.