(Those charges, for which he was found guilty in 2013, stem from a 2011 incident in which he met three recent college graduates at a bar, took them to his Bel-Air home, prevented them from leaving his vehicle, grabbed one girl’s hair and throat and slammed her head on the floor.) For years, Francis dodged or settled numerous lawsuits and skipped out of jail time for a misdemeanor assault and false imprisonment conviction in Los Angeles by fleeing to his resort home in Mexico. Lack of accountability appears to be a running theme for Francis. (The alleged assault was first reported in a 2006 Los Angeles Times profile in which he also physically assaults the 29-year-old female journalist.) Though she went to police, “nothing to this day has ever been done about it,” Jannel says in the film. (Despite years of legal battles, DVDs featuring her are still being sold.)Ī woman in her mid-30s named Jannel alleges that Francis, whom she trusted because he was a celebrity associated with such figures as Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton, fed her shots, manipulated her into masturbating on camera, and raped her in the back of the Girls Gone Wild tour bus. Another participant, Tabitha, says she was 17 and drunk when she was talked into a wet T-shirt contest five years later, she found herself an unwitting poster girl of Girls Gone Wild. Some, such as Nichole, who appears in the documentary, did not even know she was being taped. They featured girls, sometimes underage and manipulated into commercial releases while drunk, performing sexual acts on themselves or each other under blatant pressure from Francis. “And there are people whose lives are still being impacted.”Īs the film recounts through in-person interviews with former Girls Gone Wild producers and staff and copious footage, the tapes themselves were dubiously sourced and financed. “Behind the fun and the wet T-shirt competitions and this sort of faux feminist liberation – flashing your breasts for the camera – lives were being ruined,” the film’s director, Katinka Blackford Newman, told the Guardian. The 84-minute film, part of TNT’s Rich and Shameless anthology, digs into the queasy popularity of Girls Gone Wild and assembles a deluge of evidence suggesting that Francis, a fixture of mid-aughts gossip blogs, was a serial physical and emotional abuser. The anything-goes raunch and eye-popping infomercials also (barely) masked something much more sinister and damaging, according to a new documentary, Girls Gone Wild Exposed. (Nor was it without controversy at the time.) Francis dominated the soft-core porn market in the early internet days millions of people purchased footage of the girls – often barely over 18 and sometimes younger, predominantly white, thin and blonde – getting badgered by cameramen to take more shots, take their tops off, make out with their friends, use sex toys on themselves.
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