The Madness of Joe Francis: "I thought we were all just having fun. I was wrong."
Read The Madness of Joe Francis: "I thought we were all just having fun. I was wrong." Online
Authors: David Angier
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Cover photograph by Robert Cooper and The Panama City News Herald.
Copyright © 2012 David L Angier
All rights reserved.
ISBN-10: 0615705804
EAN-13: 9780615705804
eBook ISBN: 978-1-62346-856-9
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To the girls who make my life a little more wild:
Angela, Rachel, Vivi, Chris, Heather,
Nica and Aubrey.
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Contents
Chapter 1: “I thought we were all just having fun.”
Chapter 2: “I look forward to seeing how this resolves”
Chapter 3: “Girls Gone Wild, Whoo!”
Chapter 5: “I’ll be your lawyer today”
Chapter 6: “Insidious and depraved”
Chapter 8: “Aaron Dyer was giddy”
Chapter 9: Respect for the law
Chapter 12: “Judges gone wild”
Chapter 21: Beginning of the end.
Chapter 27: A Spring Break trial
Chapter 30: A fool for a client
Chapter 31: “Hi, I’m Joe Francis”
Chapter 32: “Ladies of the Jury”
Chapter 38: “Mr. Francis, you are out of control”
Chapter 39: “I was vulnerable”
Chapter 40: “Does that make you a prostitute?”
Chapter 42: “Money grubbing whores”
Chapter 43: “Big. Fat. Mistake”
Chapter 45: Dr. Leslie Lebowitz
Chapter 48: “Tactical disaster”
Chapter 51: “We’re gonna be porn stars”
Chapter 55: “I don’t appreciate being manipulated”
Chapter 56: “Extreme and outrageous conduct”
Chapter 57: “Who gets the money?”
Chapter 60: The end of the beginning
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“I thought we were all just having fun.”
T
he seed that would take root in Joe Francis’ mind and blossom into a full and flowering madness was planted on a beautiful winter morning with a phone call.
He had just parked his car and was walking across the lot of Paramount Studios in Los Angeles to do an interview with Entertainment Tonight, when his cell phone vibrated in his pocket.
He recognized his publicist, Bill Horn, and the humor in Horn’s voice.
“You’re gonna love this,” Horn said. “I just got a call that there’s some wacky mayor out in Panama City Beach who is running his mouth and saying all this stuff about Girls Gone Wild and how he’s gonna put your cameramen in jail if they get girls to lift their shirts in public.”
The words “wacky mayor” immediately resonated with Francis. It was the type of phrase that got the media’s attention. He intended to use that, and a wide, crooked smile broke across his tanned face.
He had a scheduled Pay-per-View event in Panama City Beach, and Francis immediately thought of the marketing potential of a public battle with Southern officials.
The threat didn’t bother him; he never for a minute thought the mayor was serious. Politicians were in the marketing business just like him. They were constantly on the lookout for high-profile squabbles to get their righteously indignant faces before the television cameras and win over conservative voters.
“He was the perfect character, the perfect adversary,” Francis said years later. “I thought we were all just having fun. I was wrong.”
Francis had taken marketing to a new level with his Girls Gone Wild brand and late-night infomercials, making him a millionaire in his mid-20s. Never before had a porn empire been built through the use of volunteer actors. He paid girls with T-shirts, cheap plastic beads and the occasional hundred-dollar bill to star in his videos, then sold hundreds of thousands of the DVDs for $19.95 a piece.
He’d been sued, but usually won. He sometimes paid out six or seven figures in settlements, but even that was chump-change compared to what he was bringing in.
Francis had recently won a federal case in Central Florida in which a judge had made it clear that public nudity, without sexual activity, was not illegal.
Francis felt untouchable.
But Francis wasn’t entirely stable. He’d struggled with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder since he was a child and was borderline bipolar, meaning he experienced wide mood swings.
He was personable and funny, in a manic sort of way, but quick to anger as well.
“Things always seem to go a lot smoother when Joe’s not around,” a cameraman would say after the cameraman’s arrest in Panama City.
Years later, another cameraman, Ryan Simkin, described Francis as: “a child molester; jail-baiting pervert; pimp; sick bastard; sleaze-peddler; tax cheat; rapist; sleazehole; the epitome of a true misogynist, coked-out amoral direct marketer; violent thug; juvenile smut-peddler; sexual predator; one of the 50 most loathsome people in America; and the Douche of the Decade.”
The last one wasn’t one thought up by Simkin. Francis had won the title “Douche of the Decade” from voters on a website poll.
Radio talk show host Howard Stern once asked him, “So you’re thinking there’s money in this nudity thing?”
Francis told Stern he’d gotten his start selling the video “Banned from Television,” spliced together scenes of death shot by television reporters that were too graphic for mainstream TV.
“‘Banned from Television’, that was my start. You remember when the lady got hit by the train?” Francis said.
“Oh yeah, I love that video,” Stern said. “You are so rich now from, let me get the name right, the ‘Girls Gone Wild’ videos and from the chick getting hit by the train?”
Francis was making $10-20 million a year, and Girls Gone Wild was fast on its way to becoming a cultural phenomenon with the words “Gone Wild” being used to describe any out-of-control situation.
On April 2, 2003, two months after that fateful phone call, Joe Francis was arrested in Panama City and charged with racketeering. He would be jailed in 2007 by a federal judge in Panama City, and suffer a crying, screaming breakdown that had two psychologists predicting a complete mental collapse.
The problem for the rest of us was knowing when Joe Francis actually did lose his mind.
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“I look forward to seeing how this resolves”
“M
ayor, let me start right with you,” Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren said to Panama City Beach Mayor Lee Sullivan. “You don’t want them in your city, do you?”
“No ma’am, I don’t,” Sullivan growled. It was March 7, 2003, and Sullivan, a Vietnam War vet, former police chief and future television news commentator, had perfected his simple, deep, gravely Southern drawl and no-nonsense answer.
Sullivan, Joe Francis and lawyers Tom Julin and Joe Tessitore had agreed to appear on Van Susteren’s “On the Record” to discuss Girls Gone Wild’s plans to film Spring Break 2003 in Panama City Beach. Sullivan had been outspoken about the pressure he was putting on local cops to aggressively enforce public nudity ordinances in regards to Girls Gone Wild.
“The concept of having a commercial peep show operated in our community is not only offensive to our community, to our industry and to our government, but it is also against the law and we will not tolerate it,” Sullivan said.
“Is your position that it is immoral, what this company does?” Van Susteren asked.
“No, ma’am, it’s illegal,” Sullivan said. “It may be immoral to some. The issue for us as a community and an industry is it is illegal.”
“It’s not illegal at all,” Julin said.
Public nudity was not against the law in Florida. The nudity had to be accompanied by a lewd or sexually suggestive act. A woman exposing her breasts to a cameraman was perfectly legal – even a minor. Francis maintained that they were just shooting a documentary.
“It’s a little farfetched to call it a documentary,” Van Susteren said. In 2004, the Court of Appeal of California would describe Girls Gone Wild as a “documentary videotape series.”
“What’s the difference between a girl, you know, in a bikini and a girl without a bikini?” Francis replied.
“Then why sign a waiver?” Sullivan countered.
Francis, ignoring the question, told Sullivan that a planned Pay-per-View Spring Break party was still going to be shot in Panama City Beach.
“And if the mayor thinks he’s going to stop us, he can come arrest me on stage,” Francis said. “He can come arrest me with Snoop Dogg, and he can put a bunch of half-naked girls in handcuffs as well because it’s going to happen.
“It’s probably worth the $19.99 on Thursday night to watch that happen,” he finished with a wide, lopsided grin.
“What a class act,” Sullivan snarled.
“Mr. Mayor, we’re not doing anything illegal,” Francis said. “My cameramen and myself will not be pushed around by a local tyrant, or his city police, who barely won an election by 90 votes.”
“Seven votes, my friend,” Sullivan said. “If you can count that high.”
Sullivan came to the Panama City Beach Police Department in 1970, when Northwest Florida was the state’s wild west. Biker gangs dominated the beach at certain times of the year and drug smugglers moved trade in shrimp boats along the mostly undeveloped coast.
Thirty years later, the coastline had added a skyline, but there were areas where the jungle still touched the waves. The Panhandle was called the “Forgotten Coast” mainly because developers had ignored it.
Sullivan, who was the youngest police chief in the state in 1977, joined the police department after being “shot twice and blown up once” in Vietnam.
“As bad as being shot is, it pales in comparison to being blown up,” he once told The Panama City News Herald.
Sullivan once stood on the hood of a police cruiser with a shotgun in hand and faced down a mob of Hell’s Angels. He called it a prayer session. He said he told the bikers that they would probably kill him that night, but he was sure to take a couple of them with him.
“Now, let’s pray,” he said, bowing his head. He says when he looked up, the bikers were leaving.
By the time Sullivan resolved to face down Girls Gone Wild his reputation had grown larger than the man himself. And Sullivan was a formidable man who always wore a cowboy hat pulled down low on his brow.
The hat was as much for image as it was to keep Sullivan’s sandy brown toupee from blowing away.
Sullivan ended his speech on Greta Van Susteren’s show by saying Francis was not welcome in Panama City Beach or anywhere in Bay County.
“He runs a commercial peep show and the community doesn’t welcome him, the businesses don’t welcome him and if he cares to take exception to that or if he thinks that he finds a welcome in any area of our community, he’s mistaken.”
“I look forward to seeing how this resolves,” Van Susteren finished with a smile.
