The Madness of Joe Francis: "I thought we were all just having fun. I was wrong." (31 page)

“I sat there and thought about it as everything else was going on,” she said later.

She told her fellow jurors, “I’m gonna tell you something, to y’all right now, I am very straightforward. I will tell you what I think and I’m not easily swayed. I think there’s more to this story than we’ll probably ever know, but I believe everybody deserves their day in court.”

She’d watched Francis closely as he gave his opening. She didn’t mind his nervous energy, his sudden shifts in topic. She told the other ladies, “I can’t say I would be any different than him.”

The woman from Wassau looked over and agreed. They knew they were both on the same wavelength. But Juror 5, the school teacher, instantly disliked Francis and she thought the jury-room discussions should wait until deliberations.

“We’re not discussing anything,” Juror 6 said. “We’re talking freely. I believe I have the right to say what I think.”

The division between jurors 5 and 6 remained until the last hour of the last day of trial.

“At that point, I knew that was my number one trouble right there,” Juror 6 said later of the school teacher.

.

Chapter 34

“I object”

S
elander approached the podium and told Smoak his first items of evidence were three plea agreements from the 2006 federal records keeping case against Francis, Mantra and MRA Holdings.

Selander made the mistake of saying the documents had been stipulated to, essentially saying both sides allowed them into evidence.

“Stipulated? I wasn’t present for any discussions about stipulation. I object,” Francis said, standing up and slapping his notepad on the table.

Smoak was confused, too, and Selander, when he was able to say anything around Francis’ constant complaints, tried to backtrack.

“Plea agreements,” he practically shouted. “Plea agreements! If I said ‘stipulated’, I misspoke.”

Pontikes had gone over these agreements the day before and Smoak had ruled they were admissible. But Francis objected anyway, saying the agreements didn’t list any of the plaintiffs in this case. He would argue that over and over.

Pontikes took the podium to explain, again, why she believed the documents were evidence. Yes, there was no mention by name of any of these girls. But, she said, the plea agreements list by name the video titles that plaintiffs B, J and S were featured in. Later in the trial, she said, these plaintiffs would confirm that they were in those videos.

In addition, Plaintiff B’s incident was listed by date.

Smoak told Francis that the pleas would be admitted as long as the plaintiffs could tie them in later. If they failed to do that, the judge said, the pleas would come out of evidence.

Francis wasn’t satisfied with that. Selander was going to read portions of three pleas, Exhibits 1, 2 and 5. Each time he started a new document, Francis objected on every ground he could think of: relevance, hearsay, time, incompleteness.

Each time, Selander and Francis would be called to sidebar and Pontikes would be summoned to tell Smoak again why the particular document was tied to the case.

Every time Pontikes spoke, as soon as the first words came out of her mouth, Francis would spin around on her and start whispering angrily. His face showed the loathing he felt for her. The muscles in his jaws would bunch like walnuts and the cords in his neck would stand out like twigs.

“Where is Plaintiff B in this document, Miss Pontikes?” Francis spat out during one argument.

“Mr. Francis, you don’t talk to her. You talk to me,” Smoak said. Pontikes pointedly ignored Francis, who physically bowed to Smoak and apologized.

But the minute she started speaking again he turned on her again: “No, no!”

“Mr. Francis, you will be quiet,” Smoak said, his voice rising. “This is fair warning, you’re going to get yourself into trouble.”

“This is fraud on the court,” Francis insisted, bowing and bobbing, his hands clasped in front of him. He was trying to get on eye level, and make eye contact, with Smoak. But there were five people, not including the judge who was on the other side of the bench, packed into this small area and Francis’ bobbing and weaving kept bringing him in contact with the people standing beside him. He’d bounce off the judge’s judicial assistant, apologize, take a step away from her and collide with Bailiff George Dobos.

Francis would apologize every time, but Dobos was annoyed and at one point he just pointed his finger at Francis.

Francis told Smoak again, “This is about the biggest error in this trial. You’re going to get it reversed. If you want to allow them in, fine.”

“Mr. Francis, I have made my ruling. There will be no more objections.”

That didn’t stop Francis from making numerous objections every time a new document was introduced.

Selander spent the morning reading in the pleas.

When it was Francis’ turn to address the plea agreements, he wanted to go through every page and show the absence of any direct reference to the plaintiffs in the case. Smoak wouldn’t allow it. He kept saying that Francis could only read portions of the documents that Selander had left out and that Francis thought were significant.

He began reading from one document and Selander asked him which plea it was and what page.

“I’m reading from Exhibit C,” Francis said, waiving the document at him.

“Exhibit C?” Selander asked.

“These are your exhibits,” Francis said, making it sound like Selander should know what Exhibit C was.

“They are exhibits 1, 2 and 5,” Selander said slowly.

“Oh, Kristen handed me this,” Francis sputtered, indicating the court clerk.

He ended up reading two paragraphs. He emphasized in the first that the girls had dealt with Girls Gone Wild cameramen, not Francis directly. In the second paragraph, he read where he’d paid a fine including restitution for the record-keeping infraction.

They were the two issues he needed to address, but getting there was so convoluted, so painful, that the message might have been lost on the jurors.

.

Chapter 35

Plaintiff B

A
fter lunch, Plaintiff B took the stand.

Pontikes went to the podium to do the direct examination. “Your honor, the plaintiffs call Plaintiff B to the stand,” she said into the microphone. Suddenly, Pontikes’ midwestern accent was amplified and she was talking so slowly and so carefully that she sounded every bit like the Church Lady or the women from Saturday Night Live’s NPR skit.

“Could you introduce yourself for the record?” Pontikes said to Plaintiff B, who hesitated, clearly thinking about how she should identify herself.

“I’m Plaintiff B,” she finally said, sounding like she’d answered a trick question.

“Plaintiff B, we’ll take this nice and slow and if you need a break just let us know,” Pontikes said, leaning into the microphone.

Francis snorted from his seat, leaned back and covered his grin with a hand. A woman on the jury followed him with her eyes without turning her head. She tried to keep all expression off her face, but she definitely seemed irritated by Francis’ antics.

Plaintiff B was now 26 years old. She played with her black wavy hair almost constantly, fluffing it, bunching it at the back, moving it from one side of her neck to the other. When she got upset, she’d bend her head down into a hand that she’d run up and into that mass of hair until she gripped the top.

She was pretty in a sharp, birdlike way. Her arched black eyebrows and downturned lips both pointed to her beak-like nose. Her eyes were her best feature: large, dark and intelligent.

When she talked, her hands were in constant motion, sometimes looking like she was clawing at her chest, sometimes reaching toward the jurors and sometimes plowing through her hair.

Her looks and her movements were noted by Juror 6, who instantly thought of B as both hiding something and being a spoiled rich girl who “got caught.”

Pontikes led B through her childhood, which was “pretty normal.” B said she was academically driven, hoping for a perfect 4.0 to compliment her athletic endeavors and time on the student council.

Her favorite subject was geometry.

She was accepted to her top college and hoped to major either in communications or veterinary medicine.

But all that changed when, in March 2002, she took a spring break from her senior year in high school and, as she put it, traveled to “Panama City Beach, Florida, USA.”

She was a good Catholic girl and hadn’t done much drinking in her life. But on the night of March 31, 2002, when a stranger approached her and a girlfriend on the beach and invited them to a party at a nearby hotel room, they accepted.

She said she knew nothing about Girls Gone Wild at that time and had no idea what she was getting into. She lowered her head and ran a hand into her hair, gripping a mass at the top.

“His definition of a party and mine were very different,” she said. There were two “older people” sitting on a couch, but B and her friend stayed anyway.

“In hindsight, they were watching us, offering us drinks, watching us get more intoxicated as the night went on,” she said. “They were asking us to take off our clothes for the camera. Pouring us more drinks. Our inhibitions were lowering.

“I thought, ‘We’re not going to do this. We’re not going to do this.’ I’m also convinced that they had put something in the drink that night.”

Francis blew out a big sigh, stood and said, “your honor, objection, hearsay. This is ridiculous.”

Smoak called a sidebar and took a minute to explain to Francis what hearsay was. The judge told Francis he had incorrectly used that objection three times already.

“So what is the correct objection?” Francis asked, meaning to B’s statement about the drugs. “Opinion? Is the correct objection ‘opinion’? She’s just stating an opinion, there’s no, foundation? Lack of foundation?”

“No.”

“Because like, your honor, if she just keeps spouting off, ‘I think I was drunk,’ these are just ridiculous things. That’s never come up in anything, any deposition or anything.”

“She testified to that in her deposition,” Pontikes said.

Francis was getting himself worked up, gesturing and bobbing. Each word coming out through clenched jaws.

“Mr. Francis,” Smoak said, “take a deep breath.”

“The jury can hear us, your honor,” Pontikes said.

“I think it’s fair. People can testify about how they were feeling,” Smoak said.

“Your honor,” Francis pressed, “but that’s like, come on, accusing … that’s accusing somebody of a crime because it’s your opinion.”

“Mr. Francis, that bell has already been rung without objection.”

“No, I objected. I just objected on the wrong …”

“No. It would be fair game for cross-examination.”

“OK. All right. I’ll do that. OK. What is the correct objection? So I know. So I don’t make the same mistake and say hearsay. Is ‘opinion’ a correct objection? Is that a basis for an objection, ‘opinion?’”

Pontikes objected to Francis asking for a legal lesson. “Mr. Francis is more than able to bring his own counsel.”

“I’m representing myself.”

“He could have had an attorney on these things. I understand the court is trying to be helpful. But this is not the case of an indigent defendant.”

Smoak told Francis to simply say, objection. “Then we’ll come up here and you tell me why you’re objecting. I’ll put a title on it one way or another.”

“OK, cool. Cool. Good. All right. So, objection …”

Smoak explained that opinion testimony can be objected to, but there are times when opinion testimony is allowed.

“There are certain things, just ordinary daily things that lay people are entitled to express an opinion about,” Smoak said.

“But, I mean, like ‘I was drugged.’ Is that … she’s not a doctor. I mean, come on. Like you said …”

“Somebody can say, ‘I’ve had alcohol before. Alcohol never affected me this way. I was starting to worry that maybe I had been drugged.’”

“She didn’t say that.”

“That’s probably fair game.”

“I’ll have her on cross.”

The sidebar broke up and Pontikes went back to questioning B.

“OK Plaintiff B, you were talking about the fact that you had some alcohol that you believed contained drugs.”

“There was no toxicology report to prove that, but I was convinced. It was just completely out of character. It’s not something I would have done on a regular basis: have a couple of drinks, take off my clothes and perform sexual acts.”

Also, she said she could only remember bits of the night past a certain point. She didn’t remember telling anyone she was 18, or even being asked how old she was.

She didn’t remember anything from the sexual encounter with her friend. She did have a vague recollection of signing some paperwork and then walking home on the beach.

The next morning she had an extra $100 that she couldn’t account for.

She said she’s never seen the sex portion of the tape that eventually made it into two “Girls Gone Wild” videos that were sold internationally. Rick Bateman, she said, had shown her the first part of the raw footage during her deposition and she’d “crawled into the fetal position and could not get off the floor.”

Shortly into her freshman year in college, she said, the DVD came out and word spread quickly that she was in it. Suddenly, she was receiving phone calls from friends and relatives, who were routinely calling her whore and slut.

Her older brother, she said, called her a disgrace to the family.

Distraught, she’d called her father, hoping that he’d allow her to come home for a time. During that conversation, her 49-year-old father suffered a massive heart attack and died.

“I don’t know how much he knew,” she said. “I had to go bury my father on top of all this.”

“Let’s just take this real slow,” Pontikes said carefully into the microphone. Francis leaned back in his chair and smirked. “Do you remember what you said to your father?”

“Not at this moment.” She said all she was seeking when she called her father was refuge, a break from the constant stress.