[imagesource: Peacock]

The man in the image above is Joe Francis, the brainchild of Girls Gone Wild, the infamous adult entertainment franchise that went bankrupt in 2013 after — as the new doccie shows — 15 years of selling videos exploiting girls and their bodies for money and entertainment.

The ever-widening lid is being lifted in the nasty naughts, hey?

Girls Gone Wild: The Untold Story is the new three-part docuseries that revisits the explosive cultural phenomenon of Girls Gone Wild—a collection of videos featuring young women flashing cameras, particularly during spring break. Through revealing interviews with former employees and women coerced as teenagers into performing on camera and relinquishing their rights, the series uncovers the dark truth behind the iconic brand.

Most fascinatingly, the series, which has premiered on Peacock already, also includes the first in-depth, in-person interview in nearly a decade with Joe himself. This is a big deal as the fugitive has been living in Mexico all this time after pleading “no contest” in a case connected to child abuse and prostitution charges connected to Girls Gone Wild.

Joe’s tight-knit connections with icons like the Kardashians and Ashton Kutcher during the peak of Girls Gone Wild firmly anchor his meteoric rise in a defining era—when reality TV was booming, and social media was still a distant storm on the horizon.

But journalist and co-executive producer Scaachi Koul’s nine hours of audio tapes from the interview, which were first used in her HuffPost piece in 2023, give unprecedented insight into a man who is still clinging to the fantasy of a legacy he has long fed anyone who will listen, notes Variety.

Somehow, he still calls himself the victim in all this, even as the lasting impact of Girls Gone Wild proves to be much darker than even previous investigations had presented.

“Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, but if you just start at the core, I will work with you, however many hours, and peel back every layer and answer every fucking question and show you every document,” Francis said to Koul at the beginning of their interview. “I would love for you to be able to nail me … I want that to be your goal. Nail me. Fucking nail me.”

Knowing Joe, he always gets what he asks for.

Rolling Stone uncovers a few of the more insane takeaways from the docuseries, including how many of the girls taped for Girl Gone Wild were underage. As a result, Joe and his staffers were arrested.

In 2003, a group of underage women who took their tops off and performed sexual acts in a Girls Gone Wild video in Panama City, Florida, reported the incident to the local police. Police arrested Francis on 22 criminal accounts, including charges of promoting the sexual performance of children. Francis pleaded no contest. While the judge sentenced him to 339 days in jail, Francis was credited for prior jail time he’d spent regarding a separate legal issue involving tax evasion.

Despite numerous women in the documentary claiming they were coerced into performing sexual acts on camera—acts they never signed up for—Francis unapologetically states in the series that he feels no remorse for the women featured in Girls Gone Wild videos.

When Koul asks Francis if he felt bad for the girls who were underage and participated in the videos, Francis doesn’t hesitate to respond, “No.”

“No, because I don’t believe they were victimized,” he adds. “They victimized me.”

Koul reminds Francis, “They were pretty young”.

“I could always sense when I felt like what I had to say did not matter and I very much got that vibe from this cameraman,” one woman shared in a clip. “I felt like if I didn’t comply, things could go really badly for me.”

Another major takeaway is that some women were allegedly pressured into hardcore sex acts.

Though Girls Gone Wild was marketed as videos of girls flashing their breasts, many of the tapes included hardcore sex scenes that some women claim they were coerced into filming, allegedly on the famous Girls Gone Wild bus.

“Whatever they could say, they would say it to get you on that bus,” said Janet, one of the many women who spoke out in the docuseries.

Another woman, Danielle, recounted how a cameraman blocked the door to her room, pressuring her to participate in sex acts, while a third woman, Jordan, claimed crew members told the girls they expected something in return for providing them with alcohol.

In other words, Joe’s employees were encouraged to exploit women as much as possible, and this has been proved. In leaked audio from a 2005 training session for Girls Gone Wild employees, high-ranking employees can be heard encouraging prospective employees to get women on camera having sex with each other.

“We want to avoid what we see a lot of, which is just the camera goes on, the girl flashes the camera, the camera goes off, and that’s all we got. We go to the tape and it’s like, ‘That can’t be all we’ve got,’ ” said one person, described as the VP of Mantra Films.

“That’s not what we want,” they added. “We want a longer scene.”

Consent was not even a word that crossed these people’s minds.

The individual also applauded those who can get girls to expose themselves who had previously expressed reluctance to do so, adding, “Don’t take no for an answer.”

It gets wilder. Check out the documentary on Peacock or wherever you get your sneaky streams.

[source:rollingstone&variety]