The Madness of Joe Francis: "I thought we were all just having fun. I was wrong." (28 page)

But Smoak put his foot down. The trial would only be about the sexual encounters that were at issue in the complaint.

“If anybody brings up (sexual history) you’ll probably go into custody,” Smoak growled. “There won’t be a fine, but you probably won’t be spending the night at the motel.”

Francis also wanted to keep out any mention of the default judgment against the corporations. He said if the jurors heard the corporations had no defense it would automatically prejudice him in their eyes.

“This is about Joe Francis versus A, B, C and D. If they hear that there’s been a default judgment as to the corporations it will infer guilt against me.”

That same issue had been argued more than a year ago and denied then. Smoak stayed consistent and denied it again. The trial would be about damages the corporations would have to pay, whether Francis was liable personally and how much, if anything, he would have to pay in damages.

Francis wouldn’t let it go and would continue the same objection through jury selection.

“All we have to tell them is, ‘it’s Joe Francis verses these four plaintiffs.’ At least that makes it fair, your honor. At least that starts us on even ground.”

Smoak stayed patient with Francis through each argument, but also stayed with his ruling. Now he was ready for the trial to begin. He called a recess for lunch, then told the sides to be ready to go again at 1.

“Could I have a little more time to prepare?” Francis asked.

“All right, we’ll reconvene at 1:15.”

“1:50?” Francis asked, scribbling something on a notepad.

“1:15,” came the answer in chorus from the plaintiffs lawyers.

Joe Francis burst out of the courtroom door. He was searching for Bubsey, who’d left the room ahead of him. He trotted into the hallway, hesitated and took a step to his right. He’d seen the three reporters who were talking on the couch in the hallway and he couldn’t stop his feet from taking him there.

“This is gonna be funnnn.”

“That’s what we’re all betting on.” News Herald reporter Chris Olwell said.

“Joe Francis represents himself in federal court, that’s a great headline for you guys.”

He introduced himself to Olwell and Chad Mira from Channel 7, then suddenly recalled why he’d come out in the hallway in the first place.

“Where’s my lawyer?”

Bailiff George Dobos told him that Bubsey was at his car. Bubsey had wasted no time in leaving the courtroom when dismissed and making a beeline for his car. His job here was done.

Francis turned and hit the button for the elevator.

“You have to go out this way,” Dobos said, indicating the stairs behind him.

“I’m just going downstairs,” Francis said, staying put by the elevator.

“I understand that, but you have to go out this way. This is the stairwell. It will take you outside and not through the lobby.”

“I need to find my lawyer,” Francis said, not quite grasping what Dobos was saying.

“I understand that,” Dobos said, his voice taking on that sharp edge that he gets after the first 10 seconds of dealing with someone he considers to be an idiot. “You have to go out this way.”

“But …”

“This way.”

“I’m just …”

“This way.”

Finally, Francis pried himself away from the elevator doors. He took two hesitant steps toward Dobos and stopped, a confused look refusing to leave his face.

“This way,” Dobos said again, this time sounding more like he was coaxing a cat out from under a couch.

Francis trotted past him, pushed open the door to the stairs and disappeared.

Thirty seconds later, a chime indicated the elevator had reached the second floor and the doors opened slowly to reveal Francis standing with his hands behind his back and a huge grin on his face.

“One of the bailiffs told me I had to come up the elevator.”

The stairwell had deposited him outside the courthouse. For him to get into a position where a bailiff would have told him to ride back up the elevator, Francis would have had to turn away from the parking lot, go back in the front door, past the metal detectors and into the lobby. All that in just seconds, but he hadn’t located Bubsey, his reason for going downstairs in the first place.

He edged out of the elevator and looked at Dobos who said nothing. Francis wasn’t supposed to be riding the elevator because the members of the jury pool were using it and the bailiffs didn’t want them mingling.

Francis jogged back to the stairwell door and rushed back down to find Bubsey.

.

Chapter 31

“Hi, I’m Joe Francis”

R
oss McCloy’s knees bounced as he sat at the plaintiffs’ table, giving away the only sign of his anxiety. His face, as always, was perfectly composed under his neatly combed wheat colored hair.

Across the aisle, Joe Francis was a twitching mass of energy. Even as he made notes on a legal pad, his eyebrows hitched up and down and his lips pursed and puckered. He was never entirely still, which did not go unnoticed by the people in the jury pool.

As the jury pool was led into the room, Francis would rise, turn to them with his hands behind his back and smile.

“How ya doin’?” he’d ask.

After the first group had been seated, Francis turned back to his table. He paused, smiled at the four reporters who’d been given seats next to the table. He straightened up, stood tall, grinned and shifted his shoulders. He looked like a confident 6-year-old boy preparing for his first recital, certain he was going to be smash.

Steph Watts, who had taken a seat with the reporters, said Francis had hired him as an assistant for the trial. He would do his best to take notes for Francis as he went about questioning the prospective jurors.

The rest of the pool, 50 people total, were brought in row-by-row. They were seated according to the chart that both sides had. The first 21 went into the jury box and a row of seven chairs on the floor in front of the box. The rest filled the gallery.

Smoak asked McCloy to introduce himself and his co-counsel. Then Francis got his turn.

“My name is Joe Francis. I actually started the Girls Gone Wild company. I’m representing myself today because my attorney’s father died Friday. I’m pretty sure I can win this case in two seconds once you guys see the tapes.”

“Mr. Francis,” Smoak said gently.

The judge then told the members of the panel that this case would be a little different because all the plaintiffs would remain anonymous.

He told them that the girls in this case were all minors when they had their encounters with Girls Gone Wild.

That drew a long sigh from Joe Francis, but he didn’t interrupt.

“The fact that they are proceeding anonymously should not weigh in favor of or against the plaintiffs.”

He went into a brief summation of the allegations and finished by saying that Francis denies all the the claims against him.

The judge then turned it over to the plaintiffs’ lawyers to begin their questioning.

McCloy walked to the podium and started with a story about his mother’s experience the time that she’d been summoned for jury duty. Francis quickly objected: “relevance?” Smoak, who was not a fan of lawyers using jury selection to ingratiate themselves with jurors, paused for a beat before overruling the objection.

“Your honor, I think the attorney should ask the jury questions and not go into this story about his mother,” Francis said.

“I think he’s getting to it,” Smoak replied.

“Yeah, but …”

“Overruled.”

When McCloy started in on a story about his mother-in-law, Francis objected again and was quickly overruled.

McCloy asked how many of the 50 people in the pool had heard of the Girls Gone Wild case. All but two raised a hand.

Of the first 21 people in the box, the first who would be sorted through in search of a jury, nineteen were women.

McCloy asked if anyone objected to the girls proceeding anonymously. Smoak explained again that it was his decision to conceal the girls’ identities because they were minors at the time of their interactions with Girls Gone Wild and that should not be held against the plaintiffs.

No one raised a hand, so no one had a problem with not knowing the plaintiffs’ names.

McCloy told the judge now would be a good time to bring the plaintiffs in so the jury pool could see them. One of his assistants went into the hallway and a minute later a side door opened and four young women walked in.

I don’t know what I expected, but I was disappointed. Three were slightly stocky and somewhat boyish looking. The fourth, the prettiest of the group, was slim, dark haired and olive skinned. She was the only one who’d worn a dress, the others were in T-shirts and pants.

McCloy stood behind the first girl and, in a gentle tone, identified her as Plaintiff J. He moved to the second, Plaintiff S, and the third, Plaintiff B and the fourth …

“What’s the third one’s name?” Francis interrupted, half standing and scribbling frantically on a notepad.

“B.”

“V?”

“B. B as in boy.”

“And the second?”

“S.”

“And the first one?”

“J.”

Francis sat back down.

The girls had looked over the juror list and identified four names they thought they knew. Pontikes had told the judge that they’d probably have to interview these four privately. But now, only two people raised a hand when asked if they knew the plaintiffs.

“You honor, I was told there were four.” Francis said from his table.

“Come, come up here Mr. Francis,” Smoak said, calling both attorneys to sidebar.

“Any communications, you do on the side, out of the hearing of the jury,” Smoak said quietly to Francis at a corner of the judge’s desk. “They don’t have any need to know what we talk about.”

“Sorry.”

They talked softly for a minute, going over the procedure they wanted to use in questioning the prospective jurors about their relationship to the girls. Francis was hung up on these four names he’d been given, instead of the two who’d raised their hands.

“Those were mistakes by Miss Pontikes?” Francis asked loudly, dramatically raising his eyebrows and cocking his head. McCloy said something and Francis continued with the sarcastic tone. “You identified them as knowing them …”

He snorted a laugh and glanced sideways at Smoak as if to include him in on the joke, but Smoak and McCloy continued talking and ignored him.

The sidebar was winding down, but not without a few last comments from Francis.

“I just think that if you make an order,” he told Smoak, “they should follow it.”

Smoak tried to smile, but it came out as a tight rectangle that just showed his teeth.

“Mr. Francis, you’re like the old fella they talk about down here who learned to whisper in a sawmill.” He ended the sidebar and Francis returned to his seat. McCloy paused at the podium.

“Let me regroup,” he said. Francis had a talent for breaking his train of thought.

He sought out one of the women who’d raised her hand when the group was asked if they’d never heard of this case.

“Are you not from around here?” McCloy asked her.

“I’m from Wassau,” the woman said. Wassau is a tiny community with a single stoplight, a grocery store, gas station and post office. It is most famous for hosting the annual Wassau Possum Fest, which is attended by every serious political candidate in the area.

Others in the room were far more familiar with the case. One woman worked at the Chateau Motel when the famous “shower scene” was shot in 2003, leading to Joe Francis’ arrest. She remembered Francis, he tipped her $50 for cleaning the room and bringing in fresh towels.

But she didn’t think she could be fair, saying she’d seen a lot of the things that had gone on in that room. She wasn’t asked to elaborate.

One man, who identified himself as a tomato farmer, said he’d been “following this case for years.” He also said he’d “been all over the world and had formed an opinion.”

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to say,” the man continued. “To live that kind of life, you had to believe otherwise.”

I didn’t try to figure out what that meant. Luckily, others in the group were better at public speaking.

“I can’t help but think about my 14-year-old daughter,” a woman said. “I’ve already formed an opinion.”

McCloy asked if anyone in the room enjoyed commenting on stories on the News Herald’s website. Those comments were consistently anti-plaintiff. No one raised a hand.

McCloy walked over to an easel and was starting to write the plaintiffs’ ages next to their initials.

“The ages of the plaintiffs …” he began, his marker headed toward the oversized pad of paper.

“Objection,” Francis said. “Relevance.”

“Overruled.”

The marker, which had paused on its way, resumed its course.

“Objection. Objection,” Francis said again, waving a hand at McCloy. “Before he writes anything … excuse me!”

“Come up here,” Smoak said, one of the few times he sounded like he’d lost his patience.

Francis and McCloy went to sidebar and Francis launched into his argument.

“Wait, wait, wait,” the court reporter said. “Could you slow down?” She held up her hand with her finger and thumb spaced slightly apart, to indicate that he didn’t have to talk too much slower.