The Madness of Joe Francis: "I thought we were all just having fun. I was wrong." (3 page)
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Authors: David Angier
Bagwell wrote in the official report that Francis coerced two 17-year-old girls, Christina and Darlene, into having sexual contact with each other for $100 each. Schmitz filmed the two girls kissing and doing other things in a motel shower. Bagwell also claimed that Francis paid Vanessa and Brittany, 17, $50 each to jerk him off.
“The named defendant did procure Christina to commit a sexual act with another female,” Bagwell wrote. “On March 31, 2003, the named defendant did procure Christina to commit the act of prostitution. The named defendant then did video tape this act for the purpose of marketing this sexual act for commercial gain.”
He wrote about Vanessa’s allegation: “on March 31, 2003, the named defendant did procure Vanessa to commit the act of prostitution. The named defendant did video tape this act for the purpose of marketing this sexual act for commercial gain.”
He went on: “On March 31, 2003, the named defendant did produce and/or direct a video tape, which in whole or in part, depicted Vanessa involved in sexual conduct.”
On the day of Francis’ arrest, several officials gave News Herald reporter Daniel Jackson a statement for his article.
“One of the girls was feeling guilty over it and she confessed to her parents,” Sheriff Guy Tunnell told Jackson. “We contacted the others. They were extremely embarrassed. This is more than someone flashing their breasts. This is pretty hardcore pornographic production … and it involves minors, which is most alarming to me.”
Tunnell told Jackson that Francis knew the girls were underage, filmed them anyway then made them sign waivers after the shoot saying they were adults.
Panama City Beach Police Chief Robert Harding told Jackson, “Francis is a maverick. He thinks he’s untouchable. We told them all along that if you film in public without breaking the law, we don’t have a problem. This has nothing to do with constitutional freedoms. It’s just not something that we’re going to tolerate on the beach.”
In addition to the charges, the sheriff’s office seized Francis’ private jet and his 2003 Ferrari, then began forfeiture procedures to have them turned over to the department if Francis was convicted.
For the time being, Francis and the other three men were free on bond.
But this was just the beginning of the charges.
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“I
don’t think I need to see anymore,” Circuit Judge Dedee Costello cringed, held her hands up and turned away from the television screen. She’d watched a little more than an hour of raw Girls Gone Wild footage: Lots of girls flashing their breasts and the first showing of what would become known as “the shower scene.”
Then there were the tapes of Joe Francis and his Ferrari cruising Front Beach Road in Panama City Beach, picking up giggling girls, cajoling others to expose themselves.
One blonde, oval faced girl sitting in the passenger seat of a car, lifts her sweater and says a catch line for Girls Gone Wild. The cameraman’s voice comes from off-screen while the camera remains focused on the girl. He asks her how old she is.
She is 17.
“If I say I’m 18, does it make a difference?” the girl asks. The disembodied voice tells her they’ll shoot it again, and this time she has to be older.
The girl lifts her sweater, shows her breasts, says the line – “Girls Gone Wild, whoo!” Then, when asked, she says she’s 20 years old.
“This is just the tip of the iceberg,” attorney Franklin Harrison said as he clicked off the videotape, releasing Costello from her agony. Costello had once chastised a female defendant for 15 minutes because she wore a t-shirt to court with “Porn Star” written across the chest, imagine how she felt about watching the real thing in her own courtroom.
It was May 13, 2003, a little more than a month after Francis’ arrest and the first time anyone outside the investigation had seen the videos taken as evidence in his case.
This hearing was to determine if officers had the legal right to hold the jet and Ferrari pending the resolution of the case. Investigators said the vehicles were used in Francis’ criminal enterprise and therefore fair game for seizure.
The defense said seizing the $2 million jet and $100,000 car proved that the arrest, the case itself, was all about extorting money. The sheriff’s office, they said, saw an opportunity to legally steal Francis’ toys.
They decided to take the issue to Judge Costello. What was supposed to be a half-day hearing went two days. Two days of porn in Judge Costello’s courtroom and the room was packed.
Harrison, the sheriff’s lawyer, had several of the tapes on hand to show Costello, including the shower scene, which he cued up next.
The judge shifted uncomfortably in her seat. There were several dozen reporters and lawyers in the room, all of us doing our best to appear disinterested, clinical in our observations.
Not everyone considered it strictly evidence though, and more than a few snickers could be heard coming from the crowd. I suddenly realized that I’d picked an unfortunate spot to watch the show. Costello allowed lawyers and the occasional reporter to sit in the jury box when it wasn’t being used, so there I was, in my favorite seat, which happened to put me closest to the television screen besides the judge. Once the videos started, I felt very exposed and slid down in my seat, until I was on the verge of falling out. Straightening up would bring unwanted attention so I tried to stay still, chin almost touching my chest.
Luckily, there was no reason to take notes.
The girls on the tape were obviously driven by something other than passion, lust or even curiosity. They were urged on by the cameraman’s constant pleading and direction.
Costello, who never kept her feelings off her face, watched with squinted eyes and one corner of her lips turned up in a menacing, disgusted sneer. Trim and meticulous, her black hair cut short and characteristic bright red lipstick carefully applied, Costello didn’t have much patience for what she was watching.
She’d seen a girl stretched out naked on a bed, her head hanging over the edge looking upside-down at the camera, with another woman straddling her, talking about how she’d been 16 or 17 the year before when she’d done a sex scene for Girls Gone Wild.
Costello had seen a video of the rapper Snoop Dogg sitting in front of a camera, rolling what appeared to be a cigar-sized joint while apparently in the jet. The camera shot was tight on him and while his head bobbed to the music, his hands with the rolling paper and herb stayed perfectly centered on the screen. He appeared to be giving a tutorial on the finer points of rolling a blunt.
All the videos, which were just tiny snippets of the hours of footage, were intended to convince the judge that there was probable cause that criminal activity had occurred during GGW’s short stay in Panama City Beach in March and April 2003, and the company’s private jet and Ferrari were integral parts of that criminal behavior.
Harrison argued that the jet was used to transport the people and equipment needed to carry out their illegal deeds. He said the Ferrari was a lure.
“It’s all a part of the scheme,” Harrison said. “Francis is a part of all of this. He’s not a disinterested businessman. He’s right in the middle.”
If the judge agreed, the sheriff’s office would keep the jet and Ferrari, at least until the conclusion of the criminal case.
Apparently, Harrison had not burdened Costello with some of the more unsavory tapes.
“Some of these cameramen have the worst taste,” a bleary-eyed Aaron Dyer told me sometime later, after watching hours of uncut video.
It was at this hearing that Harrison summed up the prosecution’s case: “They (the defense) are saying that it’s these children who are at fault. We are in the business of protecting children in Florida.”
Children, he argued, were unable to make good decisions when it came to predators like Joe Francis. They were vulnerable, easy targets, and Francis was quick to pounce.
The defense attorneys also made a statement, but it was not nearly as quotable.
Attorneys Jim Fensom and Robert Griscti put into evidence the statements of all the girls who were the named victims in the worst charges against Francis. In each statement, the girls told authorities that they’d lied to GGW cameramen about their ages. All had said they were 18 and even signed releases stating they were 18.
That’s all.
Girls Gone Wild had been lied to despite their best efforts to be responsible.
“To think that Mantra Entertainment is targeting 17-and-a-half-year-old girls, finding them more attractive than these wrinkled 18-year-olds, is ridiculous,” Fensom said.
Costello, who was trying to leave town for the weekend, ruled late on a Friday afternoon that Girls Gone Wild could have its jet back, but the sheriff’s office would keep the Ferrari a little longer.
She didn’t explain her ruling. She simply wrote it and sent it to the lawyers. The lawyers speculated that there was next-to-nothing tying the jet to any of the crimes Francis faced.
Francis was at least driving the Ferrari when he picked up girls.
Harrison appealed to the First District Court of Appeal. He argued that the sheriff’s office had presented more than enough evidence showing not only Girls Gone Wild’s coast-to-coast illegal operation, but the integral role the jet played in it all.
Besides the obvious struggle to keep the jet, this appeal was the beginning of the fight over the basic argument in the criminal case, the legal concept of “strict liability.”
Harrison told the appeals judges that, “The state does have a compelling interest in protecting under-aged persons from being sexually abused or exploited.”
“When presented with charges of procuring children for prostitution or sexually exploiting children, it should not be a defense that the child or children misrepresented their age or that the defendant did not know the true age of the victim,” Harrison wrote in his brief. “In other words, these crimes against children are strict liability offenses.”
Strict liability, in essence, makes sexual contact between an adult and a minor illegal regardless of whether the adult tried to determine the child’s age and was misled. In strict liability cases, it didn’t matter if an adult male had picked up a girl who looked like she was 30, at a bar where she had been served beer on a fake ID, had sex with her and the next morning found out she was only 15. It is illegal.
In Francis’ case, criminal intent, knowledge that the girls being abused or exploited were minors, would be unnecessary to prove guilt if the charges against him were found to be strict liability offenses.
Griscti, the lawyer arguing on behalf of the jet, spent much of his 58 page answer talking about strict liability. He admitted Harrison produced precedent to support his argument, but asked the appeals judges to ignore them.
“They are wrong,” Griscti wrote.
He said none of the criminal charges against Joe Francis were strict liability. On the contrary, he said, intent was essential.
Dyer put it more succinctly later when he said the idea of strict liability in a racketeering case was bewildering. Racketeering is setting up an illegal practice within a legal business; in GGW’s case it would be knowingly including illegal child pornography within its legal pornographic videos. But, he said, that would have to mean that the GGW cameramen knew the girls were underage. How else would they know to illegally include them?
Harrison’s appeal was denied, without comment, by a three-judge panel. It’s called “per curium affirmed” and is essentially the death knell of any appeal. Without a written reason from the judges, there was almost nothing the lawyers could do to appeal it to the state supreme court. Harrison said later that it was an abrupt and disappointing dismissal of a complex argument.
At this stage in the proceedings, Costello was simply the judge in the seizure issue. Circuit Judge Michael Overstreet had the criminal case.
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P
art of my job as courts reporter for the News Herald was to check daily filings in criminal cases at the courthouse. In 2003, there were 12 clerks in that office, all women.
They looked at me as a little brother and gave me unprecedented freedom within the building.
I walked in the door of the clerks’ office on October 14, 2003, past Angela’s desk and Laura’s desk, but stopped short of Joanne’s. I could see through the clear plastic wall of her cubicle that she wasn’t there.
“Where’s Joanne?” I asked. “I need a file.”
I’d gone online earlier in the day and seen a new filing in the Girls Gone Wild case. It appeared to be an amended “information” – a new set of charges based on changes in the evidence.
“Her files are on her desk,” one of the girls answered without looking up from her work.
Right on top was the information I was looking for. It was thick and had a lot more names on it besides Joe Francis.
“Can I make a copy of this?” I asked no one in particular, my head nearly touching the pages as I leafed through them.
Someone told me to go ahead.
“You know where it is,” she said.
Five minutes later I walked down the hallway, past security and into the parking lot without taking my eyes off the document. The exchange at the clerk’s office was typical, but there would be nothing typical about what would happen later.
For months, there had been talk of additional charges being filed and here they were.
As soon as I got back to the office I called State Attorney Jim Appleman and asked him a few questions about the amended information. It was easy to hear the amusement in his voice.
“At our last hearing, the judge ordered us to go through all the tapes,” he said. “We said at that time that we anticipated there would be additional charges, and that’s what happened.”
Francis was now looking at 43 charges, instead of the 22 originally brought, and was facing 335 years in prison. Nine employees also were charged, all of them with racketeering – a 30-year felony that implied a conspiracy to operate an illegal business.