Read The Madness of Joe Francis: "I thought we were all just having fun. I was wrong." Online
Authors: David Angier
The Madness of Joe Francis: "I thought we were all just having fun. I was wrong." (40 page)
Michael Burke’s face filled the monitors Friday morning. His deposition testimony had been the last evidence Thursday and they picked it up where they’d left off. It was time to talk money.
He was asked if he’d helped prepare the interrogatories that answered the question of how much money GGW had made off the sale of the two videotapes at the center of the trial. They’d netted $7 million between the two of them.
More than 230,000 copies of “Ultimate Spring Break Vol. 3” had been sold worldwide, for a gross of just over $4 million. “Ultimate Spring Break Vol. 4” hadn’t done as well, with only 159,000 in distribution for a gross of a little more than $3 million.
Burke said he hadn’t participated in preparing the figures, only instructed those who did to compile the numbers as precisely and accurately as possible.
He was not the person to ask if they were, in fact, correct.
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S
he wasn’t tall. She wasn’t short. She was pretty, not beautiful, but her makeup was applied to even out, not to enhance her best features. She had thick, wavy brown hair shot with gray and everything about Dr. Leslie Lebowitz spoke softly. Lebowitz was the unobtrusive observer.
Her testimony was the longest of the trial, but essential to understanding how the plaintiffs viewed their encounter with Girls Gone Wild and how they blamed Joe Francis for even the smallest shortcomings of their lives.
Lebowitz, a clinical psychologist who examined all four plaintiffs, took the stand. After going through her qualifications, Pontikes asked her to explain to the ladies of the jury, “How Girls Gone Wild harmed these plaintiffs.”
“In my opinion, Girls Gone Wild was like a stone that fell into the center of these women’s lives. And like a stone, a big, heavy stone, falling into a pool of water, it initiated a sort of radiating levels of harm that spread from, you know, their sense that they were bad and extended to the destruction of their social world and their relationship with their social community and they just kind of radiated from there.”
At first, she said, she didn’t think the allegations in this case were too terribly serious. She usually dealt with victims of rape, incest and combat.
“I sort of thought, well, how could this event be so harmful? What could be so harmful about a brief, you know, unpleasant experience? But that was predicated on not really understanding the nature of this particular event.
“When you look at a traumatic event, the question you need to ask is: What was the meaning of this event to this person? So I, you know, came to understand that this was a very different kind of trauma.
Shame was the central theme of Lebowitz’s testimony. She distinguished shame from guilt by saying that guilt was a constructive feeling of remorse for one’s actions that could be used to promote positive behavior changes.
“Shame is the sense that the self is bad in a way that makes you want to cringe and crawl away and hide yourself. Shame is like a kind of tar that is stuck to you,” she patted her chest, over her heart, as if to indicate that the tar was smothering that organ, “that you can’t – can’t get rid of. And shame is understood in the psychological literature as a really, a really harmful emotion.”
Shame, she said, is what all these women were feeling. Shame caused by Girls Gone Wild. Shame was also something their friends, families and communities felt.
In Plaintiff B’s case, she said, it had also led to an eating disorder. “She feels like if she doesn’t eat, all the loathsome parts of her will just evaporate.”
Pontikes asked her what effect being sexually exploited by Girls Gone Wild at the age of 17 had on B.
“It filled her with regret and made her feel that she was loathsome and disgusting. It made her feel a literally toxic level of shame and exposure. It led to her being rejected by her community and lose her social supports and meaningful social contacts. And that led her to feeling a kind of emotional pain which, in the absence of friends and family to turn to, I believe that led her to use drugs and alcohol as a way to soothe that pain. And the whole thing took on an extraordinarily destructive downward spiral, resulting in a nervous breakdown, hospitalizations and a whole host of psychiatric symptoms, many of which are continuing.”
“Do you believe to a reasonable degree of medical certainty that being sexually exploited by Girls Gone Wild caused this breakdown of Plaintiff B?” Pontikes asked.
“I guess the other thing that I would say about her nervous breakdown is that, you know, the structure of our lives, school, work, all those routines that not only structure our lives in the world they structure us internally, what happened to Plaintiff B because of the way in which Girls Gone Wild impacted her life is that she lost all the customary structures of her life. At one point she was homeless. She was very nomadic.”
She lost jobs and every time she lost a job it made her feelings worse.
“The self hatred, the loss of community the excessive use of drugs and alcohol and the kind of destructuring of her life I think unmoored her to such an extent that a nervous breakdown was the result.”
What about the death of B’s father? Pontikes asked.
“She was already psychologically devastated by Girls Gone Wild and then she experiences this profound loss. Because she was on the phone with her father, asking to come home because of Girls Gone Wild, and because she already felt like she’d done something terrible and was a bad person, when he died, at an emotional level she came to feel that she had been responsible for his death. While I don’t have any question in my mind that this would have always been an incredibly painful loss for her, there’s nothing about it that would have led to her, you know, completely falling apart.”
Usually, when a child loses a parent the family and community rally around them for support. But B had been ostracized because of her association with Girls Gone Wild and didn’t get that support.
“The whole fabric of her life was destroyed.”
The sexual incident, Lebowitz said, was not something Plaintiff B would normally do.
“It was a behavior that was completely outside of anything she ever imagined herself doing, anything she would have ever endorsed doing, anything she ever could have, you know, planned to do.”
What B needed, what all the girls needed, was a skilled professional to help them through this. A good one, she said, would run about $225 an hour and there shouldn’t be a cap on when it should end.
“You know, if somebody else can say to you, ‘I see it. I hear it. I know it. This does not have to define you for the rest of your life. You know, it was a momentary – it was a brief mistake that you made when you were 17 years old. You know, you can be a much bigger person than this.’”
Pontikes moved into the subject of Plaintiff J’s suicide attempts.
“Yes, she had two,” Lebowitz said. “You want me to talk about them?”
“I was going to ask a question. Just wait for a second,” Pontikes said quickly. She then dropped her voice into its slow, midwesternlaced, question-asking tone. “Did the GGW incident, to a reasonable degree of medical certainty, cause these two suicide attempts?”
“I think,” Lebowitz said, “but for (the incident with) Girls Gone Wild there was no reason to expect that she would have tried to kill herself twice.”
Lebowitz said J was under pressure because her parents were threatening to divorce, but “the kind of shame and guilt and self-condemnation that she’s feeling from Girls Gone Wild makes it sort of the straw that breaks the camel’s back.”
Pontikes moved on to Plaintiff S.
“How is Girls Gone Wild and this Girls Gone Wild event responsible for the very abusive relationship that Plaintiff S found herself in?”
“It’s the same link. I mean, Girls Gone Wild caused her to drop out of school, which means she didn’t have the same choice of partners. It made her needy and alone and desperate and a target. And it made her a good target for somebody looking to prey on a woman who could be controlled and dominated.”
“What Girls Gone Wild stole from them was the most valuable resources that a young woman has going forward: friends, family and education.”
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T
he reporters and lawyers filed out into the hallway for the lunch break and most left to grab some food. I stayed behind to talk to Rachel Seaton-Virga. She’d gone into the room that was set aside as their base of operations, but came out after a few minutes.
“Did they think we wouldn’t find it?” she asked as she walked up to me. I had been standing at my favorite spot, the second-floor window that overlooked the bay.
“Find what?”
She didn’t answer that. It had something to do with the medical records.
“Did they really think we wouldn’t find it?”
“Yes, Rachel, whatever it is, I’m certain they didn’t think you would find it.”
I’d seen her like this before. She was committed, not because of Joe Francis, but because she felt personally insulted. Whatever was in those records was good and Rachel was going to have fun.
I walked over to my favorite lunch spot, around the corner from the courthouse. On the way I noticed I’d missed a call from Angela, Rachel’s mother.
“I assume you’re calling to find out when a good time is to come to the trial?”
“Actually, I was just calling to find out how it was going.”
Angela did want to come out, though.
“After lunch would be an excellent time; Rachel is going to eviscerate a psychologist.”
“Really?”
“She found something. I don’t know what it is, but she’s all fired up.”
Rachel Seaton-Virga was huddled with Gerard at the table when Angela and I walked into the courtroom after lunch. They were both flipping through the thick volumes of records pertaining to a different plaintiff.
Usually, Rachel doesn’t like it when Angela comes to court to watch her, but this time she was too distracted to do anything more than give her mom a smile.
Pontikes resumed her questioning after the jurors were brought in. She asked Lebowitz if she’d watched Joe Francis’ cross examination of V.
“What did I observe during the cross-examination?” Lebowitz asked. “She came into that with every intention of maintaining a perfect composure. She did not actually want to give him the satisfaction of becoming distraught. His aggression, his insinuation that the fact that she may or may not have thought he was handsome was somehow responsible for what subsequently happened, her feeling of inadequacy because she couldn’t remember certain trivial details, which were actually pretty unimportant and pretty validating of the fact that she has been traumatized because people who have been traumatized can never remember unimportant details, it’s part of the nature of traumatic memory.”
I don’t know when this woman breathes
, I thought to myself while I struggled to take notes.
“Watching her be so activated by her exposure to him that she absolutely could not maintain composure spoke to the way in which that prior exposure lives inside of her in a form that, when it is triggered or activated, it begins to feel just the way it did the first time it happened,” Lebowitz continued. “You know, afterwards, I left when she left to try to check in with her and she was so hysterical. It was probably 45 minutes before I think she could hear anything I was saying, but what she kept repeating over and over again was, ‘I feel like I’m such a bad person. I want to die now.’”
Lebowitz said in V’s mind she’d taken responsibility for what happened that day because Joe Francis refused to.
“This is one of the tragedies that you see anytime somebody has been victimized, you know, wherein they take undue responsibility.”
Children, she said, must have a sense of moral completeness in their world. If something bad happens, someone must be held accountable. If an adult will not accept the blame then the child accepts it to compensate.
“He’s the grownup,” Lebowitz said of Francis.
I nearly laughed out loud. I was sure that was the first time Francis had been accused of that.