The Madness of Joe Francis: "I thought we were all just having fun. I was wrong." (43 page)

“But, miraculously, at the time it was time for you to meet with them, someone they never met, they all disclosed the trauma they had faced with Girls Gone Wild?”

Pontikes objected, but Smoak overruled.

“They disclosed it to you,” Seaton-Virga persisted. “They were able to somehow find the wherewithal to disclose it to you but to none of these medical professionals?”

“Yes. It’s not at all unusual in my field, particularly when you have a specialty in trauma. I’m not suggesting there’s anything miraculous about me as a therapist. What is true is that if people are deeply ashamed about something, they tell it to the person – if they’re going to tell it to anybody, they tell it to somebody who they believe will receive it in a compassionate way. It happens all the time that people have not disclosed things in spite of not just a brief encounter with mental health professionals. And it isn’t until they meet somebody who they believe really will get it that somehow the story is made available.”

“And apparently with you they believed it right away, that you would get it.”

“Well, they knew what I was there to do. I mean, they already had – they knew that I was a trauma person. They knew that I had experience with sexually victimized women, so they had a reason to expect a compassionate hearing.”

“They knew that this case was about Girls Gone Wild,” Seaton-Virga said, driving home the point. “You talked with them after suit had already been filed?”

“Yes.”

“So they knew what this was about and what your purpose was?”

“Yes, yes, absolutely.”

“That’s why it didn’t make it relevant that, you know, those other doctors had evaluated them within a couple years after this happening: those opinions didn’t matter,” Seaton-Virga said. “What mattered was Girls Gone Wild?”

Pontikes objected and Smoak sustained it. “Let’s get on to something of substance.”

Seaton-Virga asked Lebowitz if she’d looked at the qualifications of any of the other doctors that had treated the girls, “or whether or not they would be compassionate?”

“No. I don’t mean to suggest they weren’t compassionate professionals.”

“Is that maybe why one of the plaintiff’s mothers who was aware of the trauma history didn’t bring it up to the doctors then? Did she feel that person wasn’t going to be compassionate?”

Smoak interrupted, without an objection from Pontikes, and called the lawyers to sidebar.

“I do not see how this is going to help the jury,” he said about Seaton-Virga’s line of questions. “We are running late on a Friday afternoon and I think the jury is going to get numb with much more of this fairly obtuse bit of questioning about communication with the people – I mean, you know, if we push this. I’m going to probably get pushed to instruct her that it would be – it is not common practice by a retained expert to communicate with treating physicians.”

“I would like that instruction now, your honor. I was about to get up and object. I think this line of questioning has gotten argumentative,” Pontikes said. “It isn’t common practice for experts to communicate with treating physicians.”

“My old hero, Irving Younger, said about cross-examination you pick your one best topic, two at the most, and this is sort of turning into a discovery exercise. So please, let’s get on to something productive,” Smoak told Seaton-Virga.

Pontikes asked for the instruction that Smoak had mentioned earlier, but the judge ignored her.

Back at the podium, Seaton-Virga asked Lebowitz her last question.

“Doctor, is it fair to say that, based on your informed medical opinion, that the source of a lot of the issues that these young women have faced is due to Girls Gone Wild?”

“That would be accurate.”

Seaton-Virga gathered up her notes and sat down.

Pontikes tried to repair the damage, but ended up asking a lot of the same questions and getting the same answers. Lebowitz said the word “shame” more than a dozen times as she answered Pontikes’ last few questions.

Why didn’t B, J and V talk about Girls Gone Wild in their prior encounters with mental health professionals?

“Because they were ashamed. People don’t easily talk about things they are ashamed about.”

And Plaintiff J failing the ninth grade, what could account for that?

“She said she had a really sexually creepy male gym teacher. So she failed gym and decided that, rather than going to summer school, she would just repeat ninth grade.”

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Chapter 48

“Tactical disaster”

R
achel Seaton-Virga worked until 6:30 Friday night, but picked up the kids after that. She wasn’t going to pull another all-nighter.

“Lebowitz killed us,” she said, sounding well past the point of exhaustion.

“Are you kidding me? She was awful. She was a tactical disaster. I guarantee you she did more for you than she did for the plaintiffs,” I said.

“You think so? I don’t know. She had an answer for everything.”

“That’s exactly it. If the video was released, they were traumatized by the release of the video. If the video was seized, they were traumatized by fear that the video would be released. Plaintiff B was diagnosed with bi-polar, but they’re wrong and I’m right.

“And what was all this crap about a ‘nervous breakdown’? No one uses that phrase anymore.”

“Right. It’s a psychotic episode or a psychotic break.”

“The only reason she was using it was because it sounded better. It fit her theory better than saying B had a psychotic break. She had a ‘nervous breakdown’. She obviously had an agenda.

“And the jurors smelled it. They don’t want someone to come in there and manipulate them. They want someone to tell them, this plaintiff has this symptom or had this happen to her and you can reasonably say that a part of her problem was GGW.”

“And what was that catch line she kept saying, ‘To a reasonable degree of medical certainty’? What the fuck does that even mean?” Rachel was getting into it now, smiling and warming to the topic.

She didn’t believe that Lebowitz’s testimony would help her, but she was enjoying the witness bashing just the same. She wasn’t going to feel good about anything until the trial was over.

“You gonna work all weekend?”

“On what? We don’t have anything.”

This was a first. Rachel and Gerard had never gone into trial and not worked 18-hour days before and during. They couldn’t help it. They couldn’t separate themselves from the argument, from the competition. And while Rachel was beginning to feel a creeping indignation, that low, persistent protectiveness toward Francis that she felt with most of her clients, she just didn’t have the reports, depositions and documents that would have absorbed her during a normal trial. They were waiting for the plaintiffs’ testimony to be transcribed so they could start working on their closing.

Francis was on his way to a benefit dinner in Miami and she’d heard very little from him all day. She was beginning to think that he wasn’t such a bad client.

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Chapter 49

I
t was Monday, the beginning of the second week of trial.

Rachel Seaton-Virga, Gerard Virga and Jim Batton walked in to the courtroom together. Rachel stopped just through the gate, before she’d even put her files down.

“Did you bring it?”

“It’s out in the car,” Batton said.

“Out in the car? How does that help me?”

“I’ll go get it.”

She looked over at the reporters. “It’s my second day of 5-hour Energy and I’m hooked. I can’t get enough.”

She laughed.

“I still can only drink a half a bottle.”

Larry Selander approached the podium and told Judge Smoak that they had two more video depositions to play and then their paralegal, Victoria Ter Bush, was going to testify about a summary she’d compiled explaining GGW’s financial gain in selling the videos.

Gerard Virga stood and said he believed the plaintiffs would have to submit all the documentation used to compile the summation.

Selander disagreed and Smoak overruled Virga’s objection. The financial data would come in basically unchallenged.

But before that happened, the plaintiffs would like to show the jury the interview that Francis gave Thursday morning as he was leaving the courthouse. They’d subpoenaed the footage from Channel 13 News.

Francis’s “money-grubbing whores” comment was the only thing they were really interested in.

Smoak had seen it and denied their request. What he’d said outside the courtroom wasn’t much different from what he’d said inside the courtroom. But he did issue an order preventing any of the parties from making derogatory comments about the plaintiffs, or opposing counsel, for the rest of the trial.

Joe Francis was going to have to stay quiet or face serious sanctions from Smoak. There had been little threat of Francis going to jail during this trial, other than watching the proceedings from a holding cell at the federal courthouse. But this order could change that.

Otherwise, the trial was on track to wrap up soon.

Selander believed they would finish that day and Seaton-Virga said they would have one witness and then they would have to address the issue of whether the Girls Gone Wild footage of the plaintiffs would be allowed in as evidence.

That argument was to take place later. Smoak was eager to bring in the jury and get things moving. When the jury was finally brought in, the plaintiffs played a portion of a video deposition of Donald Guttman, Francis’ former corporate attorney.

It was a somewhat awkward deposition. Guttman didn’t want to answer their questions because he felt that his answers would violate the attorney-client privilege.

What they got out of him, essentially, was that he’d never told Francis it was all right to videotape underage girls and that there were many videotapes from GGW’s early years that didn’t have the paperwork required by federal law to prove that the girls depicted were adults.

Dent, who had questioned Guttman during the deposition, asked him why he’d left the company, which Virga objected to. The implication was that Guttman had resigned for ethical reasons.

Selander’s paralegal, Victoria Ter Bush was the last witness on the stand. She explained her summary that showed GGW had made $17 million off the sale of the three videos at issue in this trial.

That was based off the number of videos that GGW’s records showed had been shipped. She estimated the dollar amount off the usual price per video of about $19.99. The attorneys had complained last year that they couldn’t get the exact amount because they didn’t know if any of the videos had been discounted or sold as a package with other tapes.

But there was little that the Virgas could do to challenge the number.

Ter Bush then said that GGW had made more than $160 million in profit off the sale of all the videos that had been found to be in violation of the federal compliance law. The gross was closer to $330 million. And that was just off the 150 or so titles that were on the list and not the hundreds of “Girls Gone Wild” videos that were in compliance with federal law.

She was done and the Virgas had no questions for her.

Selander announced that the plaintiffs rested their case.

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Chapter 50

Mr. Deutsch

“M
r. Deutsch, would you introduce yourself to the jury?”

“Hi jury, I am Eric Deutsch and I am the executive vice president of Girls Gone Wild.”

Deutsch was easily 6-foot-4, slim and with hair cut so close he appeared bald. He had an open, honest face and a sincerity that was going to be essential for the defense if they hoped to make him the face of the company.

He was a 1986 graduate of UCLA and had been vice president of worldwide distribution for Playboy before coming to work for Girls Gone Wild.

“I met Joe in 2002 and we became friends.”

A part of his duties was to meet with the cameramen and instruct them on the policies and procedures they would follow in the field.

He talked about the safeguards they have in place now to catch footage of underage girls. It was a three-step process: the cameramen would card them, employees in Los Angeles would go through all the raw footage and sort the scene according to available identification and then a private investigator would check each girl to ensure she was an adult. In Los Angeles, the company used a program called Pilot Ware to sort the material for the next step in the process.

They hadn’t had an incident, he said knocking on the wooden arm rest of his seat, since 2003.

There is also a phone number, a “remorse line,” that the girls can call, before the video they’re in goes into distribution, to have their footage removed.

“How hands-on is Joe, I mean Mr. Francis?” Seaton-Virga asked.

He’s busy with other projects so he’s not that involved, Deutsch said.

Has he ever instructed you to disregard the law or cut corners on getting sex scenes? Seaton-Virga asked.

“We don’t joke about underage girls,” Deutsch began, but Pontikes stood and looked like she was going to object, so he paused. But when she didn’t say anything, he went on. “We don’t talk about underage girls. Joe will fire anyone who does.”