The Madness of Joe Francis: "I thought we were all just having fun. I was wrong." (46 page)

“This is a case that is solely about damages. You’ll have to decide whether the four plaintiffs suffered damages and who should be held accountable for them, and whether punitive damages should be awarded.”

Joe Francis had presented no evidence that the plaintiffs weren’t damaged; That was a theme in Selander’s closing. Because Francis had missed the evidentiary deadlines and the Virgas had come in to the case so late, they hadn’t been able to present much evidence or challenge the plaintiffs’ evidence. Selander would refer to much of his evidence as “uncontroverted,” unchallenged, as a way of saying that the defendants were powerless to argue against their facts.

“You have to judge who is responsible. The plaintiffs are damaged. Seriously damaged. Valuing it remains your task,” he said.

The defendants, Selander said, want to blame the plaintiffs, say they did something wrong, that they conspired to expose themselves on Girls Gone Wild.

“Should the responsibility belong to the victim or should the responsibility belong to the pornographer? We protect minors. We should protect minors. We always have protected minors.”

“Mr. Francis said in opening that he was going to show you that these girls had given false ID. Absolutely untrue and irrelevant anyway.”

He tried to describe how liability applied to Francis.

“Mr. Francis knows the law that applies to his business. He knows you don’t film minors. You don’t do it. Nobody thinks child pornography is OK. But Mr. Francis pled guilty to it. He violated the law. Why did he violate the law? Money, fame, prestige, women. And money. Lots and lots of money.”

Francis targeted the young because they were naive, easy to manipulate, Selander said. He only stops when he gets caught.

“Supposedly he straightens up his act. Mr. Deutsch seems like a good man, but he was not told a bunch of things that went on here. He didn’t know there had been guilty pleas, that there were hundreds of tapes out of compliance.”

Selander picked up the Pilot Ware printout.

“We get down to a line over here,” Selander said, tracing downward with his finger. “That person is Plaintiff B. On April 1, 2009, when this document was printed, GGW had her as a ‘go’.”

So Francis pleads out to his charges.

“Mr. Francis admits he’s violated the law. He doesn’t do any jail time. He has to pay a $2.1 million fine. For someone like him, that’s not a substantial amount. He didn’t pay a whole lot of attention. It’s like the maybe $40 I have in my wallet right now, it doesn’t attract a lot of attention.”

GGW sold about 850,000 of the videos that include the footage of plaintiffs B, J and S, for a total of $17,098,307.

“Those tapes are still out there. That is the real problem with those crimes.”

He said a part of the problem was the availability of these images on the internet. He said there were cases of teens committing suicide after private, embarrassing photos of them were posted without their knowledge.

“Our children are killing themselves over this and it’s going to get worse. There are all sorts of problems related to the internet and this is a big one.”

He said Girls Gone Wild made $160 million off the sale of videos that were found to be in violation of the law.

“This is a big-dollar business.”

He called minors, “targets of opportunity. They are the most vulnerable people for his business.”

Selander mentioned his experts. Dr. Costanzo called Joe Francis “the pied piper of fun.”

“He plays the pipe and leads children, leads people, leads animals over a cliff,” Selander said.

Adolescents’ brains aren’t fully developed.

“Teenagers, minors, are not capable of making the kind of mature decisions we expect adults to make.”

They are opportunities for “predators seeking vulnerable targets.”

Dr. Lebowitz was as qualified in the field of trauma as any you will find, he said.

“She didn’t come in with an ax to grind. She sees a problem.”

And Francis was the heart of the problem. Selander said Francis set the policies at GGW, he approved the purchase of alcohol to give to the girls to loosen them up and he paid bonuses to cameramen for explicit scenes.

Francis, Selander said, also has a personal interest in child pornography.

“16-year-old blondes were the ideal target. Mr. Francis keeps a private kiddy porn collection of the out-takes,” Selander said.

Another cameraman testified that GGW was in Panama City during high school Spring Break, but Francis just pushed for more and more scenes despite the younger crowd.

“What does all this amount to? Joe Francis had a business pattern and practice to take advantage of young girls, and doing that is the very essence of the intent to inflict emotion distress and pain,” Selander said.

He talked about Plaintiff V and the masturbation.

“He took her hand and another girl’s hand and performed that act by force. Imagine if that was your daughter. Think about that.”

During cross-examination, Francis had asked Plaintiff V what she wanted from him.

“She said, ‘I’d like you to be forced to stop this. I don’t want this to happen to any more girls.’ Make him stop,” Selander told the jury.

Francis, he said, was personally involved. He selected B’s footage for a video, and he placed J’s and S’s scene in a video surrounded by “hard-core pornography.”

“He did that.”

Then Francis blames the girls, saying they came up with a conspiracy to wreck their lives and sue him.

“It’s just nuts.”

Selander said the jurors got a first-hand look at Joe Francis the predator.

“You saw what Joe Francis feels for these victims – zero.”

He went through the types of damages: mental and emotional pain, loss of income or earning potential and punitive.

“They’ve each suffered about a million dollars difference in earnings. Was that pain and suffering, that loss of income, caused by Girls Gone Wild? Yes.”

Lebowitz said they’d need open-ended counseling.

“Fifty-thousand a piece sounds like a round number to me.”

Medical expenses?

“This is not a big medical cost case. A lot of people tried to kill themselves and if they don’t get some help, if they don’t turn their lives around, we’re going to see more of that. We already have one talking about killing herself just from her exposure to Joe Francis in court.”

Selander again pointed out that there was no contradictory testimony to the fact that the plaintiffs in this case had been ostracized, isolated and suffered “toxic levels of shame.”

“Sure, it is possible that other things contributed, but the law says if Girls Gone Wild was a substantial cause of damage to them then it doesn’t make any difference.”

Plaintiff V, for instance, had an abusive father and just lost her mother.

“Until the GGW incident, she was dealing with it.”

Is she somehow damaged less, he asked, because she had other problems in her life?

It’s time to welcome these girls back into the community. The first way, he said, was by announcing with their verdict that the plaintiffs did nothing wrong.

“Those were kids. What they did wasn’t wrong. It would be nice to take away their pain, but we can’t. We can only give them money. How do you value lost friends, lost family, lost youth, loss of fun? How do you value them trying to kill themselves? How do you value the fact that Plaintiff B feels responsible for the death of her father?”

The first way, he said, was to give them the money that GGW made off their videos, $17 million.

“I know that’s a lot of money. Either that money goes to them or Joe Francis keeps it.”

That amount was in compensatory damages, for pain and suffering. Selander then said the jurors would have to decide if punitive damages were appropriate.

He explained that punitive was meant to punish, to deter others from the same behavior that had victimized these girls.

“If you don’t punish, if someone doesn’t do something, if this jury that has the ability to do something doesn’t, then the message goes out that this was OK and we’ll keep doing this.”

GGW made $160 million off the illegal videos. Joe Francis personally made $12 million in 2002.

“So how do we get his attention? How do we punish and deter him? He was fined $2.1 million, which was essentially nothing. He didn’t notice it. I think we get his attention with a lot of money. A lot of money. How much is up to you.”

He was close to wrapping up and touched on Francis’ conspiracy theory, saying it didn’t hold water.

“You saw a predator in action,” Selander said, referring to Francis’ cross-examinations of the plaintiffs, “a predator we need to stop from preying on young people. He has no remorse. Until you stop it, I believe nothing is going to happen. We need to do something for our society.”

Their verdict, he said, could help these girls change the course of their lives.

“Help them come back into their community.”

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Chapter 54

“Moral cesspool”

R
achel Seaton-Virga wanted to get a laugh somewhere early in her closing, but she was afraid that joking was a bit of a risk.

“What if it falls flat?” she’d asked the night before.

But she managed to hit the jurors just right. When she got to the podium and looked at the women sitting before her, she introduced herself, something she wasn’t able to do at the beginning of trial.

“This is the first time I’ve had an opportunity to talk with you,” Seaton-Virga said. “This is highly, highly unusual. You don’t have to have been around the courthouse for long to know that this is not generally the way a trial is conducted.”

She introduced Gerard.

“Yes, we’re married. Which may be, while he was testifying earlier, I may have sounded like a nagging wife. I can’t help myself.”

It got the desired laugh from all eight women on the jury.

That connection was what separated her closing from Selander’s.

She told the jurors that before Thursday she’d never spoken with Joe Francis, but that had changed rapidly once she took the case.

“I’ve had a few days now to speak with him. I have a feeling that the way Mr. Virga and I have conducted this trial, stylistically, may be a little different than the way Mr. Francis proceeded.

“I would also imagine, based on my review of some of the testimony transcripts in this case, that he may have come off as an unlikeable person. And maybe you don’t like him. There’s a good chance you probably don’t like him or like what he does or the entire arena in which he operates. But that’s not what this case is about.”

She said this case was about more than Mardi Gras beads and tank tops.

“It’s about these plaintiffs playing the lottery and Mr. Francis and these companies are their lottery tickets. They are taking their chances at the big payoff. This is the big time for them.”

She told them to rely on their own memories, not on what she or Selander said, in evaluating the evidence.

“Credibility is always at issue. It matters whether or not you believe what these young ladies are telling you. It matters whether or not you believe their damages and their testimony was inflated to sensationalize it. It matters. Because Mr. Selander is correct, this case comes down to damages.”

She said Francis acknowledged that he made a mistake.

“The question becomes this: Were these mistakes intentional? Were they reckless? Did he set out to hurt these women? Do you believe it was his goal to derail these women’s lives? Are you going to ignore their histories? Or are you going to push that to the side and say this was all Mr. Francis’s fault?

“These women have taken no personal responsibility for anything that happened? That’s the question you’re going to have to go back there and ask yourselves.”

She took up one of Francis’ repeated points, that he had represented himself because he cared deeply about the case. But when it came time for him to hand the case off to a professional, she’d accepted the challenge.

“That’s my personal responsibility to do so and I accepted that responsibility.”

She asked the jurors if they remembered Pontikes asking any of the plaintiffs about their hospitalizations? Did they hear anything from the plaintiffs that these hospitalizations happened, in some cases, years after their encounters with Girls Gone Wild?

“Plaintiff V is the woman who claims that Mr. Francis forced her to masturbate him in a motel room with approximately eight other people in the room. Plaintiff V also testified that she flashed the camera. But what you also heard was that Plaintiff V thinks it’s fun to flash. She does not morally object to flashing. I’m pretty sure she didn’t say that when she testified. I’m pretty sure it was along the lines of, ‘Flashing is traumatizing. I was horrified by the experience. It has scarred me for life.’ What about the other time she did it that same day? Did that scar her? What about when she asked Mr. Francis for a ride in his Ferrari after it happened?”

She said V had taken Francis by her house and gotten his phone number so they could hook up again later that night to go to a party. That didn’t work out, though, because her friends had already told their parents about what happened that day.

Plaintiff V was dealing with a lot in 2003: her mother’s death, an abusive father and her father’s new girlfriend.

When she was hospitalized, she talked about her mother’s death and her father’s abuse.

“She didn’t mention Girls Gone Wild, she didn’t mention Joe Francis.”

Plaintiff B also was dealing with a lot: new schools, new friends and then her father died.

“Now, the implication is that somehow, I guess, her anxiety and her desire to come home resulted in her father’s death. Plaintiff B said she did not think that Girls Gone Wild had anything to do with her father’s death. And while it sounds sensational to discuss it in closing, or in opening, unfortunately the evidence just doesn’t support it. That has nothing to do with this case.”

Her father’s death was the beginning of her problems.

“She was traumatized by the death of her father. It was unexpected and she was on the phone with him. Why wouldn’t that be traumatic? How could it not be? Of course it was. Following that, she couldn’t keep it together. I don’t think anybody blames her for that.”