The Madness of Joe Francis: "I thought we were all just having fun. I was wrong." (53 page)

Rachel (Seaton-Virga) really made an impact on you.

“Oh, she did. Oh she did. She made a real good impact and it said an awful lot about her when she had her husband on the stand and he was talking and she said, ‘Move your hand.’ My school teacher friend next to me said, ‘Oh that was so rude’ back in the jury room. When we come back in for nine-hundred and ninety-ninth-thousand time, (Rachel) said, ‘I want to apologize for speaking to my husband the way I did.’ When we went back again (to the jury room) I said, ‘So tell me what that says about that attorney that got up there and apologized in front of the whole courtroom for what she did. What she was trying to do was give us the opportunity to understand it clearly.’ (The teacher) said, ‘I guess you’re right and it worked.’

“I think (Rachel) Virga, the way she carried herself, I thought was very, very good. I thought she was very precise. Did I know if they’d been behind the scene the entire time? A couple of the jurors thought, ‘Oh, they’d been there the whole time, you know. This is a drama deal.’ And I said, ‘Why would you risk that if that were the case?’ I think the Chicago folks come in thinking it was a grand slam for them and it wasn’t.

“I think if we had awarded money, and I made this statement, if you award money you just open the door for all the cockroaches to come out.

“I still believe there’s somebody behind it that we don’t know.”

What did you think of Joe’s cross examination of the plaintiffs, of the girls?

“Was he badgering? No. He wanted to get out there that he wasn’t the one, he didn’t hold a gun to their head. He was trying to do the best he could as an attorney. I probably would have been worse than him if it had been me because I would have been saying, ‘Hey now, let’s be honest about this.’

“When he asked V, did that make her a prostitute? When you accept money, you are a prostitute. It don’t take a rocket scientist, not a lawyer, to figure that out, so did he bring something to the table? He did.

“What I couldn’t figure out was the hispanic lookin’ lady and the little pimp looking guy, I couldn’t figure them out.

“The only question I had and I never could figure out was: Why was the guy who testified that he worked for Playboy (Eric Deutsch), how in the world would he ever get mixed up with Joe Francis?”

Juror 6 asked: “Who did he make mad in the very beginning? did he make Lee Sullivan mad?”

Lee Sullivan saw this as a political opportunity, and Joe, in 2003, saw this is as great publicity.

“Wet T-shirt contests, (bars) doing simulated sex acts on the beach, this is Spring Break. I’m not a dumb old girl.”__

Acknowledgments:

Thank you to Angela Seaton, Laurie Hughes and Greg Wilson for reading and editing the manuscript and all the advice they included in those edits.

A special thank-you to David Demarest, the editor who came in at the last minute and did what he could to salvage the manuscript and infuse life back into the project.