The allegations are not all from the Girls Gone Wild days the film opens with a disturbing audio recording from August 2020 by his ex-wife, Abbey Wilson, in which she screams in terror as Francis apparently attacks and chokes her when Wilson screams “You’re killing me,” Francis replies: “Good. “Of course, his legacy lives on in the lives that he’s ruined, the women whose images he stole, either by filming them without their permission or getting them blind drunk and persuading them to take part in seedy sex scenes without payment.” “He slipped under the radar of the #MeToo movement, because he has been irrelevant for quite some time,” said Blackford Newman. (Those charges, for which he was found guilty in 2013, stem from a 2011 incident in which he met three recent college graduates at a bar, took them to his Bel-Air home, prevented them from leaving his vehicle, grabbed one girl’s hair and throat and slammed her head on the floor.)

For years, Francis dodged or settled numerous lawsuits and skipped out of jail time for a misdemeanor assault and false imprisonment conviction in Los Angeles by fleeing to his resort home in Mexico. Lack of accountability appears to be a running theme for Francis. (The alleged assault was first reported in a 2006 Los Angeles Times profile in which he also physically assaults the 29-year-old female journalist.) Though she went to police, “nothing to this day has ever been done about it,” Jannel says in the film. (Despite years of legal battles, DVDs featuring her are still being sold.)Ī woman in her mid-30s named Jannel alleges that Francis, whom she trusted because he was a celebrity associated with such figures as Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton, fed her shots, manipulated her into masturbating on camera, and raped her in the back of the Girls Gone Wild tour bus. Another participant, Tabitha, says she was 17 and drunk when she was talked into a wet T-shirt contest five years later, she found herself an unwitting poster girl of Girls Gone Wild. Some, such as Nichole, who appears in the documentary, did not even know she was being taped. They featured girls, sometimes underage and manipulated into commercial releases while drunk, performing sexual acts on themselves or each other under blatant pressure from Francis. “And there are people whose lives are still being impacted.”Īs the film recounts through in-person interviews with former Girls Gone Wild producers and staff and copious footage, the tapes themselves were dubiously sourced and financed. “Behind the fun and the wet T-shirt competitions and this sort of faux feminist liberation – flashing your breasts for the camera – lives were being ruined,” the film’s director, Katinka Blackford Newman, told the Guardian.

The 84-minute film, part of TNT’s Rich and Shameless anthology, digs into the queasy popularity of Girls Gone Wild and assembles a deluge of evidence suggesting that Francis, a fixture of mid-aughts gossip blogs, was a serial physical and emotional abuser. The anything-goes raunch and eye-popping infomercials also (barely) masked something much more sinister and damaging, according to a new documentary, Girls Gone Wild Exposed. (Nor was it without controversy at the time.) Then Nevada socked it to him for tax evasion.Francis dominated the soft-core porn market in the early internet days millions of people purchased footage of the girls – often barely over 18 and sometimes younger, predominantly white, thin and blonde – getting badgered by cameramen to take more shots, take their tops off, make out with their friends, use sex toys on themselves. When he was found with sleeping pills and other medication in his cell, he faced a new set of charges, which led to the revocation of his bail. But Francis ended up in jail anyway after the judge in one of the civil suits found that he’d been verbally abusive in negotiations with the opposing side. All but six of the charges were thrown out because of problems with the search warrant. In 2003, he showed up as usual for spring break filming in Panama City Beach, but this time the father of an underage girl complained, and he ended up facing 70 counts of selling drugs, prostitution, and promoting the sexual performance of children. “ I shook them like a tree until all the fruit fell out, and I shook them violently,” he said afterward.įrancis has not been quite as good at eluding prosecutors. Francis represented himself at trial and went after the girls, asking one if she was a prostitute. In 2011, he won another case brought by underage girls in Florida. In 2006, Francis won a Texas lawsuit in a case in which the girls who sued him had signed a release form, lying to say they were over 18. Also smart enough to duck liability in lawsuits brought by girls who argued that he violated their privacy and that they weren’t of age to consent when Francis filmed them.

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