Girls gone wild serial#
Girls gone wild tv#

In 1997, he released Banned from Television, a collection of material cut from Real TV for being too graphic or violent. By high school, he attended a correctional boarding school in Idaho that was later shuttered under allegations of abuse.įrancis first got his start in television in the mid-90s, working as a production assistant for Real TV, a syndicated show of home-video bloopers. (His family, who later took out restraining orders against him, declined to participate in the film). Raised in Laguna Beach, Francis supposedly did not have a happy home life with his three sisters and parents. The documentary attempts to make sense of Francis’s apparent violent streak. I hope you fucking die.” (The film states that Wilson “has not objected” to use of the recording.) Francis was arrested in Mexico and spent 73 days in jail on domestic violence charges.

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.

Girls gone wild serial#

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.) 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.