Joe Francis (Part I): The Most Awful Human Being

In 2008, Joe Francis plead no contest to child abuse and prostitution. Today, he lives in Mexico, in a palatial resort estate often frequented by the Kardashians.

Who is this pornography mogul who has avoided more arrests than Ted Bundy? And how did he become a sweeping sensation of the early 2000s? 

In this episode, I'm taking you deep into the history of the Francis family, and the making of a man Doug Stanhope once called, “Pure unadulterated evil…The most awful human being I’ve ever met in all of my time in the entertainment business.”

This is the story of Joe Francis. The real Joe Francis. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:21

Hello, hello, hello, and welcome back to a um super dark deep dive episode of Scandal Queens. I don't really know. I can't really start this one bright and cheery. Um if it's your first time here, hi, hello, I'm EB, the D influencer, helping you deconstruct all things, Cult of Celebrity. And today we are gonna do things a little bit differently. We're gonna start a little bit differently than usual. Instead of leading you with a big, huge, giant monologue about our topic today, I'm not gonna give you any context, any names. I just want to read something to you first to really set the tone of the deep and troubled waters that we're gonna be climbing into today because it is bad, folks. Like way worse than I thought it would be. When I picked this episode, I thought, like, oh, we're gonna do this smuddy, little, scummy, probably like little, little grubby crime episode, and we'll cover the women that have been hurt by it, and that's gonna be it. But no, it turns out that this might be one of the most complicated, heavy, worst, most depraved subjects I've ever covered. And I think by reading this scene to you, it will really just kind of uh help you figure out what this is all gonna be about. So um, here we go. Let me just read this to you. Inebriated and excited, she says she was led to the back of the bus to a small bedroom. The double bed with its neatly folded, iridescent purple sheets takes up most of the room. A flat screen TV faces the bed, and cabinets are filled with remote controls, lubricants, condoms, sex toys in plastic bags, baby oil, a DVD called How to Be a Player, and a clipboard full of waivers for girls to sign. A small bathroom is off to the side with a half-sized shower with faux marble tiling, and on the floor of the shower is a crate holding cheap and fruity flavored rum, whiskey, tequila, and Kool-Aid. The camera then captures the girl lying on the bed. Her nails are chipped, her eyes coated with makeup. Following a cameraman's instructions, she shows her breasts and says, Girl's gone wild. She seems shy but willing. She smiles. The unseen cameraman asks her to take off her shirt, her skirt, then her underwear. She sprawls on the bed, her legs open. At his suggestion, she masturbates with a dildo, saying repeatedly that it hurts, but it also feels good. A man enters the room at certain points, and you hear his voice, low and flirtatious, telling her, You are so adorable. When she says she's a virgin, he responds, Great, you won't be after my cameraman gets done with you. The man told the cameraman to leave and pushed her back on the bed, undid his jeans and climbed on top of her. I told him it hurt, and he kept doing it, and I kept telling him it hurts. I said no twice in the beginning, and during I started saying, Oh my god, it hurts. I kept telling him it hurt, but he kept going. And he said he was sorry, but kissed me so I wouldn't keep talking. Afterward, the girl says, the man cleaned them both off with a paper towel and told her to get dressed. Then she says, he opened the door and told the cameraman to come back, saying, She's not a virgin anymore. No, that was not a scene out of an episode of Law and Order SVU, nor was it some cop's eloquent description from a police report. What I just read to you is a feature article that appeared in the Times in 2006, a piece that centered around one of the most notorious men in the history of porn and pop culture, Joe Francis. Yes, that scene that I just read to you is a scene that is alleged to have occurred in 2006 between an 18-year-old girl and the then 33-year-old Joe Francis. It's brutal and it's only one story and a pageantry of brutality that is experienced by a journalist who spends only a single day with Francis. To most, Joe Francis is a cartoon character. He's a sleazy character, little more than the slimy founder of Girls Gone Wild, that notorious softcore and hardcore porn series that dominated the late night infomercial world. But lift the lid a little, actually look around, and you find out that Francis is an effing psychopath and a prolific predator. Joe Francis is much, much more than his incredibly seedy and corrupt infomercial porn empire. Scratch the surface and you find a chilling story of escalation, a brazen criminal in the making, and a master manipulator with deeply entrenched ties to people like the Kardashians, who remain close personal friends with Joe Francis to this very day. Joe Francis was a foundational part of the 2000s media machine, an undeniable piece in a culture of debauchery and devaluation, a hangover from another decade writ large with an extra dose of violent antisocial inclinations. Everything the 2000s was in many ways was shaped by Joe Francis in a bad way. And that's worth talking about in the context of his trail of crimes that continues to move right on into the future. It's ongoing right now. His his criminal interludes right now. Francis built a media and property empire off the backs of women, literally. Many of them non-consenting, many of them drunk, underage, and forced into situations that changed the course of their lives forever. Like a hurricane Joe Francis ripped through the lives of America and its youth culture, leaving a trail of trauma and heartbreak in his wake. And yet, today, his legacy lives on. He's not in jail. He's not in jail. His legacy lives on not only in his deeply personal relationship with Chris Jenner and Kim Kardashian, but in all the media and celebrity ties he still retains right now to this day. To follow the story of Joe Francis is to follow the story of America's decline in many ways. It's to follow a twisted story of corruption, resentment, scapegoating, and narcissism right to the bitter end. It's the story of a man who will never grow up and who is entirely incapable of change. And that's exactly the story that we're going to be telling today by digging deep into the history and context of a man who Doug Stanhope once called, and I quote, pure unadulterated evil, the most awful human being I have ever met in all of my time in the entertainment business. This is the real story of Joe Francis, the actual story of Joe Francis, the story that Joe Francis would never want told. And we're gonna tell it today. I'm gonna tell it to you right here, right now. I will give you a little bit of a warning though. Not only is this a very context-heavy episode, because when I tell you I researched this, oh baby, I went through the documents. Okay, so this is a context-heavy episode. But more than that, as we get on into things, it'll be mostly in part two, but there is some pretty triggering stuff in this first part. Uh there's some bad stuff, okay? So if you are dealing with a lot of really heavy sexual trauma at the moment, uh this may not be the episode for you because um Joe Francis is without a doubt the most serious and darkest character that I have yet covered on Scandal Queens. And uh, you know, darkness begets darkness, okay? So uh just understand that the tone of this episode is going to be a lot more serious uh than uh previous episodes. And yeah, the Kardashians are part of it. Before we jump into the deep end on this one, uh give me the uh luxury, if you will, of a teeny tiny little little palette cleanser, and let's do a quick temperature check to see what the less serious side of Hollywood is doing these days. Getting started with a big swing, Taylor Swift's soulmate has gotten married. That's right, Taylor Swift's one true love. Matt Healy is officially married to his fiancee Gabrielle something, um, in a truly devastating turn for the pop singer, the Nazi salute throwing, degrading porn watching Healy is now officially off the market. But the real surprise here, not that the couple got married within weeks of each other, but that Healy actually had a much classier wedding. Surprise of all surprise, how wild is that? Uh the bride looked very Elvira meets Sophia Loren, and Healy looked just as ruffled and unkempt as he always did, even though he was probably in a priceless suit. Um, and the two got married at one of Madonna's former estates, which ironically, the whole thing looked like the kind of like garden palace rich people extravaganza that Taylor Swift said she was creating, that everyone that went is now complaining about. Um, just very, very funny, very, very, very, very interesting. All in all, a bunch of awful rich people doing awful things with other rich people, but it's hilarious to me that the man that Taylor once called her soulmate had a better wedding only weeks after hers. And his looks like it probably is for real. Next up, sadly, Jennifer Finch has passed away at the age of 59. In a truly heartbreaking story, Jennifer Finch, the bass player of the beloved riot girl leading band L7, has died after battling a highly aggressive brain tumor. The announcement came just days after Jennifer made her health battles public to her fans. We are devastated to announce the death of our partner's sister, daughter, and friend, Jennifer Precious Finch, read the statement posted to her social media on July 19th. Jennifer's impact on the world of music was seismic, her impact on our lives even more so. We appreciate everyone's interest and concern. Thank you for all the kind messages. We appreciate some space to heal privately during this difficult time. Jennifer was scheduled to appear on the band's final farewell tour this year, which was due to start in October, but had to pull out of touring plans after her health took a scary turn. Now the band says that they will honor Jennifer's wish and carry on the tour in her memory, but obviously with very heavy hearts. It is a very heartbreaking unstory, unjust, unfair. L7, of course, huge band in the 80s and 90s. Its members were leaders of kind of like the punk and the grunge scenes, and they made the rounds with other heavy hitters like Nirvana and Bikini Kill, right? If you're listening to that kind of stuff on Spotify, you've definitely heard L7. Outpourings of support and sadness have sounded from every side of the music community, including from Garbage, Kim Gordon, and members of Pearl Jam as well. Jennifer touched so many lives. One of our music idols is truly gone. And last but not least, they're coming for you in film. Uh, that's right. After a couple of majorly controversial announcements, the elites of Hollywood have officially made it clear they're coming for you, and you're either going to accept their perversions or you aren't. I'm talking, of course, about the laundry list of disgusting and problematic films that have been announced in the last couple of weeks. Top of the list is a new film called A Symmetry, which stars a 78-year-old Richard Gere chasing a romantic connection with his 28-year-old love interest and co-star. Yes, you heard that correctly. Coming to a theater near you later this year, or maybe next, the heartwarming tale of an almost 80-year-old man chasing a not even 30-year-old woman and trying to coerce her into being his lover. Isn't that just nice? Do I really need to go on about how awful and problematic this one is or uh what kind of relationships they're trying to normalize and promote on a mass public scale? Uh, and if that disgusting romp of a movie nightmare isn't enough, we also just got the news that the rape romanticization novel haunting Adeline is going to be adapted into a major motion picture. Yeah, that's right. That's right. A book about a woman falling in love with her rapist and redeeming his violent rape of her through her love for him is being made into a major motion picture that will be aimed at teens and young adults, the same market that the book is marketed to. Isn't that just great? A book about rape, about a violent, sadistic rape that's marketed as a romance. It's list the book is listed as a romance, a romance novel. Um, and you're yeah, yeah, I they're gonna show this to your daughters in a few months. By the time you hear this, they're they're getting ready. They're getting ready a marketing plan to show a movie about falling in love with your rapist and turning him into a good person through your love. Uh, they're gonna show this to your your kids in the next couple of months. Frame it as a romantic story. Um, hopefully, if you're following me and listening to my podcast, I don't really need to explain to you why all of this is very, very, very bad and why it purposefully being created to encourage women to pursue, normalize, and accept these kinds of relationships and behaviors. It's uh it's this it's a horror show. It's a horror show. And I really need you guys to go and read into things like MKUltra and Project Chaos and Project Monarch and Project Art Choke and Project Operation Paperclip and all of these things because they are trying to literally condition you into really bad stuff. They're trying to normalize and condition you to do, accept, promote really bad things. So, you know, uh awful, awful. Do not go and see these movies. As a matter of fact, please throw a huge fit about them. Get online, yell about them, tag the people who are making these films, tag this disgusting writer who wrote this rape book. And like, because like this is unacceptable. It's unacceptable. Neither one of these projects ever needs to see the light of day. They don't have to. Uh, we can stop this because uh, what the fuck are we actually doing? All right, well, that is the end of the road, as far as anything happy or lighthearted is concerned, because now we're gonna set out onto the long, dark road of a man who once proudly, proudly told a reporter in 2022, you can't rape your partner. Yes, I'm talking about Joe Francis, one of the most truly dangerous and psychopathic individuals I've ever covered on this show. And I will warn you again, pretty much from the beginning, it's gonna be triggering because when you're talking about Joe Francis, you're talking about someone who, at least from the age of 10, expressed a simmering and targeted resentment toward women and the wider world at large. And that's not an assumption that I'm making out of nowhere. I know you guys are like, who the hell are you to make such that's like a bold statement to make. These are statements, I'm saying this because of statements that are personally made by Joe Francis himself. Statements that come not only from his own website, which is one of the major sources that I'll be using today, um, but uh an array of interviews, documentary appearances, and documents that I'll be referencing throughout this episode. And again, I warn you, it's dark, okay? It's all dark. Joe Francis's story is one that is marked by trauma, violence, and a seeming unwillingness to compromise in any shape or form, in a bad way. The stories he tells on meetjoefrancis.com smack like the early ramblings of a serial killer. And you'll see why shortly I use terms like psychopathy the deeper we get into this web of tales. Joe Francis was almost made to be a sinister man. Every life event from birth right up to his leap into the American entertainment industry and pornography industry seems almost tailor-made to forge not only a man who's corrupt, but a man entirely without empathy or basic human emotion. And that is who Joe Francis is. That's who he was seemingly made to be. And that's who we're going to uncover today. When it comes to understanding someone, I think it's always important to go right back to the start, right? Like right back to the root. And no, I'm not gonna take you on back to the early 1900s on some big historical jaunt. Uh, I'm just talking about Joe Francis's beginning. Uh, I think it's an important place to look. When I decided to do this episode, I knew I wanted to dig deep, right? Because we all know the superficial stories about Joe Francis. We know the headlines that have been in the media. But what I quickly found out is that this is without a doubt one of the most troubled and troubling people in recent pop culture history. Like, how did he get this way? It was the same question I always came back to. Was the monster born or was he made? You got some interesting answers to those questions when you peel back all the lies that Joe Francis tells and get to the root of the people that brought him into this world. The Joe Francis story really, in many ways, starts with his parents, Raymond and Maria Francis. These were the people who created a monster. So who were they? How did they shape Joe Francis's life? Well, as it turns out, the story of Joe Francis' parents, aw, it's as murky and filled with lies, is Joe's own life story that he likes to reiterate differently in every interview. Each layer you peel back is mixed with some lie, omission, missing detail, or outright exaggeration. The Francis family seemed to be a family of ghosts stacked over a bounty of tall tales. Despite his claims that Joe grew up struggling for money, uh, Joe Francis was actually born into the arms of an extensively, extensively wealthy and privileged family, to a father who, at first glance, seems to be a really straightforward and respectable member of society. As Joe tells the story, Raymond Francis, his father, was a successful advertiser and direct-to-TV marketer who launched an array of products, some more successful than the rest. In the 70s, Raymond Francis, allegedly, became involved with a brand of potato chips called Daddy Crisp Potato Chips, which featured the ultra cheesy tagline of Were those potato crisps named after you, or were you named after them, Daddy? The adverts are truly cringe worthy and feature a bizarre scene with this Beatles-like musician chomping on potato chips with a young blonde girl who rubs all over him while desperately begging for his attention. Let's listen to one of Raymond Francis's Daddy Chris potato chip adverts here, um, which I managed to scrounge up in the old interwebs.

SPEAKER_01 18:19

Those potato chips name daddy crisp after you. Oh, you name Daddy Crisp after those noisy potatoes. They're a lot noisier than you are, but you're both lovable. If you love your daddy, you love Daddy Chris. Potato chips.

SPEAKER_00 18:40

Uh, yeah. Yeah. It's a bizarre ad. It's got these weird, overtly sexual uh uh undertones that are like a bit strange for the time, and definitely targeted a certain demographic, a very specific demographic that you might be familiar with if you've been on Patreon following my Owsley Stanley series. But either way, it made Raymond Francis a ton of money and positioned him to launch the next stage of his career as what Joe claims is a mildly successful entrepreneur. But what if I told you that more or less everything I just told you is a complete and total load of crap? Yeah, because as it turns out, uh Raymond Francis isn't even the real name of Joe Francis' father. Uh, as I was preparing for this episode and fact-checking the final script, I was following this loose train of information and found an obituary, which led me down a rabbit hole of questionable chemical ties and direct links to none other than the CIA, which were at a specific time engaged in their MK Ultra Chemical Experimentation. I kid you not. Like I really wish I could, I really wish I was kidding you. I couldn't believe it when I found it. Um, but essentially it breaks down like this the real name of Joe Francis' father is actually Raymond Friesick. Raymond Friesick, spelled F-R-I-E-S-E-C-K-E. So I might be pronouncing that wrong, um, but that's what we're gonna go with. Friesick. Friesick. Um, and it turns out that Raymond Friesick didn't make his money from slinging bags of potato chips, he actually made it being tied to some of the most questionable chemical manufacturers in the world. In the world, on top of these being associated with the alphabet agencies. Yep, yep, yep, follow me down this rabbit hole. Raymond Friesick was born in 1937 to Bernard P.K. and Josephine Friesick. There is very little information out there about his childhood, but what we do know is that he graduated with his Bachelor of Science in Chemistry from Boston College in 1959. After that, it was straight to MIT, where he added another degree to the list. Another, he was uh he did like civil chemical engineering uh at MIT, and he graduated from that in 1961. Now, after leaving MIT, Joe Francis' father, Raymond Friesick, which is what his real name is, joined the U.S. Army as a lieutenant in 1961 and served until 1963, a two-year contract, which is odd. Now, mind you, again, this is during the CIA's diabolical chemical experimentation, right? This window of time, 1961 to 1963, is when they were really amping up the uh LSD experimentations on unwitting citizens, they were getting into hate Ashbury, all that kind of stuff. This is like a really specific time, and they very often worked with the U.S. Army, the CIA did, um, which is what Raymond Friesick was a part of. Now it's pretty safe to say that even if Raymond Friesick wasn't working with the CIA, during those two years in the Army, uh, he was more than likely doing chemistry because he had multiple degrees in chemistry, right? That's what his primary degree was in. But the other big tell that he was probably working in chemistry with the army from 1961 to 1963 is because as soon as he left the army, his resume became packed with prominent positions in some of. World's biggest chemical companies. If you go and look into Joe Francis' father, you will find out that he um uh the potato chips barely even figures into his resume. The real places he worked at was Kimberly Clark. He worked for Dewey and Almy in the chemical division, he worked for W.R. Grace Co. in the chemical division, he was the vice president of marketing and planning for Butler's Greenwich Incorporated, and he was the president of a company called Strategic Management Associates. Now, if those first two companies that I named, Kimberly Clark, Dewey and Almy Chemical Division, if those two, if they rang a bell, it's no surprise because guess what? Kimberly Clark and Dewey and Almy appear numerous times in declassified CIA documents. Dewey and Almy produced balloons for the CIA and the Army, which were basically designed to deliver payloads on determined targets. The outline of these projects are documented pretty extensively in declassified CIA documents from the 1950s and the 1960s. Now, WR Grace Co., another group that Raymond worked for, is also a focus of declassified intelligence documents, appearing in them throughout the 1930s, before the CIA was even a thing. The espionage and intelligence bodies that existed as they existed in America in the 1930s were working with WR Grace Co. And guess what? After the CIA has formed the 1940s, they continue to appear in documentation and declassified CIA files all the way through the 1980s. Okay. And they literally are in there. There is um there's a message in the 1980s. There is a declassified letter in there that is sent from the head of the Central Intelligence Agency to the head of W.R. Grace Co., who uh operated some pretty extensive and dodgy operations in Peru. Um, but essentially this letter from the 1980s from the Central Intelligence Agency, it's begging the head of WR Grace Co. to tell him how they can plan the future. They say, it's pretty clear that we have to stop responding to the future and we have to coordinate the future, something to that effect, like you guys have. Please, please tell us, the CIA, how to do it. Truly, truly, truly dodgy stuff. Now, Raymond Friesick also worked um for Kimberly Clark. And the division of Kimberly Clark that Raymond worked for, the Schweitzer division, was largely tied to the production of commercial tobacco products, you know, like how to make them more chemically addictive and therefore mass consumed, so the people over these tobacco companies could make a whole lot of freaking money. Uh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And again, the heads of Kimberly Clark, the heads of Kimberly Clark are in so many social club meetings with the CIA. They all run in the same circles in these declassified documents. It is truly, truly, truly mind-blowing. And this is the man who Joe Francis, anytime he's asked about his family, anytime you read his biography material, he describes this man that I've just talked about as a hard-scrabbling entrepreneur. No, no, sir. No, that man was a chemical engineer with endless potential ties to America's most sinister clandestine organization. I couldn't even believe it when I found the trail. It was, I was like, this is this is this is insane. Like it's absolutely insane. The man who Joe described as a mildly successful entrepreneur went on after these companies to form, again, the focus here, not a potato chip company. If you go and ask Joe Francis, he says, Oh, my dad did a potato chip company. No, no. After he got done working for companies like Kimberly Clark and Dewey and Almy and all these other big, huge chemical companies that had these ties to American intelligence agencies, um, Raymond went and started his own health supplement company called Beyond Health that focused on replacing traditional supplements with natural medicine. I I'm not even this is just get this, get this. Raymond, sounding a lot like the prophet William Branham, who we have discussed at length in the Kardashian episodes, he proclaims, and this is still up on his website. You can go to the Beyond Health website and read this. He proclaimed that basically in the late 80s or 90s, he had been on death's doorstep and he had taken traditional medical treatments and they had only killed him worse. And then using his magical, mystical chemistry knowledge, Raymond claimed that he cured himself by using high doses of vitamin C. Yeah. Yeah, one of those that if you're familiar with the whole right wing pipeline, this this is this is part of it. Um, according to Raymond, the so-called discovery led him to start his health supplement empire in the the last like 20 years of his life. It's really, really wild. If you Google Rodney Francis, uh, you'll find a bunch of stuff about Beyond Health, but you'll also find a list of best-selling books and a huge list of patents and inventions that relate back to the so-called cellular health research that he was engaged in throughout his lifetime. You'll also find something else pretty interesting if you start Googling around for Raymond Francis Friesick. That name specifically, the whole name, not just his entrepreneur's name of Raymond Francis. And what you find is that Raymond Francis Friesick actually sat on innumerable Republican committees, like a lot of them, um, including the Republican Committee of Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Cambridge Republican City Committee, and the Marin Republican Council, as well as the Navy League of Marin County. Joe Francis's father was also a member of the NRA and the World Affairs Council. Hello, hello. Uh, he was a prominent man and a powerful one with a lot, a lot, a lot of powerful connections. But we're not done yet. Because, and here's here, this is the craziest part. Um, the craziest thing I found out about Joe Francis's father, and it's genuinely so crazy that I have a hard time believing it. I couldn't believe I had to get my friend Connie, which you've heard she did the Kardashian episode with me. We do the podcast Newska together. Um, I had to get her to confirm this with me because I was mind blown, mind-blown that I was getting the same business addresses for Raymond Francis and this Raymond Francis Friesick. They had the same death date, they had the same obituaries, right? And I was like, this is really crazy. Can you please verify what I'm about to say that it's true and that these are the same people? And we did, we verified it. But here it is. Raymond Francis Friesick is named in declassified JFK assassination documents. I kid you not. I kid you not. Joe Francis's father is named in declassified JFK assassination investigation documents. Now, buckle up because this this is this is really crazy. So you remember how I told you when we were going through the crazy timeline of Raymond Francis, you know, getting all his chemical degrees and working for all those chemical companies? And do you remember how I said he was in the army for two years from 1961 to 1963? Well, as it turns out, sometime after Raymond Francis's quote unquote discharge from the Army in 1963, while he was working, he was working for a various array of chemical companies, he pops up again in a warning letter from the Office of Army Intelligence in Washington, D.C. Yeah. He uh Raymond Francis Friesick writes a letter, okay, from somewhere in Washington, D.C., and he sends it to this lieutenant colonel in Georgia, the state Georgia, not the country. And someone in the Army Intelligence office intercepted this letter and wrote a warning letter to the head of intelligence of the Army, okay. These documents, which were declassified as part of the House Select Committee on Assassinations that took place, I think, from 77 to 79, they were investigating the assassination of President JFK. Okay. And they were also looking into the Warren Commission. They were investigating the Warren Commission, which the public had widely come to believe had covered up the assassination of JFK and specifically the CIA's involvement in it and having it done, basically covering up the fact that the government had JFK killed because he wanted rights for working class people. Okay. That's that's where these letters were declassified from. And in it, they're basically insinuating that Raymond, they're not even insinuating, they blatantly state um that Raymond Francis Friesick has contact with Cuban anti-Castro paramilitary groups. It's like it's it's genuinely, it is a bombshell of a document to find. It's it's literally on the National Archives. Because so, in these documents that Raymond Francis is mentioned in, he specifically mentioned this person who intercepts his letters and sends them, forwards them as a warning. He's mentioned as having connections to this Cuban paramilitary group called Alpha 66. And the person writing this says, Hey, I've intercepted these letters from Raymond Francis Friesick. It looks like he's in communication with anti-Castro-Cuban elements. And it looks like he has access to secret government documents, like top secret classified government documents. You need to keep an eye on this. And that's a really, really big deal, okay? Um, specifically the mention of the Alpha 66 ties, because that group is a paramilitary group of Cubans who were funded by the CIA and given land to train on in the Florida Everglades. And they were like this really crazy, unpredictable group. They had all these charismatic leaders. The early ones were like really genuinely wanted freedom. The last ones were just like these violent, untrustworthy renegades, and the CIA just kept pumping money into them, and they were just like this wild dog that couldn't be controlled. And eventually the CIA just like cut ties with them, but they still gave them tons and tons of money, right? This is a group who has widely been questioned as potentially having involvement with the killing of JFK or the organization of it and potentially having ties to the CIA and their running of guns to Cuba during this time. Now, again, these documents, which were released in 1977, quote these letters from Raymond Francis to, I believe it's Lieutenant Colonel John Connolly. Um, and they were originally sent in 1964, the year after JFK's death. Okay. And that is quite significant, especially the fact that he's writing these letters in 1964, the year after the president's death, when the investigations into his assassination are ongoing. And he's he's he's writing saying the CIA are scheduling another coup for the revel, like for the election times, and this Alpha 66 group is about to move now. It's he's he's like in on some really covert stuff. And so the reason that's important is because this letter that Joe Francis' father sent from Washington in 1964, it basically proves he was a spook working for Army intelligence in the 1960s. All right. Now, I won't need hopefully to remind most of you that in the 1960s, the Army was also engaging in MK Ultra-like experimentation that very often took place in conjunction with or alongside the human experimentation that was going on with the CIA for that specific MKUltra project. Okay. It is knowing that this guy had all these chemical degrees from these prestigious institutions, and now we have a letter from him, a declassified letter inside these documents showing that he's working for intelligence in the 60s as a chemist with ties to all these chemical companies. It's a revelation, man. I like that's just what it is. Joe Francis's father was allegedly working with government intelligence agencies during the one of the most like twisted, illegal, and harmful chapters in the history of these organizations. And it could mean that Raymond Francis was tied to all kinds of things. Okay, because remember, he's a chemist. So does that mean he's working with Jolly On West, who was heading up the LSD program and doing horrible, unspeakable things to people and hate Ashbury? Did he have any knowledge of the experimentation that was going on with Charles Manson? Because there was all these guys who knew that Charles Manson was a part of all these drug research programs. So was he a part of that? I mean, he might have had a hand in all of it for all we know. His name could be in any of these research documents tied to these people that they still have not released to us. And it certainly looks like he may have had something to do with the cover-up of JFK's assassination, certainly in like the Warren Commission and the years that followed. Long story short, Raymond Francis Friesick was a far more um complicated and successfully entrenched man than Joe Francis has ever let anyone, anyone, anyone, anyone to believe. Joe Francis's father was also a member of the NRA and the World Affairs Council. He was a prominent man and a powerful man with a lot of powerful connections behind him. He wasn't just some daddy Chris potato chip potato slinger, but Joe Francis never talks about any of this stuff. Any of it. He never talks about any of it. Long story short, Raymond Francis Friesick was a far more complicated and successfully entrenched man than Joe France Joe Francis has ever led anyone to believe ever, ever, ever. Raymond Francis Friesick was more respected for his lifelong ties to chemical research and political circles than his entrepreneurial credits, which, let's be honest, those also netted in millions, maybe even billions, of dollars over his lifetime. If you think it's going to be smoother sailing from here, you are absolutely wrong. Because Raymond's wife, the mother of Joe Francis, is even more of a mystery than her son or her husband. For while Raymond, we'll just we'll just call him Raymond Francis. Uh, for while Raymond Francis lived his life as a successful businessman with a fake name, his wife is much harder to pin down. There are only literally like two concrete things, two or three concrete things we know about Joe Francis' mother. Maria Francis was born Maria C. Arlt in Austria, Germany. The timeline on her arrival in America and her family roots have intentionally been kept murky. It's hard to even confirm a birth date for this woman. As the story goes, in every Joe Francis interview that he's given about this, his mother Maria was a good-looking woman that his father spotted on the beach one day in Long Island, New York. His father, who I just described to you, his connections. Uh, Raymond Francis, according to his son, made the first move and the rest was history. That's pretty much where Joe leaves it. Uh, I looked and looked and looked and looked and looked, and any other descriptions of his mother, it's basically just like she was a good homemaker who looked after her kids, and there's nothing else. There's like a couple of pictures of him with her as a baby, nothing else. I, of course, after finding out everything that I just found out about Joe Francis's father, wasn't ready to buy a story off of any other story off of Joe Francis that easily. So I decided to do some digging, and digging I did. Being an old hand with the immigration records on ancestry and a longtime member, not I don't do the blood tests, just I like to do the history, the ancestry, the genealogy stuff. Um, I decided to have a look around and I came up really disappointed when I couldn't find anything, which is weird. I like I literally thought to myself, that's odd. That's really odd. Because usually, especially when she, when, when Joe Francis's mother would have been coming over here, which would have been sometime between the 1930s to the 1960s. Uh well, it wouldn't even be the 1930s, it would have been the 1940s to the 1960s. She, there's there would have been some kind of record. There would have been some kind of record, if not of her, of her family, but I couldn't find anything, right? I couldn't find anything, especially nothing in the 1960s, which was weird, which was weird. But Maria C. Arlt was a hard pen to find in the haystack. And so I was like, right, okay, I'm gonna have to widen the net. So I widen the net and I start looking around more broadly at the Austrian immigrants who came into America in the kind of time frame that she must have come in if she was having kids at the end of the 60s. Okay. Now, before we get into this, I do have to put a disclaimer here. None of what I'm about to share with you uh is like 100% smoking gun concrete confirmed. Okay. I have a lot of reasons. I have a lot of research, I have a lot of evidence, and I'm gonna share all of that with you. Um, everything I've discovered. Uh, and it has led me to the following beliefs, okay? But there is no concrete smoking gun as there never is with these people, right? Just like with his father, his like Joe Francis' father worked with all these companies that worked with the CIA, but I don't have a pay slip from the CIA, right? I don't have his name on a paper. I just have time frames when he happened to be working in the same place. Well, there's some similar things with Joe Francis' mother, okay? Uh, so I'm gonna explain those. I'm gonna explain two main theories of where I think Joe Francis' mother probably came from, okay? And you, you know, if you want more even deeper than what I'm about to give you, go to Patreon, it'll all be explained there. But it is wild. It is wild, okay? So buckle up. So being unable to find any clear information on Joe Francis' mother, even like a confirmed birth date, um, and which is weird, right? Because she's this extraordinarily wealthy woman. They sold their house for 25 million um a few years ago, and it was a house they bought in the 90s, the 80s or the 90s. She was an extraordinarily wealthy woman. She was married to this extraordinarily wealthy man who was a man of society. He was on all these society boards. Like this was a woman of society, and it's very weird that you can't find her anywhere. She just seems to be nowhere. So I got suspicious and I started just like focusing on the Arlt family specifically, because that was that was her maiden name, Maria C. Arlt. So I was like, I'm gonna find connections to that. So I winded the net, and the first thing I found was Charles Francis Arlt. And I just heads up, this this first theory, I think this is the most likely one. So Charles Francis Arlt, he was an Austrian immigrant and he moved to Long Island, New York, where Joe's parents met, sometime just after the turn of the century. Now, details on him, again, are very vague. That's not so weird, right? There's a lot of people coming into America. There's a rush of people after the early 1900s. It's like fine, fine, right? Um, but he seems to be your typical immigrant story. Flees Austria to escape increasing militarism sometime between the end of World War I and the start of World War II. And he sets up a camp in Long Island and he raises a family, right? Pretty straightforward, I think. And again, the most likely option. Now, through this Charles Francis Arlt, I found a well-known family of artists, also with the last name of Arlt, who are well established and well respected in Woodstock, New York. They've got close ties to the historical community there. Cool, fine, interesting. Nothing suspicious about that. That makes sense. Immigrant comes, kids get educated, they become artists. Fine, great. But what was interesting was when you start digging into the sons of Charles Francis Arlt specifically. Okay. And this is this is this is when I started looking at the sons of this man, I went, I'm pretty sure that this is this is where where Joe's mother Maria came from. So Charles Francis Arlt comes from Austria. He comes to America, he brings with him two sons. Okay. The first son, Edward Charles Arlt, bears a striking resemblance to Joe Francis. Like when I saw the picture of him in one of the genealogy websites, I actually gasped because I went, that has to be, that has to be either Joe Francis's grandfather or like a great uncle or like a granduncle, like the something, something like that, right? Has to be. You can see that on Patreon if you want to see that on Patreon. But it is the other son, which I think maybe if we're kind of following the line that the father came from, right? If we follow where Joe's dad potentially came from in the intelligence community, this second son, Rodney Arlt, becomes very, very interesting because Sergeant Rodney Arlt served in the 881st Signal Corps of the Army during World War II. Now, if this is the family of Joe Francis's mother Maria, this particular relationship with this sergeant is very, very, very important because, as it turns out, the unit that Sergeant Sergeant Rodney Arlt served in World War II, they served and assisted the OSS. Yes, yes, the OSS. For those who don't know, that is the very first version of America's secret government. That's the first version of the CIA. Like all the espionage, secret identities, missions, sabotage, all that stuff in World War II, that was the OSS. So I start to dig around. I'm thinking, oh my God, are you kidding me? This guy, this guy was working potentially with the OSS. Um, I found out that Rodney Arlt's unit, the 881st Signal Corps of the Army, were stationed in the China, Burma, India or CBI theater during World War II. And more than that, they had offered cryptography, aviation, and depot assistance to OSS agents who were on endless, endless covert espionage missions in China, Burma, and India. What does that mean? I know some of you are like, oh my, the ones who are not like having their minds blown right now, they're like, what does that even mean? Members of the Signal Corps in the CBI during World War II were responsible for supplying secret agents from America with things like the SSTR1, which was a suitcase transmitter. It was a radio that they were walking around with. It just looked like a suitcase, but they could transmit and receive through it and record spy stuff, spy craft, right? Absolute spy craft. They also supplied the cryptography equipment for covert communications and even trained the OSS officers in cipher. It was a support branch for the intelligence agencies. And Rodney Arlt, who just so happens to have a brother who looks almost like an identical twin to Joe Francis, he was right in the middle of all this. And here's another really interesting development. On December 12th, 1945, this sergeant Rodney Arlt, who again, I'm pretty sure that this is like Joe Francis's great uncle or something like that, he was awarded the soldiers' medal. And if you go and look up this award, it's very vague. It's incredibly vague, the description of it in the regist, like in the register. And it only states that Arlt had been given the award for, and I quote, performing an act of heroism, not involving conflict with an enemy of the United States. It is an odd context when you consider that who his unit was, the fact that they worked in support operations with the OSS, and also the whole history of Joe Francis' father and these chemical organizations that he worked for that also had these ties to the intelligence agency. And if you think this part of the story is not that important, I just want you to remember the OSS had several major operations in the CBI during World War II. Um, it included Detachment 402, whose job was to conduct espionage and psychological warfare on Chinese people. And then they also had detachment 404, which was focused on acts of sabotage in Burma, Thailand, and Malaya. Soldiers like Sergeant Rodney Arlt, who was a technician fifth degree, who performed admirably in these theaters during World War II, were often the first people offered positions in America's growing intelligence communities back home in the United States, which was already gearing up by 1945 for its Cold War with Russia. And when they did so, their family records suddenly became very difficult to trace with any accuracy. Like Owsley Stanley, who we know for a fact served in the military, his dad served in the military, his granddad served in the military. You can't find military records for any of them. Isn't that interesting? Isn't that interesting? The only thing you can get is uh we can neither confirm nor deny from the CIA. It's an interesting connection. And again, this is just the first theory of Joe Francis' mother and the family that I believe she is tied to. I think I've found some pretty convincing proof, which again you can go and see on Patreon. Um, but no, there's just like with everything with this, I don't have a smoking gun of a pay slip with names and dates on it. But if you see the picture of this Sardney, Sergeant Rodney Alt Arlt, if you see his brother Charles, I get again, I gasped. I gasped. I'll put it up on Patreon if you want to go over there and have a look at it. But it uh I genuinely think that this is probably the most likely option, right? A family who flees the European continent just before the war, and then one of their clever sons joins the military and makes good in a new branch, right? Of this like growing branch. It's not, it's not even a conspiracy theory. That's not that's not even a conspiracy theory. That's just like what I think is probably pretty likely, and it makes sense. But then there is a second potential possibility when it comes to Maria C. Arlt, the mother of Joe Francis. Um, and it's a much more far-fetched one. I just want to say that. I'm almost just putting this one in there for fun. Um, this is something that I just ended up falling into the lap of while I was searching for Maria C. Arlt and her Austrian family. But it would explain a lot about Joe Francis if this second theory about his mother's family is true. So if Maria C. Arlt, the mother of Joe Francis, was not part of this first Austrian family that the Charles Arlt that immigrated to America before World War II, right? The ones who became well-to-do artists and members of the American military, then there is a very, very, very far-fetched, very far-fetched, but nonetheless troubling possibility, considering the context of links that we have discussed, um, that she could be a part of a much more troubling family legacy that came to the shores of America after World War II. If that's when she came, we don't know, right? We can't find any confirmed time for when Joe Francis's mother actually came to America. But here's the thing before I get into this it's fucking weird that there's seemingly no record of Maria C. Arlt or when she went to America from Austria. That's it's very, that's very weird. I I know people think that there was just no record keeping and everything was higgledy-piggledy, but that's not necessarily true as someone who has been able to trace things all the way back to the 1300s. Records are sometimes a lot better kept than you think, especially in America in the Cold War with Austrians coming in. Okay, like that's someone who would have been documented, okay? So it's very, very interesting that Joe Francis's mother is just nowhere until she arrives suddenly in America in the 1960s at some point at the end and marries this uh this chemist who has some interesting tie. So here's the other potential option. As you guys know, I'm doing a lot of work on America's covert government elements in the 1960s and their ties to counterculture. And in that, I found some patterns specifically as it comes to proven events like Operation Paperclip. Okay. And if you don't know what that is, pause this, go look up Operation Paperclip, and then you can come back here. So I kind of have this context in mind when I started going, it's weird that I can't find the Arlt family. Let's look around in declassified files and see what we can find of Maria. So I started doing that. And while I didn't find a smoking gun, I did find a Nazi doctor named Dr. Fritz Arlt. And Dr. Fritz Arlt was notorious. He was notorious. He was the second of, he was like Himmler's second, he was like Himmler's like right hand man, and he was a notorious representative of the Nazi SS. Not just a Nazi, he was a high-ranking SS official, which is the worst of the worst of the worst. These people had full knowledge of what was going on. They loved it, they supported it, they pushed it, okay? Like this is this is it. And he was known for um, at the end of the war, trying to expand Auschwitz to put Polish in it and to expel all the Polish out of Poland and replace them with native Germans so that Germans could have the country. Okay. Really dark, sinister shit. He was awful. He was absolutely disgusting. And you would think that a man like this would have ended up in Nuremberg, right? Like you would think he would have, you know, ended up in like prison somewhere or in jail. But uh nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. Dr. Fritz Arlt appears to have skated right past any form of justice whatsoever. After World War II, when many of Dr. Arlt's companions were sitting in the rows at Nuremberg, he mysteriously disappears from the record, banishes right off the face of the earth along with his wife and unnamed children, of which I also can't find any record of. I found a couple of vague mentions of a son and a daughter, but no confirmed anything, and they all just disappear after 1945. Now, one might think that Dr. Fritz Arlt did what many other Nazi leaders did, change his name and the name of his family and start new somewhere else, but I don't think that that's what's happened. Actually, I know for a fact that that's not what happened. Because after a mysterious disappearance of 10 years, Dr. Fritz Arlt suddenly boop popped up, popped up again with no mention of his family, um, as a member of the science and youth boards in Germany. Yeah, really prestigious, high-ranking government, government jobs, just 10 years, 10 years after he helped to orchestrate and execute what was going on at Auschwitz. Uh, he would later go on to serve as a representative for German and Friends Youth. He worked on science boards, like all this kind of stuff. Digging into the history of Dr. Fritz Arlt, I found some pretty compelling evidence in declassified documents that he might have been one of the Nazi scientists and bureaucrats who was protected by the U.S. government in Operation Paperclip. He is mentioned as a valuable connection and asset in several documents traded in the 1950s by CIA agents who were discussing covert operations in Leipzig and Russia. He exists nowhere else but in these declassified CIA documents. He completely disappears off the map after World War II, except for in these declassified CIA documents. So whether Dr. Fritz Arlt was a member of Operation Paperclip or not, it's incredibly odd that a high-ranking Nazi official like him and his family scattered to the wind after World War II, only to resurface in the mid-50s and 60s as a prominent member of a prominent organization, multiple different organizations. And like when you trace the locations and even identities of he and his family between the years 1940 to 1965, can't do it. Doesn't exist. It is literally impossible. I spent days trying to track these fuckers down on the internet and like uh through papers and all kinds of stuff, couldn't find them, which, you know, and it it seems intentional. He was a high-ranking official. It seems intentional. Let's just put it that way. And I know how it all sounds. There's no way Joe Francis could be related to that line of Arts. Well, I thought that way too, until again, I started digging into the CIA documents and just found gaping holes in the military and immigration records. It could all possibly be coincidence. Hell, it probably is, but maybe it isn't. After all, what are the actual odds that Maria C. Arlt was just a poor immigrant girl walking on the beach and she just happened to capture the heart of one of the most prominent chemists of the time who had graduated from MIT and worked at the biggest chemical companies in the United States? That just happened. That just happened. I'm sorry. The world that come on, the world doesn't work that way. If you follow the trail, it seems to me very likely that they met one another through similar social circles and settings. So who was Maria C. Arlt Francis in truth? How did she raise a man like Joe Francis? We will probably never get the full truth, not from Joe Francis for sure, anyway. Um, and probably not from a woman who seemingly has no available public records. Either way, by 1971, Maria C. Arlt, the Austrian, with an untraceable background, was married to the wealthy and successful chemist Raymond Francis, and they immediately started their family. Little did they know, however, that within just a few years they would open the door on a child who was truly troubled from the start. So, all of that dodgy history in the past, we now get to the meat. Joseph Raymond Francis was born on April 1st, 1973, in Atlanta, Georgia. April Fool's Day, as it turns out, which would be a very fortuitous day of birth for the second child and the only son of Raymond and Maria Francis. Little Joseph came into this world much as he would ride astride it in the 2000s, screaming, red-faced, and delirious. It was a lucky family to be born into for this privileged only son. By the time the Francis family had moved to Atlanta, they were thriving and well-to-do. Daddy Crisps were a hit, and Raymond Francis was already looking to the future for his next big score: a career in cosmetics and skin creams, direct to order from the glow of your TV screen, really putting that chemistry degree to good use. To hear Joe Francis tell his story, he was pretty much a hailraiser from the moment he was born. In fact, it seems to be an identity he takes a lot of pride in. Little Joe was put into a local school around 1978 where he immediately earned the deserved reputation of the problem child. According to Francis himself, during his first year or two at the school, he was caught exposing his genitals to another little girl who he claims had asked him to play a game of show me yours and I'll show you mine. Blaming the girl, that's just going to be the start of a lot of this, so buckle up for that. Joe Francis tells this story proudly on his website, taking no heed apparently of the realities of CCSA and what this incident that it basically reads, like a textbook case of ex-escalating child-on-child sexual abuse. Once he was properly scolded for trading a peek at genitals with the little girl, Francis, apparently, again allegedly, according to him, as we know, he lies about everything, he turned his focus on one of his teachers. Now, I actually found this interlude to be pretty disturbing. Let's see if you find it pretty disturbing. But essentially, the way Joe Francis tells this story, which again, you got to take it with a grain of salt, but but the even the fact that he tells it this way is I think indicates a lot about his psychology. But basically, he says, after he gets in trouble with this little girl for exchanging peaks of genitals, he gets focused on this teacher who he describes um as having these perfect huge breasts. And he says, I was so obsessed with her large breasts at around the age of eight or nine. And I was just fascinated with her. And I just had to have her attention. Creepy, creepy, creepy, creepy. If it is true, big red flags. If it's not true, big red flags that he's even telling the story this way. So Joe, according to him, he was obsessed with his teacher and her boobs, and he wanted her attention. So what he decided to do was to find the biggest pin that he could find to put it in her chair so that she would sit on it and hurt herself. And he describes the thrill that he felt seeing the needle sink into her backside and watching her scream and get upset by it. Uh, alarming. I don't, I don't really know else, know how else to describe that, but alarming. Uh, a little boy who is already figuring out that he likes the thrill of inflicting harm on women who he has growing sexual feelings for, right? It reads like something out of this is why I said at the beginning, it reads like a serial killer biography. This reads like something out of a Bundy biography, honestly. While Joe Francis tells the story of his childhood antics with an air of frivolity, it's clear that he was an escalating problem for his family. Okay. The school lodged complaint after complaint after complaint. Um, but before he could get kicked out, his family, which again, his dad's a bigwig, so this makes sense. Uh, his family decided to move. In 1980, when Joe was just seven years old, his father Raymond decided it was finally time to set his chemical career on the sidelines and head for the bright lights of the West Coast. California was where the Francis family was headed next, and it was there that Joe Francis would discover who and what he was. But again, that's the story anyway. The Francis family, which at this time consisted of Babette, the older sister, Joe, and then a baby sister, Caroline, who was a year and a half younger, uh, they settled into the upscale and pocket-lined community of Newport, Newport Beach, California. Yes, yep, yep, yeah, that one. For those in the know, if you know, you know that Newport Beach. And why not? Raymond Francis was a successful potato chip man, according to Joe Francis, with multiple other successful business ventures in the pipes. Where else would an ambitious man of society set his sights in the early 80s? The Francis family apparently settled into one of the upskill neighborhoods around Our Lady Queen of Angels Catholic Church, which offered a private and comprehensive education for the most discerning of Newport's conservative and faith-oriented Catholic citizens. And here's what I found interesting about this. Joe Francis, to this day, every time he gets asked about his family and does interviews about his family, he basically, like when he when he tells the story of his success and even his childhood, he makes it sound like it was this rough scrabble bootstrap story. Like he generally makes all these claims that his dad was always looking for money and his dad was always worried about bills, and his dad was always struggling about money. And then when he's asked about the start of Girls Gone Wild, he says, I had to take out 50K in credit card debt just to do it all on my own. But all you have to do is look at this chapter of Joe's life when he was seven years old in New Newport Beach to know that all of that about his family not having money is absolute horseshit because Newport Beach is an incredibly affluent area and his parents were incredibly affluent people. They were like, There's no hard-knock slums in the suburbs around that Catholic church that Joe Francis went to. Go into a street view like I did. Go look around. And you can even go and look back, go and look back at the house prices in the catchment area around that school in the 80s, like I did. There were houses that went for millions of dollars. There's he's just like, you have to pay a yearly salary just for your kid to go to that Catholic church that he went to, right? I I know I've done this. I've looked up the well, I spent hours on the church and school website. I've satellite viewed, I went up and down the streets. So already we're seeing the cracks in the story that Joe Francis likes to tell about himself, right? He's basically a pathological fucking liar. Francis said his family's choice to put him in private Catholic school was to provide him with a religious sense of order and decency. Uh, according to Francis himself, he rebelled against it immediately, immediately rejected it. Uh, if you go and read his completely absurd, egotistical, chalked full of lies biography on his meetjoefrancis.com. Um, he basically says like he wouldn't sit still, he wouldn't behave, and it just didn't matter what they did. It didn't matter what kind of an intervention the school tried to put him through the church, his parents, he just like didn't care. Punishment was not a fear for Joe Francis, even at a young age. He actually, as you'll see in a second, one of the stories I'm gonna tell, uh, he relished in it. He relished in it. He loved being told what he wasn't allowed to do, and not like in a cool John Locke way, but like in a serial killer way. Uh, whatever the Francis parents hoped their son was gonna learn at Catholic school, it did not take. So in 1983, Maria welcomed the birth of the fourth and final Francis Frisca child, another girl named Christina, who was 10 years younger than her older brother Joe. You would think that that would make for a celebratory year for the family, but instead, it seems to be when Joe officially went off the rails in his pattern of escalating behavioral problems. That same year, 1983, Joe Francis was expelled from Our Lady Queen of Angels. In some interviews, he claims it was because he questioned everything about the nuns' religion and told him to prove it. But on Joe's own website, he hints at something far more graphic that he has agreed not to talk about. He does one of those things where he's like, one day I'll share the full details, but it's so bad, man. I just can't tell you about it because I'm so bad. He probably didn't do anything, but who knows, right? He was already doing genital show and tells at a very young age. Who knows? Whatever it was, by the time Joe Francis was 10 years old, he was out of Our Lady Queen of Angels and started what he called a pattern of rotating boarding schools. In reality, Joe's parents sent him to a series of reform schools and camps in the hopes that someone else would deal with their increasingly troubled and troublesome child. That's that's what I think. And like, uh, here we go, lay it all out. You'll see it. Like, I think this was people. I think his parents, who again were these like they were, you know, they were like wealthy socialites of the six 50s and 60s. These people didn't care about their kids. These people who had money, like someone else deal with it, right? And that seems to be how they handled Joe Francis. The first school that Joe Francis was sent to in 1983 was Rumsey Hall in Connecticut, which still was still around to this day. The school, right, is uh considered to be the only boarding school that Joe Francis attended, right? In the traditional sense of the world. But like, if we're gonna be truly truly honest, this is the only like when you hear boarding school, you think like rich kid going to like New England. That's what this is. Rumsey Hall is an independent junior boarding school, grades six through nine, that describes itself as an establishment that prepares children for a remarkable future. Well, Joe Francis, again, per his own words, had no intention of taking advantage of that promise. Uh, Joe's parents dropped him off, allegedly, with that age-old trick of, let's go have a look and we'll see what you think about it. Then, according to Francis' own website, Meet Joe Francis, they had barely finished their tour of the facilities before his father handed him his suitcase, climbed into the car with Joe's mother, and drove away. This part of the story, though, I think is complete and total bullshit. Because while Joe Francis describes being sent away by his parents and dropped off on an opposite coast, a quick look at his father's professional history tells a completely different story. Because during this time period when Francis said that he was abandoned on the East Coast, uh, his father was actually serving on a number of prominent East Coast Republican committees. Okay. He was he was like a part of the official Massachusetts Republican committee or something like that, which indicates that he was, in fact, living in Connecticut. That means that Rodney, Francis's father, Joe Francis's father, was living in Connecticut where this school was during the time that Francis, Joe Francis, alleges he was abandoned. Okay. His dad was in the same state. So it it just reveals that maybe Joe Francis is absolutely full of shit. I will say the rest of the story that he tells is plausible enough. He I don't think he was abandoned, but the rest of it is plausible enough. He Joe Francis describes being met by this grim and mothy teacher who follows him to his new room where Joe says he collapses and cries for three days, begging to be taken back to his family, who he claims were in California, and we know his dad certainly wasn't. Uh, Joe Francis did not get his wish wherever his family actually was. Uh, he stayed there. He stayed there. They kept him there. He he stayed at Rumsey Hall. Francis was immediately cycled into the rigorous curriculum of Rumsey Hall, and he hated every freaking second of it. Joe rebelled against every rule that was given to him, and he admits it proudly again and again and again and again and again and again and again on his website till you're sick of hearing about it. This is a quote from him. Every day I would escape from class or from the playground and steal through the woods, he wrote, not because I was looking for action, but because it was forbidden, and that alone made it irresistible. What a douche, right? But it I think this this kind of is important because it could demonstrate potentially a burgeoning psychology in this now ten year old child. Um, this kind of like desire to chase thrills to an ever increasing point of danger and exhilaration. It's kind of, you know, and he's he's edging towards puberty, right? So this kind of that kind of fits if you fall into the belief like I do that we're seeing a psychopath in the making. Francis said. He did everything he could to get kicked out of Rumsey, though he doesn't explicitly list those offenses, even though he seems to be quite proud to brag about stuff like that. Uh, and Rumsey isn't going to release a record on a kid like Joe Francis, so once again, I guess we'll never really know in black and white. Whatever he got up to, Joe Francis was out of Rumsey by the end of the year, and he was back in Newport Beach with his family by 1984. Francis thought he had beat the system. His family would have to suffer him now. Rules meant nothing to him. Why should they? Every school Francis had been kicked out of so far, it only resulted in him being welcomed right back into the heart and home of his family bosom. Francis was sure, even at his young age, that there wouldn't be any more consequences for him. But he was wrong. That same year, 1984, 11-year-old Francis was told to pack his bag right back up, back on the road again. His parents drove him to San Diego, where he was enlisted in the Army and Navy Academy in San Diego. Francis would only spend five days, supposedly, at this military school, which he would describe as grim. He tells the story much as he tells any other: a complete disregard for rules, throwing shined belt buckles back at the sergeant's face, all that kind of pompous douchebag burado shit. Francis claims to have little memory of the school, but looking into it, I wonder just how long Francis actually spent in this school and just how formative it actually was, because it seems to echo a lot of his anti-female values. Yeah, because I went and looked up this school that Joe Francis uh was alleged to have attended, this military academy, and it turns out that it's called the Army and Navy Academy. And it's an all-boys school that proudly, proudly, and this is written on the front page of their website, proudly bases their curriculum around the Gurion model. The Gurion model is a model for boys-only education that was developed by the self-proclaimed social philosopher Michael Gurion. And it has widely, widely been debunked as a heaping, steaming pile of shit. It was that model that argued famously that boys were being left behind in school because the loss of traditional gender roles in society, because mommy wasn't breastfeeding him anymore. That's what was making it hard for baby man. It's absolutely an absolute joke. You can go and look into it. Gurion built a pseudoscience around the idea that boys and girls inhibited naturally designated roles. He proudly taught clearly baseless ideas like boys are better at math because they get surges of testosterone and other absurd theories. It's laughable and enraging. Search Gurion's name today, and you are met with a flood of papers and articles from experts like actual psychologists and sociologists and philosophers who debunk basically all of his gender stereotypes as pseudoscience. So even though Joe Francis only spent five days at this military school, these are really honestly some of the ideas that would come to reflect many of his attitudes towards women in the later years and the blase way in which he became able to dismiss them as the perpetrators in every story he would ever tell. This also seems to be the time when Joe's resentment of women really takes root. According to his own self-published website biography, Joe Francis returned home to his family in Newport Beach after his brief traits at military school. It doesn't sound like it was a happy reunion. Without describing any specific event, Francis launches into a tirade about his three sisters. The resentment is obvious. You could cut it with a knife. According to him, all three sisters are super special and loved, and they get to remain at home, including Babette, who is two years older than him. And all three, according to Francis, are preferred by their parents over him. This, Joe Francis claims, is when a system of blame begins that follows him through the whole of his life. This is this is a quote that he literally says in this. Francis writes. Francis goes on to paint himself as the valiant underdog during this time, so fed up with not being heard by his parents that he puts his hands up and just accepts the blame that his sisters place on him without so much as a fight. It's an interesting story, and judging by his, because spoiler alert, this man's a fucking narcissist. Um, I wonder what stories we would hear if we could talk to Joe Francis' sisters. I wonder if we were like, hey, you remember when Joe came back from military school? Was he a totally perfect little angel that you just blamed everything on? I'm sure we would find out that he was actually getting up to some pretty heinous things. Because remember, this is a man who, as we're gonna talk about, uh grew up to film children sexually and grew up to rape people, right? So I'm sure his sisters didn't have a fun time growing up with him. Whatever Francis was actually up to, he was certainly doing something that warranted a reaction from his parents, because no sooner had he set his suitcase down again than he was off to his next school. And this one was gonna be the worst of the lot. Now, the story here, shock surprise, gets even murkier, okay? And it's really disturbing uh by any normal, reasonable standards, okay? It's still 1984 by this point, if you're keeping track of the timeline, and Joe Francis is about 11 or 12 years old. According to Joe, after being kicked out of military school, his parents turned around and packed him off once again to a remote, boys-only reform ranch in Northern California. This experience, I think, uh if it's true, is probably one of the most formative in Joe Francis' life. And in all of the research I've done on this man and his family, it seems to be the one and only time that he ever, ever, that Joe Francis ever experiences or expresses a sense of fear. And it's not hard to see why. According to the story that Joe Francis tells about his time at this remote reform school ranch, every waking second was hell. Boys ranging from 11 to 18 were forced to work from sunup to sundown on a ranch surrounded by deep woodland. They stacked wood, mucked staples, and did a host of other manual hard labor, all with the threat of physical punishment or deprivation looming over them. Life at this school was brutal, according to Joe Francis. So brutal that he doesn't hold many memories of it. In fact, according to Francis, he claims he only has three or four total memories of his time at this school. And I have to warn you, this is serial kill serial killer-making stuff. Say that three times fast. As Joe Francis tells the story, during one of his first lessons at the school, a male teacher took the boys into a paddock and had them watch a pair of horses breeding. It was graphic. The teacher allegedly put himself right in the middle, picking up and then inserting what Joe Francis describes as a monstrous penis into the other animal. Francis claims that as an 11-year-old child, he didn't know what the point was, but he describes the event with a visceral detail that shows the mating absolutely made some kind of impression on the man who would go on to create Girls Gone Wild. After the mating incident, the boys were subjected to another stinging animal-based lesson. This time, sent out into the rain, the boys were put up close and personal with a horse castration. Their teacher performed his task with a pair of pliers, and Francis was so struck about it that he wrote about the incident decades later. And as if breeding and animal castration weren't enough for the academic aims of an 11-year-old boy, Joe Francis then goes on to describe what is truly one of the most disturbing villain origin stories I think I've ever heard of in terms of a school. According to Joe, his final and most powerful memory of his time at this remote California boarding school was the morning the boys were once again ferried out into the fields at the crack of dawn. This time he and all the rest were introduced to a herd of sheep. The boys, as usual, got up close and personal with the animals, and once they were well acquainted, the teacher stepped to the front. What do you think of that fella there? The teacher allegedly asked. Francis described himself as giving a non-committal answer before the quote unquote teacher pulled out a shotgun and blew off the head of the animal. Before the kids even had a chance to react to the shock, uh, they were ordered to carry the body of the sheep back to the barn so that it could be processed. It's a harrowing story, especially when you consider the fact that these events are happening to an 11-year-old child. Castrated animals, dead animals, forced matings. As I said, it's like something out of a serial killer documentary. But as bad as all these events were, they weren't what inspired the most fear in Francis. For that, you would have to look to the anal rape. According to Francis, the boys at this remote ranch reform school were prevented from escaping with threats of anal rape. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Yep. They were told that if they tried to run out into the woods, they would be picked up by hippies or loggers who would in turn analy rape them to death. This is the only thing that Francis describes with any degree of fear, and he claims it was the one thing that broke his otherwise lifelong habit of escaping and running away from every other school he had ever been sent to. I kept myself busy cleaning chicken coops and stacking firewood until I was too tired to do anything but fall into bed, Francis writes about his time at the school. I sure as hell wasn't going to venture anywhere near that forest full of anal rapists, so I kept my nose clean. Eleven-year-old Francis lived at the school for a year before being determined to be reformed enough to return home to his parents, who were definitely by this time in Newport Beach. Or, at least that's the story that Joe Francis tells. Would you be totally shocked by this point if I told you that everything I had just outlined about this school, about the horses and the sheep and the anal rapists in the woods, was not as Joe Francis told it. It was not as Joe Francis told it. Well, not entirely, anyway, right? I know you're I know you're completely shocked. But that is what I discovered when I started looking into this story and trying to verify all of it, uh, which is the story is still up to on this on Joe's website to this very day. Um, it was almost too hard to believe, and so I didn't believe it. And I started looking into it. And so, according to Francis, this tall tale of a reform school yarn happened in 1984, as I said, at a school that he refers to as Pine Valley Ranch School. So had a name, right? Seems pretty pretty straightforward. If he went to this school in the 80s, there will be some kind of record of Pine Valley Ranch School somewhere, somewhere, and somewhere in some document in the 80s, right? I looked everywhere for the school, including in business records from the 80s in California. I looked in other surrounding states. I could find not narry, a single source, complaint, newspaper mention, hiring, firing, nothing about a school with that name and that nature in that part of California. And I'm telling you, I spent hours trying to find this school. I tried every spelling, I tried everything you could like ranch, reform, anything, anything, anything, and couldn't find it. But what I did find, interesting enough, was a series of private evangelical schools and ranches with very similar curriculums to what Joe Francis described. So what am I saying? I'm saying that I don't think Joe Francis went to someplace called Pine Valley School. I think it's very possible that he went to another very well-known group. And top on that suspected list of where Joe Francis was sent when he just couldn't behave is the teen challenge schools. There are these controversial teen rehabilitation programs that have been closely tied to the troubled teen industry. These are schools like the Provo Canyon School that we just talked about up at the top that was attended by Paris Hilton that put troubled youth in extreme high pressure situations. They basically torture them, often in tandem with hard labor and a lack of medical services. You know the deal. Teens get scooped up in the middle of the night, taken to remote facilities they can't escape from, beaten, neglected until they fall in line and become complacent and obedient with not only the school, but whatever is going on in their home lives. Teen Challenge, of course, is an evangelical Christian organization, and it has been plagued by controversies from day one. And guess who's behind it? Guess who's behind it? If you if you guessed our old evangelical buddies, you'd be right. Because David Wilkerson, the guy who started it, a diehard Pentecostal evangelist, he started the organization in 1958 and it was immediately a hit. And guess who started endorsing it? Billy Graham, Billy Graham, and all those other big non-denominational, heavy-hitting TV televangelists of the time. Billy Graham, of course, is tied to the Kardashians and the Shikarians through the Full Gospel Businessman's Fellowship International. And he also has distant family ties to Lou Taylor, and he advised a whole bunch of presidents. Former residents of these Teen Challenge programs describe basically more or less the type of environments that Joe Francis described at this ranch school. They describe prison-like climates, extreme isolation, lack of appropriate medical care food, and psychological and physical abuse. Because the Teen Challenge organization is a Christian and private organization, it's completely exempt from state medical and mental health licensing, which makes it a breeding ground for neglect, pseudoscience, and torture. It is horrifying and an absolute mess that has been going on, like I said, since 1958. And honestly, I could do a whole episode just on Teen Challenge, but I think these are probably the schools that Joe Francis was put into, the quote unquote ranches and schools and reform facilities that he was put into, not some imaginary place called Pine Valley Ranch School that never existed. Because this Teen Challenge place better fits the description of what Joe Francis described in 1984. And if that is the truth, it would make sense that Joe Francis is so vague about naming the actual organization that tortured him as a child. Teen Challenge is still a multi-million dollar, I think maybe billion-dollar business by this point with close ties to the American far-right evangelical pipeline. But what if this is not the school that Joe Francis attended? Because that's possible. It may not have been a Teen Challenge school. Disturbingly, I found a vast network of unregulated, unlicensed Christian reform schools working with children who have mental, emotional, and behavioral problems. One school, all the way out in Montana, and coincidentally called Pine Valley Ranch, has spent decades abusing children, creating an open secret in the community that residents have spent years trying to shut down. Still running to this day, as far as I can tell, still torturing children right now. These schools, these ranches are not rare. In fact, you probably have one right down the street from you, especially if you live in Northern California. And it's not hard to believe that the Francis family, dealing with a son that they couldn't control, sent their child to a school like this. After all, they had already sent him to one private Christian school trying to bring him into line. It's a disturbing concept, no matter how you split it. And it was certainly a disturbing experience in some shape or form for Joe Francis, who tells the story as though it is the most horrifying experience of his life. If anything that he said is true, it probably was the most horrifying experience of his life. And I tend to think not every detail is true, but something sinister happened to him as that 11-year-old kid sent away to whatever this school was. For myself, I then that's it. Like I think it's a little bit of column A, a little bit of column B. Even in the name, even if the name of the school that Joe Francis gave is not true, the rest could be. And why? Because a school like that is the perfect environment to shape the person that Joe Francis would eventually become. Wherever Joe Francis went to school in 1984, he was back with his family by 1985 and setting out on a new straight and narrow path, according to him, which seems to be a massive achievement, according to Joe. And yes, we have to take everything with a grain of salt. He was put back into normal junior high school where he got on with things even though he hated it. Now, there's no name that I could find given for the junior high school that Joe Francis went to. He never gives the name, couldn't find one anywhere online, even these stupid like Google AI couldn't find anything. The only notable part of this story here is that Joe saw fit to share about his time in junior high was that sometime around 1985 he got his first job. Now, I don't know what business in an upscale, ritzy, multimillionaire community in 1985 was employing a 12-year-old, but Francis claimed that he worked throughout junior high at a place called Gelato Classico. He got paid little more than $3 an hour, but claimed that that earning gave him a sense of freedom he allegedly hadn't ever felt before, despite all those escapes he bragged about in his earlier years. What I think particularly matters, especially as we start looking towards the next episode when we're going to get into his adult years, um, his relationships with women, his relationships with the Kardashian, Girls Gone Wild, some of the really dodgy, Epstein-linked people at E that he worked with. But what's interesting to me is how Joe Francis frames this segment of his life. And I think it's a really good segue that's kind of gonna lead us into the monstrosity he becomes in as an adult. Because according to Joe, when he returned to his home in Newport Beach, California, again, one of the most upscale and illustrious neighborhoods in California, he got tired of watching his father struggle for money, again, which we know is bullshit. Said he he just couldn't watch his father worry about bills and it lit a fire under him from a young age that he just had to earn as much as he could. Again, it's a story that none of us buy, none of us. Um, and the further proof is that after junior high, Joe got sent to Laguna Beach High School, a school with a laundry list of notable alumni and other multi-million dollar Nepo babies, trust fund babies, in a million-dollar zip code. And it may not sound like a big deal to you at first, but it pretty much this completely lays bare the lie that Joe Francis' father struggled with money because to attend Laguna Beach High School as a resident of Newport Beach, students have to live specifically in the coastal area of Newport Beach, like Corona Del Mar, which is again super ritzy, super chintzy. Okay. Even in the 80s, homes here regularly sold for millions of dollars, millions of dollars, which means in the 80s, his parents were buying million-dollar homes. And they were highly, the area was highly sought after by celebrities and all the social elite of Southern California. Long story short, Joe Francis was a rich boy, and he continued to be a rich boy after returning home from his horrible reform school experiences and setting off into what he describes as a thankless slog toward college. If the Pine Valley Ranch School was supposed to reform Joe's behavior at home, it did, but it did nothing to improve his views on women. Joe Francis described his time at Laguna Beach High School like the ultimate unavenged nerd. Awkward and cursed with braces, he goes on and on about how the girls just didn't give him the time of day. Girls just wouldn't look at him. Much as Joe has described himself as a loner at reform school, he was also a loner, it appears, at Laguna Beach High School, where there's just no mark of him. He didn't do anything, he didn't play sports, he didn't do anything. He was a total loser with middle of the road grades, who didn't rank in any extracurriculars or any of the normal kind of social and athletic achievements that you kind of expect a rich boy with all the assets to do, and especially someone this grandiose who thinks that they're like God's gift to the world. He did nothing. He was basically nondescript, no one cared. That's it. In short, Joe Francis was a nobody in high school, and that seemed to sour his views on women more and more and more. This is how Francis described his time at Laguna Beach High. For me, high school was something to be endured until I could finally get into the world and make my own way. I didn't attend my prom, I wasn't voted most likely to succeed, or most likely anything else. I just worked, saved, stared balefully at the girls who wanted nothing to do with me, and made sure my grades were good enough to get into a decent college. It's a sad state of affairs when you really look at it. A kid who has gone through a laundry list of behavioral troubles at school, completely checked out from the world of what should ultimately be one of the most fun and like exciting and formative experiences of your life. Like high school is the last chance you have to kind of like be free and have fun. But Joe already was showing his inability to take pleasure in the normal things that normal people take pleasure in, which is again, I think got some psychopathy going on here. In a way, Joe Francis saw himself as above the experience of high school. He just wasn't thrilling enough. Like, how are you guys enjoying that? You're so fucking stupid. I'm so cool because I'm not enjoying this. I'm way smarter than you guys. It's very, very that. But in truth, he was rejected by his peers. He's got this like, I was above it, but no one wanted him. And that's what it is. And this, I believe, is the linchpin that sets the stage for everything that Joe Francis would become. The proverbial forming of the chip on the shoulder that would fuel a victim, like the biggest victim mentality and need for vengeance that you've ever seen. Joe Francis is a man who fully believes that everyone and everything in the world has wronged him, that it has been designed to wrong him. And that kind of outlook has come to form the backbone of everything Joe Francis would become, and that he is right now in the present day. It is this teenager, the one who didn't. Go to Prom, who spent years in and out of reform schools and boarding schools that would go on to build a media porn empire on the exploitation of women. It's this same teenager who described himself as the loneliest kid at the quote unquote Pine Valley Ranch school who would go on to leave a wake of traumatized and abused women behind him. And perhaps most importantly of all, it is this teenager who would grow up to give birth to, of all things, the modern day Kardashian Empire. I kid you not, you don't get the Kardashians without Joe Francis. And that's exactly where we will be picking up part two of this horrifying look into the life and history of Girls Gone Wild founder Joe Francis, a truly evil and terrifying man. And that's gonna be it. That is it for today's episode. Woo! Woo-hoo-hoo! That is a lot to choke down. What did you think? Did you know all of this about Joe Francis? Uh, does learning any of this make any more sense for you? Because I know for me, it absolutely adds up. I'll be totally honest. I knew Francis was a scumbag, but I had no idea. Like when I started this, I thought it was just gonna be like a real quick little deep dive into the crimes that he had done. I was gonna showcase the women that he had abused, which I am still gonna do, but there's just all of these insane connections, and it's only gonna get crazier from here. The connections only get absolutely crazier. And I I just I had no idea. I had no idea how rotten his villain origin story was. Every new corner that I've turned has absolutely blown my mind into a million pieces with this Joe Francis thing. And I know the next chapter of this saga is gonna blow your mind too, because next time, like I said, we're gonna be getting into a world of trigger warnings. If you thought the like castrations and force matings and all that kind of stuff was bad, uh, we're gonna be moving on to talking about Joe Francis in college, how he got his big break, his decades-long relationship with the Kardashians, rape allegations, fraud, assault, child pornography, and some of the twisted connections Joe Francis has had through the years with the executives at E and the notorious Jive Records. Oh yeah, well, yeah, what did I say? Yeah, that Jive Records, yeah. The record label that notoriously protected R. Kelly throughout decades of abuse and a secret marriage to a child. Yeah, yeah, all of that can be connected. You can connect it right down the path to Joe Francis, and we're gonna break it all down in the next episode. Because what do I always say? Yes, it is truly worse than you think. Thank you so, so much to everyone who has listened today. I hope it was truly like it's giving you something to think about, uh, giving you something to learn. And most of all, I hope you enjoyed it. If you want to go even deeper into this story, the story of the Kardashians, or the rest of Hollywood's most twisted secrets and scandals, head over to patreon.com slash scandalqueens where you can get bonus episodes of this podcast, early episodes, essays, research, deep dives into the darkest side of the Hollywood machine. But maybe that's not quite your thing. Maybe you want to get more serious. If that's the case and you want to get a more psychological perspective, head over to my Substack where I put my psychology qualifications to good use with weekly essays and guides into relationships, the human mind, narcissism, and a lot of other psychological goodness. And you can get that over at the real ebjohnson.substack.com. For everything else, if you just want to get little clips of me talking shit about celebrities, um, just follow me on the social media platforms uh at the real eB Johnson on everywhere that matters. And if you love this episode, why not leave a quick five-star review? It's absolutely free. It only takes a couple of minutes, and it helps me keep this crazy podcast going because um I am entirely, I don't know if you guys realize this, but I'm entirely independent and I'm funded solely by my Patreon subscribers. So um if you can leave me a five-star review, it just kind of helps get me in front of more people, and that is a huge, huge help. 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