Joe Francis (Pt II): Pure, Unadulterated Evil

Assault. Child abuse. Grievous bodily harm. Kim Kardashian. Those are just a few of horrors you can expect in this final chapter on Joe Francis.

In part one, we looked at the mysterious childhood that created Joe Francis. Now, in Part 2, we'll see how the boy became the monster behind Girls Gone Wild -- an empire of softcore and hardcore pornography that ruined the lives of countless women. 

This is an examination of a troubled life. A terrifying life. A life lived without consequence...and ever in the presence of a Kardashian. 

This is the stomach churning, gut twisting, enraging final chapter of a man whose history reads like something out of a serial killer's playbook. This is the final chapter in the Joe Francis story. A look at the monster behind the curtain. 

Recommended sources for this episode: 

• Epstein's Black Book: EFTA00191467

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:21

Hello, hello, hello, and welcome back to another great episode of Scandal Queens. If it's your first time here, hi, hello. It's me, E. B, the D influencer, breaking down all things shady in the narcissistic cult of Hollywood. And we are here to wrap things up today, folks. That's right, finishing up this insane story of Joe Francis that we started last week. And let me tell you right off the top, it doesn't get better, right? It was it was pretty bad with the horse castrations last episode. Um, but it's this this is it's a lot worse. Because Joe Francis didn't become infamous thanks to just his family, though, as we have gathered, and of course, as I've certainly learned enough about his father to have some major questions. Uh, no, Joe Francis has become famous in his own right. Okay. Most people don't even know anything about his family. Like I said, I've uncovered so much more stuff about his family since the last episode. It's it's him, right? It's on the back of Joe Francis' behavior and a very specific window of time in which he rose to power. I'm talking specifically about the late 90s and the early 2000s, a chaotic, colorful explosion of sexual and cultural alleged freedom that was on a level not seen since perhaps the 1960s. In that time, sex was power and hedonism and business casual reigned supreme. And in the midst of this explosion of cultural and capitalist rebirthing, Joe Francis found himself in exactly the right place at exactly the right time to become what he eventually became a porn lord. And that's really what we're gonna get down to the grit of today. How Joe Francis Francis, Francis, Francis, Francis, how Joe Francis became the infamous head of Girls Gone Wild, how he built an empire that was eventually brought down by child exploitation, abuse, and one of the most psychotic and narcissistic personalities you've ever seen on your TV screen. And I do not use those terms lightly. Last episode, among other things, I gave you a quote from Doug Stanhope. Do you remember? I opened with a pretty graphic uh uh excerpt, but also a quote from Doug Stanhope, who said that Joe Francis was the most awful human being that he had ever met in like 40 years of showbiz. Well, um, do you remember how that quote ended? If not, you will remember by the end of this episode, because we are going to give life to that quote, which ended in the description of Joe Francis as pure unadulterated evil. Yep, I'm gonna prove that today that Joe Francis is indeed what Doug Stanhope said he was: pure unadulterated evil. Before we jump back into this deep end of things that are just just super so fun to talk about, let's do a quick temperature check and see what your favorite Hollywood grifters are doing this week. Number one, right off the top, Jared Leto is finally facing justice, maybe? Looks like it. Um, yeah, that's right. Jared Leto, the controversial, Leto, Leto, Leto, Jared Leto. We're gonna go with Leto. Jared Leto, the controversial and predatory frontman for alternative pop rock band 30 Seconds to Mars, is finally facing the music, it seems. This news comes on the back of an explosive new BBC documentary, Jared Leto, Hollywood's Dark Secret, in which 10 women come forward with these explosive stories of abuse and assault at the hands of the actor turned singer. Four of the 10 women in the documentary who use pseudonyms to protect their identities were teenagers when the incidents with Jared Leto occurred. One teen model who was sent to a 30 seconds to Mars concert by her agency, even though she was underage, um, only to end up alone with Leto in a hotel room at the end of the night, said the singer told her that if she, and I quote, fell asleep in his room, she was going to wake up with a dick in her ass. That's a direct quote. Leto is, as he always does, vehemently denying the claims, but former cast members of the actor and singer and those who have worked with him in the past told Entertainment Rag page six that they've known that this day of reckoning was coming for a long time. He's not a good guy, one inside insider told page six. There's no soul behind his eyes. People who have known him for years have also said that he's very problematic with women. No shit. Rumors and allegations have circled the front man for years, including a slew of allegations in 2020 that Leto Leto was running an ex-cult on an island off of Croatia. The allegations came from concerned parents and family, as well as members who thought they got screwed over and concerned fans who swarmed over these crazy insane pictures that were released by 30 Seconds to Mars and Jared Leto and all of that kind of stuff. These photos are insane. They show um Jared walking around in like long white caftans with his long dirty hair and everyone's dressed in white, and he's got them all assembled in these outdoor buildings. It looks like Jonestown. It looks like Jonestown. It's very reminiscent, it's very Jonestown coated. And the band was like, ha ha, he he made a joke of it and said, Yes, this is a cult, which I actually maybe they weren't joking. Maybe they were just putting it out in the open. But uh during this cult excursion, Leto was accused by nine women of sexual abuse, assault, or impropriety. That was in 2020. He denied everything, obviously, right at the time. That's why he always I've never had to do that. He always plays that that card, and there seems to have been no consequences for him then. Now, however, with the BBC's new documentary, that number of accusations has risen to an official number of 19. There's like 19 on the books. This guy's done something, so God only knows what is not on the books. You know what I mean? It's an insane story. It is heartbreaking for the women. It's infuriating when you see this pattern around Jared Leto that's been an o this is basically it's an open secret. It's it's become almost like a zeitgeist joke where you're like, you know, if you if you were trying to call someone a rapist, you might call them Jared Leto, you know, like we all know at this point. So it's just crazy. He's been in he's been displaying clearly predatory behavior for years. I remember I got their first album when it came down, loved it, loved it, loved it. And I don't remember specifically what happened, but there was something that came up about him very early on. I'm talking like by 2010, 2011, I was hearing stuff, or maybe 2012, and I remember going, nah, I'm not gonna listen to this anymore. So, you know, it's just let's let's just hope that we can finally put this fucking monster to bed and get some justice for everybody, like once and for all, because I'm tired of every couple of years having a whole new batch of Jared Leto victims or hearing about him terrorizing people that he worked with or whatever. So, can can this just like can we just can this be the end, please? Next up, Surrey is no longer a cruise. That's right, Surrey, the daughter of Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise, is following in the footsteps of Shiloh Joe Lee and officially dropping her deadbeat father's last name. Page six in TMZ broke the news earlier this week that 20-year-old Surrey, who was once Surrey Cruise, will now officially be Surrey Noelle. The new surname is a touching tribute to her mother Katie, whose middle name is Noelle. Surrey, as it turns out, has been using the surname Noelle for quite a long time. That's what she was under in high school. And it's not hard to understand why she would want to do that. Since ever since her mother bravely, in my personal, I don't know anything about Katie Holmes and her politics now, but I have a lot of respect for her for leaving Tom Cruise and leaving Scientology, even uh all the bullying that she faced on the she it must have been absolutely terrifying at times when she made that escape from him. So um, you know, it kudos to her. But ever since Katie Holmes did that, the Mission Impossible Star has basically been entirely absent from his child's life. That, of course, is because that is what Scientology, the cult that he's a part of, demands. When you are a member of Scientology, if any of your family members decide they don't want to be Scientology anymore or that they don't believe they become, I think it's called, I can't remember what it's called. It's called like a diversive person or something like that, uh subversive person. And so you go on this blacklist and no one's allowed to have anything to do with you, right? So the minute Katie left, which she was right to do, that was it. Tom Cruise has basically not been in his daughter's life to the point of, I don't know if you guys, if you're TikTok followers of mine, you might remember this, but I made a video, I think it was last year or the year before, but uh Tom Cruise was at a Taylor Swift concert on the day of his daughter's high school graduation. He was in the VIP with Travis Kelsey and like in this like special celebrity you've been invited here zone. And that's he was like had himself photographed partying with Travis Kelsey and a bunch of other like right-wing dickheads at a Taylor Swift concert uh on the day of his daughter's graduation. And I don't know, me personally, if I was Taylor Swift, I wouldn't have invited Tom Cruise in the first place because he's a member of a fucking cult. But second of all, I surely the fuck would not have had him there if I found out that his daughter was graduating. I would have told him to get his ass out of my concert and go to his high school, his daughter's high school graduation, where he should have fucking been. But nope, he's basically had nothing to do with her her whole life. Um, and yeah, so she's she's dropping his name. So it's good to see Suri Noel thriving. She seems to be a lovely young lady. Uh, she looks exactly like her mother. Like they were taking these pictures, and I thought, my God, was Tom Cruise even involved? It looks like she just popped off Katie Holmes' shoulder, man. Um, and you know, it's good, it's good. She seems to be thinking for herself and leading a great life. So good luck to her. Kudos to, you know, everyone in the next generation who kind of breaks the cycle and learns how to buck the past. And last but not least, this is not really a celebrity scandal, but it kind of, I still, it's like a fascinating story, and I thought it definitely fit in here. Um, eBay is to show out 46 million dollars in a 2019 harassment suit. Yes, eBay has agreed to pay 46 million dollars with an additional six million in charitable donations to a Massachusetts couple who were harassed by the online marketplace giant in 2019. I'd never heard this story. It's it's fucking insane. David and Ina Steiner were cyber stalked and harassed by executives of eBay after articles written by Ina gained the attention of the corporate giant. According to the settlement, the chief executive at the time, Devin Winnick, after becoming angry about one of her posts that he was sent, allegedly got in touch with his communications chief and said, and I quote, take her down. That was quoted in the New York Times. So that's like, I think that's probably pretty solid. Winnig's order was passed down to eBay's security team, who then, like the fucking Gestapo, started having scary packages delivered to the couple's home. I guess it's more like the mob, like the mafia. The packages included boxes of cockroaches, a bloody pig mask, and a fucking funeral wreath. They sent a funeral wreath as a threat because they didn't like articles she was writing online. Seven employees were ultimately charged by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Massachusetts, and each one of them pled guilty to these like felony charges of harassment and stalking and stuff. Absolutely nuts. The company was hit on top of all the other money with $3 million government fine. And obviously, now they're gonna pay the Steiners $46 million directly with an additional payout of six million dollars to various charities. eBay released a statement saying that all the employees involved are now former employees and that they find the behavior absolutely reprehensible. But still, I think that you kind of have to wonder what kind of culture, what kind of corporate culture exists within eBay that executives just a few years ago thought that this was appropriate behavior at all? Like what kind of what kind of environment is back there? I mean, yeah, they fired seven people. Are you telling me those seven people were the entire corporate culture that fostered that kind of behavior? I wonder, I wonder, uh it's truly a wild story from start to finish and one that hasn't gotten a lot of immediate attention despite the obvious implications of a corporation harassing private citizens. It's wild stuff and certainly something to pay attention to down the line as eBay won't be the first company who's done this. And uh in this day and age, I'm certainly willing to bet they won't be the last. So make sure you're paying attention in case you yourself can get a $46 million bag off of being harassed and cyberstalked by a corporation. All right, it is that time. End of the road or start of the road, I guess, depending on how you look at it. Joe Francis, how did he become the monster that he is today? How did he build an empire of porn, barely facing any time in jail, even though he exploited children and assaulted endless women? Well, last episode we got the background, we laid the foundation. If you haven't listened to that episode yet, then go ahead, pause here, and you can go back and listen because it is like way, it's like an insane amount of ground to cover. But we can kind of see how the pieces came together, right? All the boarding schools, you know, when we last left off, Joe was a kid being tossed around through increasingly hostile military-like boarding schools. His father, an intelligence asset with ties to complex CIA mafia, Cuba covert actions at the time, was more often away than he was at home. And his mother seems to have been a practical ghost in his life, certainly in the stories that he tells these days. Joe Francis was a problem child, raised in a world that seemingly didn't know how to deal with him, without passing him off to someone else to fix, which never really worked. Growing up in a world that he increasingly resented, the only thing that Joe Francis seemed to learn was how to get slicker and more covert with his own predilections and resentment. And while Joe Francis tells the story of his childhood with an air of relative dismissal, it's clear that it shaped him into the man that he is today, the man that he was soon to become. Because all that resentment, all that selfish desire, it was bottled up, ready to explode. And as with all narcissistic and psychopathic personalities, again, not terms I'm using lightly in this story, it was going to explode on the people around him. And that's what I think you're going to see today as we move on from Joe Francis' childhood and see him as the young man he morphed into. So when you see Joe Francis today, the first immediate thought, if you're a person of sound mind, is what an asshole, right? It's hard to listen to the guy speak. He's clearly so full of his own fucking grandiosity, so devoid of a basic sense of empathy that other people are humans that he cannot even conceive. He cannot, he literally cannot conceive that the other people in the world around him are human beings with feelings like his. He's incapable of it. His brain does not have the parts that allow him to complete that function. Okay. He screams, privileged and never challenged, with the braggadocious swagger of a 1980s Wall Street banker with a nose full of coke. Seeing Joe Francis today, you'd think he was the dickhead cock of the walk jock at his high school. Kid of that, you know that, like, you know, at the end of 16 Candles, the the the fluffy douchebag douchebag kid that she ends up picking, even though he's like, he's never noticed her before until she had ugly dress. Um it comes and picks her up in like the red corvette. I think it's 16 candles, right? Anyway, you know, you know, you know, the Molly Ringwald and the dickhead that chooses her at the end. That Joe Francis today feels like he would have been that guy, right? He he that's certainly the image that he's kind of cultivated into now. That's that's kind of what he's farmed for himself now. But that's not that's that's not that's not the teenager that he was or the young adult. In those times, Joe Francis was, in no uncertain terms, a total freaking loser. We touched on it a little bit at the end of the last episode, but there's essentially no record of him in high school. Try looking up Joseph Francis, Joe Francis, Joe Francis Friesick, Joseph Friesick at Laguna Beach High School, where he allegedly went, or I can't, the other one is like Laguna Something High, which I also looked at. Uh, you get a big fat nothing. There you get you get you get no record of him. And that's no surprise because as I said in the last episode, Joe Francis himself admitted that he was a loser. He had braces, he didn't play sports, he didn't do well in academics. Joe Francis was a nobody. And as he realized more and more that he was a nobody, his deep-seated resentments grew. The man is full of excuses. He he whines about how he had to wear braces. So the girls didn't like him and they didn't want to sleep with him. So when he couldn't get laid, Joe Francis decided the only thing that he needed to focus on was money. Because as long as he had money in his pocket, he would get laid. The girls would look at him. They would be able to look past what a fucking loser he was with no personality, no hobbies, no skills, no interests, no achievements. And they would just go, money. It didn't work. It didn't work. Joe Francis worked at a video store throughout high school where he became the like top salesman selling people these like scammy membership cards, which he's he was very, he's very again, he like brags about how scammy it kind of was. Um and he made a lot of money for a high schooler doing it, right? He was able to buy himself a nice car and all this kind of stuff. And he thought, I've got a nice car, I've got money in my pocket. The girls at high school are gonna love me. The girls at Laguna Beach High School didn't give a shit. They didn't care how much money he had, they still didn't want anything to do with him because, you know, as we already know, especially if you're a woman like me listening to this episode, he was a repugnant, steaming hunk of dog shit, right? Um, but Joe Francis, he still didn't get that. He skipped his prom, turned his eyes to college. Since money had become the means he used to comfort and console himself, he decided on the entrepreneurial program at USC. It was the perfect kind of environment for a sleaze ball like Joe Francis. Because remember, this is the same college that had already turned out Robert Kardashian and OJ Simpson, among a sea of other scumbags that these people were all associated with. Francis found the college environment much more to his liking than the stuffy world of his family. He threw himself into the entrepreneurship program and into the party lifestyle. As Joe Francis describes it, during his freshman year, he went to Tijuana, I think is where he said he went with his one of his buddies, who still is this other scummy guy who's also a loser. And they went to Tijuana and they experienced a wet t-shirt contest, and it was the best thing that ever happened. And Joe literally describes it uh as becoming immediately obsessed, right? That's that's that's the word that he uses. After all those years of being unwanted by women, Joe Francis found himself suddenly in a world in which women were objectifying themselves. Even a loser like him could get lucky occasionally in the hard partying environment he entrenched himself in. Francis said he spent every moment after that, again, obsessing over when he was gonna get his next hit of boobs. All he wanted to do was party and have sex, and that he just wanted to make partying and sex the center of his world. Once again, when you read this stuff in Joe's own words on his website, it sounds pretty scary. It literally sounds like serial killer stuff, like this growing obsession combined with thrill seeking, combined with objectification, this like breeding ground for really dangerous behavior. Anyway, Joe somehow struck a balance, no idea. I'm sure daddy's money didn't hurt. Um, even though he spent as much time as possible chasing tail, which he was mostly unsuccessful at, he also managed to eke out a decent enough grade at USC to scratch out a degree. He graduated in 1995, just as his own family seemed to be hitting the big time suddenly, out of nowhere. Because you see, um, even though there's not really a very large business trail um that you can kind of link to quote unquote entrepreneur Joe, I'm sorry, Raymond Francis, uh, a year after Joe's graduation from USC, his family moved into the $25 million Ocean View Laguna Beach mansion that his parents would remain in until 2022. Yeah, that's when it was sold off. They weren't actually there. They they passed away before that, but the house was sold off in 2022. Now, despite Joe's claims that his father was always struggling for money, it seemed that Raymond Francis was suddenly at the very tip top of the Laguna Beach food chain with a successful company allegedly named University Pharmaceutical Products. Now, no shock, surprise, but there's a very, very, very, very extremely limited record of this company existing. Okay. This company, this University Pharmaceutical Products, uh Joe Francis claims he's the one that named it. He claims that they created all these like revolutionary skin care creams and thigh creams and stuff. But despite all that, despite the fact that it bought them a $26 million Ocean View estate in Laguna Beach, um, there's not really a lot of business records at all around Raymond Francis. It's very odd. There's like a couple of transfer documents from around, I think, 2017, um, when they were transferred to, I think it was called like Valent, Valiant Pharmaceuticals, um, and this basically like hedge fund kind of buy-off, inflate, sell-off, close out kind of kind of transfer. It was very, very odd. And then there's this confusing review website that seems to be packed with fake reviews. And there's another website that has like um uh uh details a legal respute dispute from the nineties that it involves Raymond Francis and his wife, but there seems to be nothing else. There's no like business registrations, there's no taxes information, there's no Website for the company. I found a 1-800 number that didn't seem to work. But other than that, there's no real record of this company that allegedly created and sold one of the most popular and revolutionary acne and thigh creams in the world, which is just quite odd. And I also searched all of the um, you know, like Macy's and uh JCPenney's and Sears through the years, and I looked for these creams and couldn't find anything, could not find any of these things that allegedly bought a $26 million Ocean View estate. Um, there is, however, a pretty extensive record of Raymond Francis's letters to CIA handler Jim O'Connell, who worked as an overseer for the mafia units that the CIA was using in the 1960s to do its dirty work in Cuba as they tried to assassinate Fidel Castro. So it's very odd. It's very interesting that I could find more documents about Raymond Francis's alleged ties to Alpha 66 and you know the JFK assassination than I could find two of these businesses that netted him millions and millions of dollars and had no websites. So, which is which is again, it's very odd to have this successful company in the mid-90s that supposedly was so successful you sold it for millions of dollars again in 2017, but you don't have a website. Very odd. I don't know. It just is a little odd to me. Anyway, Joe Francis was simultaneously inspired and resentful of his father's success. After graduating from USC, he claimed that he tried to work for his father in his business dealings, which I'm I gotta tell you, I'm starting to believe more and more we're probably tied because of this tie to Jim O'Connell. We're probably looking at some ties to John Roselli, Bob Mayhew, and again, these Cuban assassination attempts being made by the CIA. But Joe and his father just couldn't get along in whatever the business actually was. The way he put it, they both had egos that were too big to be in the same office together. So Joe was forced, either by his father or by circumstance, I think it's probably his father, to figure out what his own entrepreneurial dreams were going to be. Like many a child of individuals with alleged ties to intelligence and the mafia, Joe Francis struck out to try his hand in the television industry. Despite being a college graduate of what he described as a mildly successful man with a $26 million mansion, uh, Joe Francis was able to walk onto the set of Real TV, where he made a made it as like a production assistant. I think production assistant was his first title. Despite having done a business degree, he had absolutely no experience in the television industry. He apparently had no interest in doing it, but he just landed himself as a production assistant on real TV. Joe Francis did the work and he got paid $350 a week for it, but he didn't like it. He describes the work as if it were beneath him, despite the fact that it was a hand fed opportunity that other people would have killed for. And again, if when you listen to him describe this, no empathy, no fucking self-awareness. The man's devoid. He and other assistants would spend hours pouring through submitted footage, looking for the perfect thing that they could put to shock and awe the TNT audiences that watched real TV. And real TV had specifics, and the clips they played had to meet those specifics. They wanted to shock their audience, yes, but they weren't willing to go too far. Joe Francis, however, was a different sort of beast. While working for real TV, he went to his father with an idea to pitch a series of gambling tapes. My doesn't that sound mafia. Joe Francis talks about the idea like it was a real grand scheme. He was going to produce this whole series of tapes, and I think they were supposed to go out to casinos or maybe they were supposed to teach people how to play poker at home. It was a fucking hack idea. It was just, it was absolutely stupid. In the context, you know, of his father's potential business relationships, you know, again, it sounds like more mob shit. Raymond Francis turned his son down. That's what Joe says. He told him the idea was no good, he wasn't going to be able to get any backing for it. So Joe was back on real TV lot and he was simmering. Joe is a Joe's a guy who has a chip on his shoulder, okay? If if you know, if you learned nothing else about him, just know Joe Francis, no matter what he achieves, no matter how much money he's got in his bank account, no matter how much privilege and power he gets, he's one of those guys that just always has a chip on his shoulder. He's still that little just he's just that little weak little high school loser that's like, well, why is she not picking me? Like, no matter what. He's just a little baby. He's a little baby back bitch, man. He just he sucks so bad. He sucks. So he he kind of he's he's like possessed by this idea that he's better, smarter than other people. But so far, right, at this point in his career, none of that had been proven. So Joe Francis, like, I need an idea. I gotta show my dad up. So Joe Francis got his next big idea on the cutting room floor of real TV. After almost a year of pouring through submitted footage, Joe realized that real TV often cut out what he considered to be the best bits. These bits, of course, were horrific, horrific clips of animals being abused, people dying in extremely violent and brutal ways, decomposing bodies, robberies, electrocutions, you know, basically video versions of all the things that you would have seen on rotten.com way back in the day, right? Joe realized that there was a lot of money to be made in these clips and that sickles like him would love to pay to watch horrible things happen to people and animals. So Joe Francis's first big business venture was formed. He called the Endeavor Banned from TV, and it was a series of videotapes that collected all the worst footage that real TV rejected. Again, death, murder, train collisions, animal murder, you name it. It was horrible. Horrible. So, you know, the more horrible it was, if it was too explicit to be on television in the 90s, Joe tracked it down, paid whoever had it, and put it on his new videotapes. Francis and his business partner, get this his business partner who helped produce these horrific tapes, uh, Richard Crystal, Richard Crystal, who is Billy Crystal's brother. Yep, yep. They launched it together, banned from TV in 1997, and advertised it through a series of late-night TV ads that would later become the kind of blueprint and trademark of the Girls Gone Wild brand. Within a few months, Francis and Crystal were getting more orders than they could handle. Their tapes were a big hit. As Francis had predicted, people liked watching horrible stuff on video, but it still wasn't far enough for Francis. After all, all he had done was copy the old faces of death tapes that every blockbuster in the country had displayed prominently on their horror shelves, right? That mixed with Rotten.com. It was nothing new, it was nothing splashy. People could just get on the internet and see this for free. So Joe Francis' ego needed him to push the envelope. And Joe Francis is nothing if not a man led entirely by his ego and his dick. He got his next idea while he was cutting clips for the next popular video series. According to Francis, he was scrolling through the tapes when he saw a clip of a group of drunk women celebrating Mardi Gras in New Orleans. They were whooping and hollering and lifting up their shirts and jiggling their boobs at the camera, again, obviously clearly intoxicated. And Joe said he was transported right back to his college days when the only women he had been able to score with were the drunk women stumbling off the stage after a wet t-shirt contest. And so there in a dark room, staring at videotapes of women's jiggling breasts, Girls Gone Wild was born. Boobs. He had to have them and knew a lot of other people had to have them too. It was a lightning bolt of inspiration for one of the world's biggest and most monumental losers. Joe Francis launched the first Girls Gone Wild tape in 1997, the same year he was launching his band from TV Grift. These videos featured drunk college girls flashing the cameras in exchange for hats, t-shirts, or branded panties. It was a nerve-wracking time. Like his previous endeavor, Joe put out a series of adverts on late night direct to consumer advertising. Again, scummy, scummy, scummy. We've talked about some of these people in the past. This was another mafia industry, just scummy, scummy, scuff. But Joe put it out there and then he waited. The Girls Gone Wild videos became popular almost immediately and attracted a lot of attention to Joe Francis. All the wrong kind of attention for a decent person, but the right kind of attention for a scumbag like Joe Francis. The first big name, seemingly, to take an interest in Joe Francis's new project was Mindy Herman, who had just been made executive of the E Network in 2000. Mindy came onto the scene at a time when E, which was still just the entertainment network at this time, was really struggling. They had low numbers compared to everyone else. It was something like 4 million viewers a year or something. And scheduling, it just didn't resonate. Their scheduling, people just didn't care, they didn't watch it, it didn't stick, and they just really were not breaking into the reality TV market the way bigger networks like MTV and VH1 were. So that all had to change. And it did change when Mindy came onto the scene and flipped the network around by turning it into one of the trashiest and most exploitative platforms on the planet. Under Mindy Herman's watch, E launched shows like the Anna Nicole show, the Anna Nicole Smith show, a truly hard-to-watch exploitation romp that, in my personal opinion, basically destroyed Anna Nicole's life and is partially responsible for her death. She was the tastemaker for the network, this Mindy Herman, and America's taste, Mindy decided, was exploitative trash. The network became one of the raunchiest and most awful, only outdone by TLC, which to this day is still just pumping out the worst of the worst of the worst. That kind of reputation is exactly what made Mindy Herman the perfect match for Jo Francis and his budding softcore porn empire. She and Joe Francis met sometime around or just before 2000, just a few years after the launch of Girls Gone Wild. Mindy saw the opportunity right away and offered Joe Francis and his porn videos a top late night advertising spot. Girls Gone Wild was advertising in a series of 30-minute infomercials that ran on E, eventually spreading to Fox Sports, BET, Tech TV, Style, and a host of other channels. Anyone flipping through a channel in the early 2000s past 11 p.m. was likely to see a cascade of drunk women showering together and flashing their breasts. Girls Gone Wild exploded on the back of these sensationalized infomercials. Within weeks, they were part of the National Zeitgeist, a joke that every single person in America knew about. By 2001, Girls Gone Wild was selling 4.5 million videos and DVDs per year. By 2003, the company was spending $21 million a year just in advertising alone. The company became a giant, and on that explosion of success, Joe Francis was suddenly worth $150 million by 2008. It was the kind of sleazy success story that you see in a mafia movie. Rich boy produces porn, is shown into all the powerful rooms, then becomes a porn-slinging mogul in his own right. The whole thing oozes Epstonian sleaze. But when you look at the people around Joe Francis at this time, especially the people who were at this e-network at the time, it's pretty easy to see how Joe Francis got into the rooms that he did, wealthy father aside. Because besides scummy Mindy Herman, who was ultimately terminated from the network after four years for fist fighting another female employee at an Anna Nicole Smith party, there was a host of other predatory and empathyless ghouls working to ensure that Girls Gone Wild was a big hit and a success for E and all the other networks that the commercials ran on. Two of those men were Alan Ruvka and Larry Neymar, the two men who founded the E Network. And I gotta tell you, looking into these two men and then seeing how E was involved in the rise of Joe Francis and Girls Gone Wild, oh wow, everything starts to make more sense because these are two men with a consistent track record of being problematic and surrounding themselves with problematic and predatory men, especially Alan Ruvka. Alan Ruvka is currently involved in Gamma Time, which is an app I've talked about before on TikTok and is an Israeli-based video app startup that has been invested in by Kim Kardashian and Chris Jenner. The app seeks to create highly addictive short form dramas that copy the popular Chinese short-form dramas of recent years. That's not the only problematic business dealings that Maruvka has been involved in recently either. Maruvka is also a known business associate of Brock Pierce, a Jeffrey Epstein co-conspirator and self-proclaimed cryptocurrency giant. The two are involved in the Bronfman's Paramount bid. And if you were to go look up the Epstein files, you would find out that Alan Marovka's name featured prominently in Epstein's Black Book on more than one occasion. And you would find that under EFTA00191467. Larry Neymar, likewise, has an endless swirl of rumors and controversy around him, including alleged ties to Russia and possible intelligence ties. Both of these men benefited greatly on the back of Girls Gone Wild, who by 2003 had become the biggest advertiser for the e-network. Girls Gone Wild, like by 2003, they were spending most of their $21 million advertising budget on their E-late night infomercials. Thanks to this working relationship with E, Joe Francis and Girls Gone Wild became a household name. And Joe Francis, with millions of dollars in his bank account and alleged connections to organized crime and intelligence all around him, decided that the sky was the limit for him. You know, Arthur Schopenhauer once said, genius and madness have something in common. Both live in a world that is different from that which exists for everyone else. And that quote, I think, uh, I it just I don't know, it makes me think very much of Joe Francis. Uh and then especially this next chapter of his life that he was gonna go into after Girls Gone Wild exploded. And no, I don't mean that Joe Francis was a genius, right? He's never been a genius. He's he's though he has made people wealthy, he's made himself wealthy, he is not he is not a genius, he's just a copycat, right? Um it was not genius to film drunk women and sell it, you know, even though that's what his little fanboys will say. That's it's genius. He's genius. How could he not be a genius? But you look at the personal life of the man behind Girls Gone Wild and the years of his greatest success, and you will see the certain madness laying not even covered. It's not even a secret, it's not even covered. It's just it's just right out in the open. Because while some people would have taken the opportunity of major success to better themselves, you know, become more elevated, like go into, you know, elevated maybe circles of society, Joe Francis dead set on doing the opposite. Richer than ever before, with his own company under his control, Joe Francis set out not to become a great man of means, but to become the biggest monster piece of shit that he could become. His success had justified that right to him, after all, and he exercised it with a monstrous dexterity over every single person who dared to cross his path. The accusations against Joe Francis go all the way back to the beginning of his Girls Gone Wild success. I mean, within the first handful of years. In 2000, just as he was getting in bed with E, he was hit with a restraining order in Santa Monica, where he was living in a plush townhouse at the time. The woman who filed a restraining order against him, Stephanie Van de Mater, was a property manager in the complex. Francis, she said, had become enraged with her when the complex's garbage collection disturbed him. He didn't like the noise, he didn't like when it was getting picked up, and he demanded that they change it. When she replied sensibly that as the manager, she had no control over changing where the garbage was or when it was collected, uh, he basically lost his shit. Joe Francis lost his fucking mind. Joe Francis became so enraged at her refusal to obey him that he started stalking Stephanie whenever she was on property and showed up several times in the office of the complex where he would scream threats at her and at other employees. He was a monster, just a just an unbridled monster. And Stephanie, again, rightfully, became in fear for her life. In 2002, the first of the big sexual assault claims popped up, this time from Becky Lynn Gritzky. Gritzky claimed that she had been filmed without her consent and that her images had then been used in promotional material against her knowledge, against her consent, without her consent, against her will. Her claims were dismissed by a judge that basically saw her as a party girl at fault. You shouldn't have put yourself in that position. But it was one more stone in the pattern that was building around Joe Francis. In 2003, Joe Francis employed the same tactics again, this time against event planner Darion Matthias Patterson. Patterson arranged an extravagant Halloween party for Francis, for which he paid Patterson a $25,000 deposit. After the party, the event space was so damaged and so trashed that Patterson was unable to return the deposit to Francis. Like there was structural damage. You know, there was like there was no getting it back. Joe Francis became enraged and started his usual pattern of threatening, stalking, and harassing the young woman who was pregnant at the time. The harassment got so bad that Patterson eventually had a miscarriage, losing her pregnancy entirely due to the fear and stress that Joe Francis and his threats and harassment caused her. Patterson took Francis to court in 2003 and was awarded an undisclosed amount in a private settlement. I hope she fucking cleared him out. That same year in 2003, Joe committed perhaps one of his most unforgivable and unspeakable, like just it unbelievable. In April of 2003, Panama City Beach police arrested Joe Francis after he was caught filming underage girls committing sex acts for his Girls Gone Wild series. Joe Francis and his crew had picked up the 16 and 17-year-old girls in Florida in the Girls Gone Wild van at the end of March, and they took them to a hotel room where they then told them on camera to lie about their age and perform various sex acts on one another. Just like um unfucking believable. Police searched five locations related to Joe Francis after this arrest, which included business addresses, personal properties, and a private jet. In those properties, they found what they were looking for videos confirming the claims that Joe Francis had been filming underage girls between 2002 and 2003. Like uh Francis was charged with drug trafficking, racketeering, child abuse, and prostitution. And ultimately, there's he ended up doing nothing. He ended up doing nothing. From this point in 2003, when he gets charged, he gets he gets bailed out and then he just starts fighting it for years. Like just he staved off the charges until 2008. Until 2008. He did this in 2003. He staved off the charges in two till 2008 when he was finally sentenced to two years of probation and 200 hours of community service, plus a $500,000 fine for sexually abusing children. Let that sink in. Let that let that just sink in just a little teeny tiny bit. Professionally, his company, which was called Mantra Productions by this time, is what Girls Gone Wild was under, was ordered to pay $1.6 million in fines for the filming of children, but practically nothing else, uh nothing else was done, right? They they got told, give us $1.6 million and we'll call it a day. And this is a company that's making hundreds of millions of dollars a year at this point, right? So that's like it's like nothing to them. It's like 1% of what they make. And after that, Girls Gone Wild was allowed to continue producing videos on the stipulation that they would check IDs in future. Scouts honor. It just it's disgusting. The whole thing is disgusting and it's a ridiculous outcome. And during that time, Joe Francis was openly supported in public by his celebrity friends like Kim Kardashian and Paris Helton, who we'll be getting deeper into in just a moment. Because Joe Francis ultimately never paid a price for any of this escalating behavior, he went on to continue to perpetrate harm on women that came into contact with him. The next year in 2004, while Joe Francis was still fighting racketeering and child porn charges, a Jane Doe came forward to accuse Joe Francis of sexual assault. Shock, surprise to nobody, right? According to Jane Doe, Joe Francis had drugged her and raped her, after which she was gaslit and threatened. Like many of his other accusers over the years, her claims were dismissed, more or less as you were asking for it. That same year in 2004, there was another major incident that shows just how out of control Joe Francis, his ego, and his behaviors had become. And it also shows, I think, that once again, Joe Francis may very well could have, maybe potentially. I don't know, but I like I question organized crime of things, right? This incident, thankfully, turned the tables for a little bit on Joe Francis. Instead of him assaulting someone, Joe Francis was assaulted when a man named Darnell Riley broke into Joe Francis' home, hog tied him like a bitch, and then forced Joe Francis to pleasure himself with an extra large dildo on camera. It was, it was, it was strictly uh purely like we're gonna humiliate this bastard. The incident became major news, and Riley was eventually caught and imprisoned for the crime, allegedly on a tip by Paris Hilton. But the message was clear. Those around Francis said it was a mafia statement. Joe Francis was crossing lines and he needed to get his ass back in order, or worse was gonna happen to him. Someone wanted him ruined. It's a moment of perverted justice. And I know it's wrong, and I know I shouldn't be like, ha ha, he he. But hearing that Joe Francis got hog tied, and I found the old article clips, he's changed this story now. And now the story that he tells, and the now the story the guy, the other guy tells, and I think he's out of jail now. He only did like two or three years for this. But like the story Joe Francis tells now is oh no, I never, he never s I never, I never put anything on my butt. I'm too macho to put anything in my butt. It was just, he took a picture of me with it next to my head. And that's not what happened in the original news reports about it. And you can go and they talk about it in that um 2000. There's a 2006 LA Times article that we're gonna get into in just a second. But they they reported the original report said that he was raped, right? With this dildo. And it like goes anyway, he it did. It happened. It's on camera. And they they wanted to humiliate him. And you know, really, it's kind of like maybe, you know, he's already raped multiple women by this point, and uh he's filmed children. So what do I care if someone gets at him with a dildo on camera? I don't care. But Joe Francis, who I truly believe is a psychopath uh and capable of experiencing true fear and humiliation in the way that you and I experience it, learned nothing from this event, as would be evidenced in one of the most explosive interviews ever released about a human being that I've ever read in my fucking life. The 2006 LA Times expose on the monster behind Girls Gone Wild. In 2006, as Girls Gone Wild was booming and Joe Francis was becoming a regular feature in the weekly crime and scandal columns, Times staff writer Claire Hoffman released an explosive piece on who was then the most controversial man in America. And I'm gonna I'm gonna warn you, this is uh lots of trigger, lots of trigger warnings. I'm I'm I'm I'm not gonna read everything from it, but it's bad. All of this is bad. The interview is horrific, and it opens and closes with some of the most mind-blowingly horrific scenes um that explay display exactly what Joe Francis is. Uh, you already heard a bit of this piece in the last episode, in the very introduction, when I read a graphic description of one of Joe's victims and how he objected her to humiliation, rape, and the loss of her virginity all in one fell swoop. Well, that came out in the 2006 LA Times article. And I have to warn you, it's so much more than just that one little X excerpt. I'm giving you this is your last chance. Uh, hit the eject button now if you're not ready for this. Because this LA Times article titled Joe Francis Baby Give Me a Kiss in a in a better world, uh, would have put this lecherist, rapist, abuser in prison. It is a graphic article, it is filled with graphic admissions, and it's a perfect painting of every inch the scumbag that Joe Francis chooses every day to be. The article begins with the writer, a woman, being physically assaulted by Joe Francis. I'm like, I'm not even, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not kidding. Here's the first lines. I just listen, here's the first lines. Joe Francis, the founder of the Girls Gone Wild Empire, is humiliating me. He has my face pressed against the hood of a car, my arms twisted hard behind my back. He's pushing himself against me, shouting, This is what they did to me in Panama City. I um, okay, I had to read that when I found this article. Uh, I had to read that a few times to make sure I was reading what I thought the fuck I was reading. Cause that's literally the first paragraph. Um, I was like, is the writer saying this correctly? Was this a man? Like I had to go and check the name, and like I like I it, I my brain could not compute what I was reading. That Joe Francis was physically assaulting, battling, battering, also subtly threatening with rape, a journalist on an assignment to interview him for a major publication. Like, that's what it is. That is not made up. That's what happens in the interview. Joe Francis, after a day-long interview, in which he ultimately admits to like raping and taking advantage of women, seeing them as stupid trash and playthings to be disposed of, he grabs a female journalist in front of an audience of men, twists her arms behind her back, and forcefully bends her over the front of a car while forcing himself against her and screaming at her. And in that group of men, watching the assault of this journalist is a police officer on active duty in uniform, who later tells this female journalist in this article when she contacts him and says, Why did you let him do that to me? He says, Well, I didn't get involved because Joe told me that you two had a thing and you were jealous because he didn't want you. I kid you fucking not. The cop said, I thought you were a jealous wannabe girlfriend. So I let him rip, wrench your arms behind your back and slam you into the front of a car. That's that's what she gets told. The interview isn't just packed with this assault incident, though. Throughout the piece, the journalist encounters a sea of women who've been used and abused by Francis. One young woman, a Janelle Siziska, Siziska, Siziska, Siziska, Siziska, that's where we're gonna go. Janelle Siziska is discovered by one of Joe Francis's one of his employees in the club while the group is partying, right? So Claire Hoffman, this female journalist, she gets she has to spend this whole day and night with this asshole, right? And they go to this nightclub so he could show her what girls gone wild do at these nightclubs in 2006. And while they're in this club and she's talking about what just how scummy the whole thing is, one of Joe Francis' employees, one of his cameramen, who is all also scout for him, they come running into the VIP section where this journalist is with Joe Francis, and they go, I found one. She's 17, she's a virgin, and she's gonna she's gonna turn 18 at midnight. She's here for her birthday, which is like fucking crazy. A 17-year-old should not have been in the club before her birthday. That's that's uh just nuts. So Joe Francis gets super excited in front of this journalist. He's like, Hell yeah, we got a virgin. That's great. And he gives the camera guy a thousand dollar bonus for bringing him a virgin, right? And it it's just it's he's ecstatic. Joe's ecstatic, he gives the guy the thousand dollars, and then he starts making the rounds to get the teenage girl onto the bus. What followed that poor young woman onto that girl's gone wild bus was the excerpt that I read to you at the start of the last episode. A rape scene with her saying it hurts. I don't want to do this, and him bragging and high-fiving his cameraman on camera about taking her virginity, like laughing, threatening her with taking her virginity, like all kinds, just like throws a towel on her, tells her to clean herself. It's horrific, horrific. The scene is Joe Francis forcing himself onto a woman while she tells him that it hurts. She tells him to stop and he he he he doesn't. It's rape, right? The journalist gets essentially she's she's there when a rape happens. She doesn't even realize it, right? She doesn't even realize it. And it's it happens in a group of men that included an active on-duty police officer in uniform. And this teenager was raped in this bus. Unbelievable, right? Absolutely unbelievable. The rest is what you would expect. Joe Francis calling women stupid, calling the Times staff writers stupid. It's clear that women are trash to him, their things to be used for sex and then discarded. His resentment of women, it's just insane. It's lifelong, man. From according to him, it's been since he was 10 years old. And in this interview, this 2006 LA Times interview, I mean, he does everything in his power to debase and demean women like at every, every, every turn. The whole thing is shocking, it's upsetting, but I think it is an important read. And I think, you know, to show you just what kind of system Joe Francis operates within and just what kind of person he really is. And all of this, I do also think is really important for you to understand about what comes next and who comes next. Because Joe Francis, an insecure puddle of a child at his core, is never a man who likes to be alone, right? He must be surrounded by an audience. The more famous, the better. After the 2006 exposure of Joe Francis had ripped through the headlines, nothing happened. Nothing happened. He didn't go to jail for assaulting the journalists. No one questioned the rapes and the assaults that the women told and the journalists and their stories uh that were documented in the piece. It was all quiet on the Western Front for Joe Francis, even while he was also battling child porn charges on the same thing. And that that seems weird, right? Like, why wasn't that all over the news? Well, it turns out it wasn't all over the news in 2006 because Joe Francis threw a birthday party for a big-time editor, Richard Johnson, who was editor for the New York Post in 2006. Um, and Richard Johnson was kind of like over all these other journals, and all these journals kind of had the thing like we we hate Joe Francis and we're gonna like expose him, right? Well, in 2006, Joe Francis threw a huge birthday party for Richard Johnson and it was like a weekend away, and it's his like fancy New Mexico estate. And then wouldn't you know it? Suddenly, Richard Johnson comes back from this birthday party that Joe Francis, a porn mogul, has thrown who films children, and Richard Johnson is suddenly calling him the next Hugh Hefner, and all the other media outlets in America all of a sudden start calling him the next Hugh Hefner, while we have the LA Times article out there vividly describing him assaulting multiple people, right? So that's how the narrative got changed, and that's why you probably never heard about the LA Times article because Joe Francis probably gave children to to the right person who would then like write nice things about him. In 2007, Joe Francis got stung for tax evasion, one of the few times he did a little bit of time behind bars. Ultimately, however, he was released and went back out on the proud to inflict as much damage as he could on whoever had the misfortune of crossing his path. In 2008, it seemed like Joe Francis's number might finally come up. Four different women took him to court that year, where they accused him of various crimes from outright rape to basic violence, manipulation, and assault. They all claimed that they had been subjected to extreme emotional distress at the hands of Joe Francis and Girls Gone Wild. One of the women, Ashley Dupree, claimed that Francis and Girls Gone Wild had filmed her without her knowledge or her consent and then used those images for promotional materials, again, without her consent. Another woman from Missouri sued Francis after she said one of his producers forcefully removed her halter top and bullied her into filming. She was later awarded, thankfully, $5.7 million for the obvious assault and crime. Francis decided to represent himself in these cases, claiming that the Justice Department was prosecuting him simply because they just didn't like him. It's all just a big, it's all a big scheme because they just don't like him. It was a disaster of a misstep with Francis incurring multiple fines during the trial for inappropriate behavior. Like when he, while cross-examining one of his victims on the stand, he asked her, one of his victims, he asked her if she was a prostitute, right? And so he got fined $2,500 for that little, that little oopsie poopsie. It's not lost on me, and it should not be lost on you how similar this behavior is to Ted Bundy, who represented himself at one point in his murder trials just so that he could have the thrill of torturing his victims on the stand one last time. Really, really awful sadistic shit. Um, but it wouldn't be a learning opportunity for Joe Francis. No, no, not him, the man who is incapable of learning or growth, um, who was about to commit one of his most heinous assaults yet. The only silver lining to all of this sh debacle in 2008 was that Joe Francis finally paid the Piper a little bit for his 2003 child pornography and prostitution charges when he pled no contest to everything the Panama City Beach police threw at him. He was sentenced to almost a year in prison and got out early for time served and good behavior, which relied on his previous tax convictions from 2007 in Las Vegas. Now you would think that surely Joe Francis would have learned to keep his head down and behave now, right? Wrong. In 2011, Joe Francis made the news again when he was arrested for three counts of false imprisonment, one count of assault causing great bodily harm, and one count of dissuading a witness during an incident in his Bel Air mansion. This incident, of course, happened in January of 2011 after Joe Francis in a limousine pulled up to a popular Hollywood club, which they would never name. Francis lured three young women into his limo, promising that he was going to drive them to their car, which, ladies, the guy in the limo, that's he's never gonna drive you to your car. Walk to your car, okay? If he you're not going to your car. Instead, Francis had his driver take the three women against their will to his Bel Air gated mansion. There, the women were locked up behind the gates of Joe's house and not allowed to leave. Inside the gated home, the women begged to leave, after which one of them was allegedly assaulted by having her head slammed against the tile floor. Francis denied all the charges, but was ultimately convicted in 2013 on three charges of false imprisonment, one count of grievous bodily assault, and trying to force a witness. He ran to the Hollywood reporter, of course, and lashed out at the jury in a direct message to them because he's always the perpetual victim. He said, and like I what I'm about to say, this is not me. This is a direct quote from Joe Francis. It is very bad. It is very triggering. He said this to the press. You can go and look it up, but this is what he said. I want the jury to know that each and every one of you are mentally fucking retarded and you should be euthanized because, as Darwin said, you have naturally selected yourself. Yeah. Real stellar character, right? Holds three women hostage and then tells the jury that convicted him they should be euthanized, right? Hello, eugenics. Is that you? Well, he's just like, oh, he's just a scummy Nazi rat. Fuck, man. Just he's awful. Awful. Francis was ultimately sentenced to 270 days in jail, two years of probation, anger management, and psychiatric treatment following the incident, but it taught him nothing. That same year, his precious company, Mantra Entertainment, was forced to declare bankruptcy. All those years of running around inflicting harm on people with a devil may care attitude was finally starting to catch up to Joe Francis, who needed his skeezy little porn videos anymore, anyways, when everyone had free porn in their pockets 24-7. Francis's huge gambling debts were exposed in 2013 and he was subjected to a huge and explosively embarrassing court case. Essentially, after his gambling debts were exposed, he went on a tirade about the guy who owned Wynne Casinos. So the owner of Win Casinos sued the hell out of him for libel and defamation. He lost, like uh Joe Francis, sorry, Joe Francis lost both of those suits with Wynn, right? With the head of Win Casinos and was ordered to pay millions. It's like over, it's like 26 million by the time he got done with like first the libel and then the defamation suit. I don't remember which order they did them in, but essentially he lost the first one, and the win guy was awarded $20 million for Joe Francis running his mouth. And then the second one, he got like an additional $6 million or something for Joe Francis continuing to run his mouth. And it was this uh that was it. That's the final nail in the coffin for Joe Francis' business life. Bankruptcy was declared and he was soon forced to flee to Mexico to avoid prison time when it was revealed that he had ultimately hidden a bunch of money and assets and committed bankruptcy fraud. Now, for a normal person, that would be the end of the story. It seems like it would be the end of the story, right? Because after all, Joe Francis is still living in Mexico right now. But nope, no, no, no. It's anything but uh because you see, there's a very specific reason we've landed on Joe Francis, okay? Why we've spent such a long time together talking about what a big piece of shit he is and all the bad things that he's done, okay? And the reason that I've spent so much time proving to you what a disgusting, horrible, criminal, predatory be uh person being Joe Francis is, is because it's just one more piece of evidence that proves what a piece of shit Kim Kardashian and every member of the Kardashian family actually is. Yes, that's right. Because the truth is, one of the greatest crimes that Joe Francis has ever committed, it's up there, it's up there with his worst crimes, was giving us Kim Kardashian. Kim Kardashian. The two have been friends for decades. And even though Kimberly and her mother don't like to acknowledge it, the only reason that you know Kim Kardashian's name right now is because Joe Francis is the one that built and established their brands and their careers. Kanye can say whatever he wants to say. You know who Kim Kardashian is because of Joe Francis. In that wild, in that wild, but it's true. To this very day, Kim Kardashian and Joe Francis are close friends. And she and her family still appear in promotional advertising for his resort mansion home in Mexico, like right now, like right, right now. And it gets shown in like People magazine. And why is that, right? Why would a mother remain close personal friends with a man who pleaded no context to the sexual filming and prostitution of children? Why would a woman who claims to have been abused by men in the past remain close personal friends with a man who has physically and sexually assaulted more women than you and I probably have the ability to count on all our fingers and all of our toes, right? It seems like a strange relationship to cling to for someone who claims to be this really smart and decent and strong woman, right? Like, why are you friends with a rapist and a child predator? Well, it makes a lot more sense when you understand how Kimberly's career was designed by Joe Francis. It all goes right back to the very earliest days of the 2000s. Joe Francis was just becoming a big name with Girls Gone Wild, and his fame happened to coincide with the rise of none other than Bimbo culture, specifically the rise of Uber viral mega media star Paris Hilton. Paris Hilton was the it girl by the early 2000s. In 2000, she was photographed jet setting around the country with none other than get this, George Maloof of ye old Britney Spears conservatorship fame. Um, and the tabloid tongue started wagging. She was all over town with George Malouf, so the tabloids are like, ooh, look at her. And she exploded overnight. Very interesting, huh? Maloofs, once again. And so did her childhood best friend, Nicole Ritchie, who hired Chloe Kardashian to start working as her assistant. As Paris Hilton's star hit the big time, Joe Francis was becoming meteoric in his own right. In 2001, he opened his quote-unquote celebrity resort in Mexico, which is called Casa Aramara. It was a huge girls gone wild stunt, this opulent mansion where the biggest names in Hollywood would fly down and have the wildest times of their lives. The 22-room mansion became a playground for the new brat pack of the 2000s. Paris Hilton being one of the first celebrities to appear at Casa Aramara alongside Joe Francis. Eminem also appeared there, Snoop Dogg. It's been very gross, very, very gross. It was that same year, right, 2001, while Paris was being spotted at Joe Francis's Mexico Sex Mansion, that she and her then boyfriend Rick Solomon filmed their notorious sex tape. One wonders about the timing. The next year, in 2002, Kimberly Kardashian would do a similar thing when she flew down to Mexico for her birthday party, only to wind up shooting a sex tape with Ray J while she was there, who she was not dating. No, she was not dating Ray J when she filmed the sex tape with him because she was married. She was married during that time. Yeah, yeah. But 2003 was the really big year for Joe Francis and his new circle of friends filming sex tapes in Mexico. It was in 2003 that Joe Francis and Paris Hilton finally made their debut as an official couple. The tabloids went nuts. The super powerful heiress with the scumbag porn producer, it was like an unexpected match. Even though Paris Hilton was kind of slutty and trashy, it was really weird seeing her with Joe Francis because he's just very he's like a used car salesman. It became less confusing when that same year, though, Paris Hilton's sex tape with her ex-boyfriend was suddenly leaked. Paris became even bigger overnight on the back of her sex tape scandal. One night in Paris sold millions of copies and helped launch Paris Hilton into a spotlight so big she and Nicole Ritchie were given their television show, The Simple Life on the back of it. Paris became bigger than she had ever been before. She was an unstoppable force, and Joe Francis was right there along for the ride. In later years, he would blatantly take credit for masterminding the leak of Paris' sex tape, saying that he arranged it with people that he knew in the adult film industry. He had created a media giant on the back of scandal, and that's probably why that same year, 2003, Kimberly Kardashian and her mother, Chris Jitter, allegedly came to Joe Francis asking him if he could make the same kind of instant fame happen for them. Paris Hilton and Joe Francis eventually fizzled out. He was never going to be good enough for the heiress of the illustrious Hilton family, and she doesn't seem like the type who would have long tolerated all his women are stupid fuck whores routine. But even as Paris Hilton became less and less of a figure in Joe Francis' circle, her best friend and now stylist, Kimberly Kardashian, seemed never to be more than a few feet away from the problematic porn mogul. When Paris Hilton disappeared from the picture completely, taking more and more of a backseat in the media after the wrap of her wildly popular show, The Simple Life, in 2005, Kimberly was still heavily featured in Joe Francis' circle. The Kardashian sisters also love the rapist and assaulter. Even after his exposure for assault and rape in the 2006 LA Times article, the girls continued to party with him. Joe started sleeping with Courtney Kardashian sometime around 2005, then allegedly, according to him, pushed her off onto Scott Dissick in 2006 when he was tired of her and couldn't get rid of her. In 2007, the bond between the Kardashians and Joe Francis was sealed forever when Kim's sex tape with Ray J was finally quote unquote leaked. It took years for us to get the real story of how it all went down, but now, thanks to recent allegations from Ray J, along with the story that Jo Francis tells, we pretty much have all the pieces to understand what happened. Essentially, what had happened was that Kim filmed a sex tape with Ray J all the way back in 2002, as I told you. Kim was married to her first husband at the time, but after the plan swirling around Paris Hilton's sex tape became super successful, she and her mother decided it was a good bet to get in famous. So Chris Jenner, who had been trying to get a reality TV show for her daughter for years, but nothing. It panned out because they suck and they don't have talents and they're not funny. They figured that a sex tape was a good way to go about doing it. So, according to Ray J, he and Kim shot at least two more versions of their sex tape, which had to be put in a shoebox and then passed on to Chris so that she could approve the sexual performances on the tape. Okay, not kidding you. Allegedly, Chris Jenner had to make them shoot multiple versions, according to Ray J. After all of that, in 2007, Joe Francis alleges that he was approached by Chris Jenner and Kimberly Kardashian about releasing the sex tape. They had seen how famous Paris Hilton got on her sex tape, and they knew that he was involved and they wanted him to do the same thing for them. Joe claims he organized everything. It went down something like this Vivid Entertainment would distribute Kib's tape, but to make it more sensational and to protect her image on the other side to make sure they could still sell her, a scheme was cooked up to make it look like a leak. Essentially, Vivid put out a statement that they had the video and they were gonna release it. After which, Chris and Kim acted really upset to the papers and pretended to sue the company. Vivid would agree to quote unquote settle the lawsuit for a specific sum, which wasn't really a settlement. That was the payment for the tape that they were about to distribute without making Kim look like the paid adult actress that she actually was. The scheme worked. Kim's sex tape with Ray J went the 2000s equivalent of viral in six months. I think it was actually four months after it, Kimberly Kardashian and Chris Jenner finally achieved what they had tried to do on the backs of their own personalities and failed. So Chris had to do it on the back of her daughter. They got keeping up with the Kardashians finally green lighted. And at what network? Oh, why, yes. E, of course, the same network that had helped Joe Francis launch his Porn Empire. The same network whose founder appears in Jeff Epstein's black book. Isn't that crazy? Isn't that so crazy? Well, if you've ever wondered why when Joe Francis was facing child pornography charges, Kimberly Kardashian was walking around in a free Joe shirt with her sisters. That's why. The Kardashians would have nothing if Joe Francis hadn't helped orchestrate their adult performances into the media empire they possess to this day. And they continue to pay homage to him to this day, regularly visiting his home in Mexico with their children and their partners, where Joe Francis is living in exile, hiding from extradition for bankruptcy fraud. Shortly after Kim and Kanye started dating in 2012, the two took an extended vacation to Joe Francis' home. Now, doesn't that seem odd? Kanye has been very outspoken about Kim's sex tape in her former life, and he's never spoken highly of it, yet he accompanied her more than once on trips to the home of the porn producer who helped release Kim's sex tape and start her career as essentially a courtesan for wealthy black men. In January of 2014, again, after Joe Francis had been convicted of producing and distributing child porn and prostituting children, Cordy Kardashian took a trip down to his Casa Aramara home in Mexico with her children. She took her children to the home of a man who pled no contest to filming children sexually. She was back there in April of that same year for her big 35th birthday girls' bash. She took a bunch of women to the home of a man who has assaulted numerous women and filmed them against their will. Wonderful, wonderful. And the whole thing was broadcast in multiple publications as just really glamorous, like, yeah, Stella, get your groove back kind of bullshit. Just really crazy. Crazy, crazy, crazy stuff. A couple of months later, in June of that same year, 2014, Kim and Kanye were back at Joe Francis' home where they spent part of their honeymoon on the compound. Kid you not, a rapist, a violent abuser of women who vocally talked about how stupid and useless he thought they were. That's where Kim and Kanye decided to spend part of their honeymoon. Isn't that wonderful? That really, really nice. In March of 2015, Kim was photographed lounging around the estate with her friends. Then in August of 2015, Kendall and Kylie flew down to Joe Francis' house to celebrate Kylie's 18th birthday, because we know how much Joe Francis loves when a girl turns 18, right? We remember what he did to Janelle on her 18th birthday, right? So definitely let's send Kylie down there to celebrate her 18th birthday at that man's house, right? In that great uh shortly after which it was confirmed that Kylie had been basically out with Tyga since she was 16, 17 years old. So wonderful stuff out of the Kardashians. In 2016, after Kim's infamous Paris robbery incident, she took her two oldest children to Joe Francis' house to recover. Isn't that crazy? She was filmed there crying on the bed about how sad she was about her Paris robbery. Uh just she took her children, she took North and Saint to Joe Francis' home, who again by this point had pled no contest to the sexual exploitation of children, right? And Kim has her own bedroom there, apparently, allegedly, that that Joe likes to show people and go, This is Kim Kardashian's room. Only she's allowed to stay in this room. Isn't that fun? Isn't that really fun? Really fun stuff. In January of 2017, Kylie and Tyga were seen partying and relaxing at Joe Francis' home with Tyga's son. And I I mean, do I need to say it again? Do I need to say he's he's a convicted child predator again? No. Um in April of 2017, Courtney Carnashian was back, back, back again for another big girl's weekend. She just can't stay away from Joe Francis' house. Um, and that one got tons of press and a bunch of celebrity advertising for the home of, again, convicted sex criminal Joe Francis. In 2018, Kendall and Chloe had a romantic and sexy weekend getaway with their respective partners, Ben Simmons and Tristan Thompson. And in 2019, Kylie decided that it would be a really, really good idea to bring her female child, Stormy, to the home of again, a convicted child predator, along with her newest love interest, Travis Scott. It's just really it's sickening stuff, you guys. It is sickening fucking stuff. At every turn in the road, no matter like what he does, no matter what crimes he's committed, the Kardashian family remains, remains in the pocket of Joe Francis. Like when he is accused of abusing women, raping them, exploiting children, they put on free Joe shirts and go to the press saying literally, and I quote, Joe Francis didn't do anything wrong. He should be free. It's scum supporting and protecting scum at the end of the day, because there's no excuse for a woman and a mother to continue to prop up someone who, as recently as 2020, was charged with the violent assault of a woman. An assault which happened in the home the Kardashians vacation at, and allegedly involved Joe Francis grabbing a woman by the throat, throwing her to the ground, stomping on her, and spitting in her face because he didn't like the way his injections that she had given him had turned out. Not even kidding. That incident happened in 2020, the same year that Kim Kardashian did a promotional interview with Joe Francis about what a great guy he was and how much she loved staying at his home. The whole thing is her saying, we've been friends forever. He's just the best guy. He's grown so much. I'm so proud of him. He had just assaulted a woman. I kid you fucking not. These people are the two sides of the same coin. Like I, you I needed you to see how bad Joe Francis was because that's Kim Kardashian's one of her best and closest family fucking friends, right? So what kind of person is going to be best friends with someone like that for decades? And honestly, you know what? The rabbit hole goes so much deeper than that. If we dig into the links between Joe Francis' father and his alleged ties to organized crime in California, you start to see a whole network of people who can be easily tied back to Robert Kardashian and his buddies like Irving Azoff. So, like, are we looking at two bad people being friends simply because they're bad? Or like, is there something deeper there, maybe between the Kardashian family and the Francis Friesick families, both of whom seem to have, you know, made the bulk of their money from like questionable means that no one can really trace. I suppose that we don't get any straight answers on that front until the government starts declassifying more documents, but one thing is for certain Joe Francis is an evil man and the Kardashian family are ride or die for him. You would think after all of this, there would be some gleam of decency, some shred of moral reason learned, but there is no learning for a man like Joe Francis. To this day, he continues to hide out in Mexico where U.S. officials are still trying valiantly to extradite him for bankruptcy fraud. He's not hiding that hard. Joe Francis continues to advertise his Mexico mansion as a popular resort for celebrities. According to the website, Joe Francis's home, where he continues to live to the day, has hosted names such as Elon Musk, Courtney Cox, Ashton Kutcher, Demi Moore, John Mayer, Haley Bieber, Sierra, Morgan Fairchild, Russell Wilson, Vince Vaughan, Selena Gomez, Pitbull, Orlando Bloom, Quincy Jones, and I quote, countless more. Joe Francis's home is one of the top destinations for celebrities, it claims, because they have an anything button that gives their guests access to literally anything their heart could possibly desire. Stress on anything. Is that to me it sounds it sounds awfully Epstonian? Does that sound Epstonian to you? In 2004, investigative journalist Saatchi Soul, Scotch Sochi, I think it's Saatchi Soul, uh, released a searing three-part investigative series on Joe Francis and the Girls Gone Wild Empire titled Girls Gone Wild: The Untold Story. In it, Sewell exposed the ghoulish company and its even more ghoulish leader in a light that Joe Francis had never been exposed in before. The documentary re-examined the rise of Girls Gone Wild and questioned the figures and cultural incidents that made its rise possible. It shows how the late night video franchise captured the zeitgeist like nothing else before it and shone a light on the victims who paid the ultimate price, the women who were destroyed by Girls Gone Wild and Joe Francis. The really important part of this documentary, perhaps, though, is this shocking interview that that Cool's able to get to close with. And it was this huge, deep, and incredibly exposing interview uh one-on-one with Joe Francis in his home in Mexico, where he was hiding again from U.S. extradition. And when pressed about his past crimes, he basically, like always, he denies them. But then when he gets put on the spot by Cool and questioned intensely about some of his victims, he was forced to trip over himself. He becomes arrogant, he becomes aggravated, he starts throwing out retorts to accusations like you can't rape someone you're dating. He says that in the interview. Just like un unbelievable. It was all but an admission of the creature everyone had so long said he was. And it was as if Joe Francis from 2006 was standing right there in front of the camera again in real time. It's an enlightening watch. If you're someone who still isn't convinced that Joe Francis is evil embodied, then like go and look. It gives it gives life to every story, every accusation, every claim that's ever been made against him, because ultimately that's who and what Joe Francis is: a monster. He may not have been born that way, but that's certainly the way he chose to be shaped by the life that he was handed. He could have been anyone, done anything, and he chose to be a porn mogul scumbag. He chose to exploit when he could have built, and in the end, he's gonna lose everything for it and die alone. Joe Francis, for all his bluster and bravado, for all his shallow belief that he is the most powerful and important man on the planet, he is ultimately a nobody now. He can't even move freely. The man who once had a fleet of sports cars, homes around the world, a private jet, can now barely leave his mansion without the looming threat of prison and lawsuits haunching right over the top of him. And he remains a scumbag, right? Saying horrible things about the mother of the two twin daughters he now has. Oh yeah, he's a father now. I didn't even have time to get into all that. Abigail Wilson, the woman who thought she could tame Joe Francis for some reason, is now locked in a legal battle against him, desperately trying to retain custody of her children from a man who doesn't believe she can be raped by him. It's an awful story from top to bottom and from every other angle besides. There wasn't even time to cover his ties to Jive Records, the record label that protected R. Kelly as he raped teenager Leah and married her in secret. The same label that protected him from endless accusations, and a tour manager who once begged the label to please protect young women who were being abused by R. Kelly on tours. Yeah, Joe Francis is also tied into that. He has a whole connection with that. And you can go back to Clive Davis and all that other stuff, and I'll be looking at some of that on Patreon. So go over there if you want to see that. But yeah, Joe Francis is evil and he continues to do evil things and not really pay any price for it, which for me just points potentially to a powerful and shadowy pool around him that has kept him from doing the time he should have done for his sexual and physical abuse of women and children. I suppose at the end of the day, there's nothing to do now but watch and wait to share this story and hope that others avoid falling into the traps that men like him love to set. But there is comfort in knowing this one thing. All men like Joe Francis eventually fall, and they eventually become victims of their own greed who die by the same means that they dish out to others. That's especially true if Joe Francis does happen to be messing around with some organized things he shouldn't be. Because there's one thing I know from all that work you've seen me doing on Patreon lately, on the CIA, the mafia in Hollywood. Cross the wrong people, fail, humiliate them or yourself in any way, and death is just around the corner. Just as John Roselli, the once big mafia head, who was the untouchable handler of Frank Sinatra, died with his throat crushed, gut shot, and wrapped up in a metal barrel, which was dropped into the bottom of a harbor in Miami. Violent delights beget violent ends. And that's no doubt the kind of end that Joe Francis has coming for him one day, the way he's lived his life. And that's it. That's all. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. I hope you loved it. Um, if this series sparked your interest or piqued your curiosity, why not head over to Apple or Spotify and leave a quick five-star review? It only takes a couple of minutes and it means the absolute world to me because you guys, I'm doing all of this on my own. I don't know if I've stressed that. I do it all. I do the research, I do the script writing, I do the recording, I do the editing, I pay for hosting, got the website, like all of that, everything. So it really means the world when you leave a kind review and help other people find this work that I'm doing just one day at a time. If you love this episode or you love this work specifically of exposing celebrities and all their twisted ties, then head over to patreon.com slash scandalqueens, where I have all kinds of deep dives, bonus episodes, and goodies on Joe Francis, the Kardashians, Taylor Swift, Owsley Stanley, and so much more. Subscribers over on Patreon get episodes early. I record bonus episodes you can't get anywhere else, and a host of other collections and research that I'm adding to all the time. So I just started a series on the CIA in Hollywood. So it's a good time to get involved if you are into that kind of stuff. For a more psychological perspective, head over to thereally be johnson.substack.com, where I have a huge collection of articles on psychology, relationships, mental health, narcissism, you name it. And for everything else, make sure you're following me on social media at the Really B Johnson on everything. That's just it, at the Really B Johnson, nothing else. Um I'm on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. And that's it. That's it for the day. Thank you so much for being here and supporting me and listening every week. It's really cool seeing all of you come back and listen all the time, and it just really makes me giddy. So thank you, thank you, thank you. I hope you enjoyed this series, and I'll be back, back, back next week with a little bit more of a fun one. So buckle up, it's gonna be good. And until next time, keep your secrets close and your receipts closer. Stay scandalous, queens. Bye bye.