Girls Gone Wild founder Joe Francis can probably recruit Kip Winger to croon his off-to-jail-again theme song. Kip’s likely available these days. After just finishing a jail sentence for distributing content featuring under age girls, Francis’ widely-publicized revelation that Eliot Spitzer’s call girl, Ashley Dupre, was caught on seven tapes in Miami might cause him some more statutory troubles.
Dupre’s attorney said yesterday that Ashley was just 17 when GGW filmed her, a month before her 18th birthday.
Why then, are the videos still advertised on the GGW website? According to reports, Francis talked it over with his lawyers and found out that in Florida, 17-year-old girls are in some kind of weird legal limbo nether region—okay to film nude, so long as there’s no sexual contact.
Francis, knowing a golden ticket when he sees one, says the videos will be released with that information now known. The only problem is that in earlier statements, Francis said more happened than just stripping.
There was not only underage drinking, but also lesbian encounters, and that Ashley involved the GGW cameraman during her weeklong stay on the GGW bus. Francis said he put her on a Greyhound bus after the crew caught her drinking. Dupre’s attorney, though, claims he knew she was 17 at the time.
Somewhere, somebody’s lying. Either Francis exaggerated the footage GGW has of Dupre in order to sell more subscriptions, or he’s downplaying the extent of what happened to save his own skin. Maybe the answer’s both.
Today there’s just one tape, not seven, according to Francis’s statement in the New York Post:
“The lawyers looked at the tape, and said since there is no sexual contact; it doesn’t matter if she was underage,” he said. “It will be released.”
But yesterday, according to Francis in the New York Post and a widely-quoted press release, there was a lot more going on than that:
“She spent a week on the bus, where she engaged in girl-girl action and got nude,” Francis told The Post, adding, “I actually think she had a sexual relationship with a cameraman.”
And if you haven’t seen other GGW videos, then you may have been up late enough to see the commercials. If so, you know they sort of encourage the girls to do whatever they want. But in then-unknown Ashley’s case, it was probably different, right?
The video is still available at the GGW website for a $30 access fee, presumably in an attempt to shore up defense money before the videos go officially Traci Lords status. And though filming underage girls in the nude might be legal in Florida, it is still unknown, since this is an Internet release, if he hasn’t violated laws in other states. It was the feds, after all, that pegged him with a $2.1 million fine last time.
On his blog, Francis writes that jail “has become just as interesting as any other part of my life.” Well, it might just get more interesting, unless his time-served counts for this incident as well.
