Girls Gone Wild founder Joe Francis got rich peddling seedy videos featuring sometimes nude, sometimes drunk young women. Several have sued him, accusing him of exploiting them and soliciting them to frolic nude on camera when they were underage. Now, the tables are turned. Someone is reportedly shopping around a sex tape featuring Francis and his girlfriend, Abbey Wilson, and the soft-porn honcho is angrily threatening to sue for violation of privacy.
Francis says the scenes, which are described as hardcore, were on an iPad stolen from Wilson — winner of Girls Gone Wild's 2012 "Search for the Hottest Girl in America" — when she was at Los Angeles International Airport. "It is not only unfortunate, but it is a crime," Francis' lawyer, David Houston, tells TMZ, vowing to identify and stop the person trying to distribute the video.
Cue the tiny violins. Kristine Gutierrez at Jezebel views this as pure, delicious karma, saying that whoever pilfered this very private video that Francis wants no one to see is not so much a criminal as an "amazing hero."
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One would think that someone who became a D-list celebrity by enlisting a small army of cameramen to exploit drunk girls and film them performing varying degrees of sexual acts would be a little more comfortable with his f--kathon being put out there, but no. [Jezebel]
The irony is lost on no one. Still, Andrea Reiher at Zap2it suggests that Francis deserves at least a little sympathy. "The girls who participate in Girls Gone Wild didn't have their footage stolen from their private electronic devices, but still — this is a little funny."
And, don't forget, Francis is not the only person in the video. Mish Way at Canada's National Post suggests that even those who are reveling in Francis' misfortune should have some compassion for his partner Abbey Wilson, whose privacy has been violated, too. If they don't, though, Francis is the one who bears the blame, Way suggests:
It's hard to feel sorry for scum, and Francis has proved over and over that he is scummy. Unfortunately, his choice of career, legal issues, and media outbursts have reflected him as somewhat of a monster to the general public, thus dehumanizing him completely. After more than a decade of trading drunken tit shots for crappy T-shirts, the fact that his personal sex tape leaked is nothing but ironic. [National Post]
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Harold Maass is a contributing editor at The Week. He has been writing for The Week since the 2001 debut of the U.S. print edition and served as editor of TheWeek.com when it launched in 2008. Harold started his career as a newspaper reporter in South Florida and Haiti. He has previously worked for a variety of news outlets, including The Miami Herald, ABC News and Fox News, and for several years wrote a daily roundup of financial news for The Week and Yahoo Finance.
