The ‘No’ Means ‘Yes’ Culture Of ‘Girls Gone Wild’ Is Still Going Strong

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Girls Gone Wild founder Joe Francis made a fortune selling videos of inebriated teen girls baring their breasts and having sex on camera.

Then, as the internet took over, the company went bankrupt, and his celebrity status faded. He was convicted of child abuse and prostitution, tax evasion and bribery, assault and false imprisonment and ordered to pay out millions in a defamation lawsuit.

But the 51-year-old has generally emerged unscathed from criminal charges and a number of lawsuits filed by women, including four teenage girls who accused him of causing emotional distress, a woman in Mexico who said he violently attacked her, and another woman who said she miscarried after he harassed and threatened to kill her. He fled to Mexico after he was sentenced to jail time in Los Angeles in 2013 for slamming a woman’s head to the floor and refusing to let her and her friends leave his Bel Air mansion. His ex-wife said he physically assaulted and raped her, and countless women — including several interviewed on the new Peacock docuseries “Girls Gone Wild: The Untold Story” — say their lives were ruined by the franchise.

Francis has denied any wrongdoing. He never served jail time in California — he fled to Mexico after he was sentenced and has been living at the sprawling beachside resort property he owns in Punta Mita ever since.

And that doesn’t surprise Scaachi Koul, the former BuzzFeed News writer whose wide-ranging 2023 interview with Francis and investigation into Girls Gone Wild spawned the docuseries, told HuffPost.

“It’s not surprising to me that he is living a pretty good life … and a pretty affluent life,” she said. “He hasn’t really had to offer anything in terms of restitution, financial or otherwise — has not really had to serve a lengthy jail or prison sentence.”

Koul, whose audio interviews with Francis are played throughout the docuseries, spoke with HuffPost about the troubling legacy of Girls Gone Wild — and her shock when Francis told her, “You can’t rape your partner.”

So what prompted you to pursue Joe Francis in the first place?

Scaachi Koul: There had already been some projects here and there about him and the company, but none of them really felt like they were fully answering some of the bigger questions we had culturally around how Girls Gone Wild impacted the way women look at themselves, how we look at each other, how men look at us, about the media culture around sex and feminism and bodies and girls and women, and so we started to look into that. And then we found Joe in Mexico.

Getting him to agree to the interview was surprisingly easy. I think he felt like he had a bunch of things to say, namely about those cases in Panama City Beach. And he didn’t feel like anybody, I guess, understood his perspective, or understood what had happened there with the investigation and the way that the police kind of mishandled some of the investigation, so I think he was excited to talk about that.

What does it say about society that Joe Francis has largely managed to escape accountability for so long?

I think we are still convinced that any woman or any girl is responsible for her own subjugation. She’s responsible for it because she put herself in the position, or she’s responsible for it because she didn’t remove herself from it, or she’s responsible because she has a body, or she’s responsible because her parents weren’t taking care of her. Or she’s responsible because she, you know, was 16 and lied and said she was 18, or she’s responsible because she had a fake ID, or she’s responsible because she was just too cute.

We are still stuck in this conversation of “you should have known better” and “you should have done better.” And you know, fine — I think a lot of us should know better and should do better in a lot of ways. But I can’t think of a group more vulnerable than teenage girls to the kinds of things that Joe and his company had built.

I think there are still a lot of people — and I know there will be a lot of people — who watch this documentary and will listen to clips of young women and older teenagers as they perform on a “Girls Gone Wild” tape and not believe them and think that this is the regret of hindsight. So I know that if people feel like that now, they absolutely felt like that 20 years ago.

So I am perpetually depressed by how little progress we make on that. But the big lesson that I take from it is there will always be someone to tell me that whatever happened to me is my fault. I can find that person easily anywhere. I don’t look for them, but I am aware of that. I wish it was different. I wish, in a lot of ways, that you could watch this documentary and feel fully like, wow, things are so different.

There’s a lot that is different. I don’t think a company like Girls Gone Wild could exist now — certainly, I don’t think people would be as interested in it. What it offers is paltry compared to what you can get on the internet. But the temperament of that company, the tone that made it exist, is still very present, and I still feel aware of that, and I still feel aware of the weight of doubt that is cast on women and girls who talk about what happened to them.

Yeah. I kept hoping for some kind of schadenfreude …

I know. It’s just not coming.

Were you aware before your reporting — because I wasn’t — of GGW persuading young women to have sex while their cameras rolled? I knew Girls Gone Wild from the MTV era, but I had no idea that there was porn happening in the back of a bus.

I had never watched a tape until I started reporting on this. I had seen some of the ads, but not that often, because I was growing up in Canada. So when I started doing interviews for the story, I was asking a lot of people who used to work at the company, or cameramen, “Is it just women flashing, or is there a performance — like a porn performance — element to it?” And they all said, “No, it’s just girls flashing. Sometimes they’re with another girl; maybe they kiss, but that’s it.” And then once I got my hands on some of these tapes and watched it, and watched the whole thing, I realized the last act in all of them is pornography. It is a scene. It’s between two women, always.

But the people who worked there, overwhelmingly — and some of them still believe this — did not consider it pornography, because it was two girls. Like, “That’s not sex, because it’s two girls. It’s just two girls kissing. What’s the big deal?” That’s how they talked about it — and still, in some cases, talk about it. So there is this idea that it’s not a potent act, it’s not a scary act, it’s not an illegal act, and it’s not something that could possibly violate your boundaries, because it’s you and another girl, or it’s you and your friends. Like, sometimes it’s a girl you knew — ideally. So how could that be abusive? How could that be violating? That was the way everyone’s looking at it. And I promise you, you will find people today who still view that as not really porn.

You mentioned subjugation. Can you contrast for me what is currently happening in the political climate — that women’s power over their bodies is being taken away — while the whole argument of Girls Gone Wild and Joe Francis is that women do have power over their sexuality and their bodies?

I would venture a guess that the argument that this is something that is empowering came up later and was not a key tenet of the company as it was being launched. I don’t buy that. I think Joe was sitting in a conference room somewhere, trying to pitch this idea, and he said the greatest part is that it’s giving women what they’ve always wanted, which is control over their bodies.

I think there were a lot of bad actors who worked at Girls Gone Wild, who wanted to separate women from their agency, and they are happy to present it as empowering or as a gift and a treat, in the same way that there are people now in our political ecosystem who are also determined to separate women from their agency and their bodies and their power over their bodies and want to frame it as “this is what we’re doing to protect women and children.” It’s not protection, and it’s also not what I asked for. And then conversely, Girls Gone Wild is not agency, and it’s not what I asked for. But you know, I generally do not take my cues from men on what they consider empowering for me and my body, and I similarly do not take cues from men about what they consider protective or just for me or my body.

It was interesting that one of the women who was interviewed a lot in the documentary was working with the “scenes,” and she doesn’t seem to have changed her opinion much.

No, she hasn’t. I do think that there are a lot of people who worked there and worked with Joe who maybe can’t fully assess their involvement in this because it would be painful in the same way that I think there’s a lot of people who will watch this and be unwilling to rethink their involvement in the witnessing of these images, the purchasing of images like this and videos like this, because it forces us to rethink our relationship with female bodies and with sex and the commodification of both and who owns it.

And I don’t think people want to think about that too hard. It’s kind of related to when you really like a celebrity and you find out that he like, hit his wife, and people don’t really want to do that. They don’t want to think about that too hard, because then you’re like, “I gotta think about this shit every time I go to the movies.”

Like, yeah, fair enough. I don’t want to think about the politics of sex and patriarchy and agency every time I’m trying to jerk off — like, I don’t want to either. But unfortunately, sometimes we have to. And here we are. In the same way, I don’t want to go on a date with a man and have to think about like, “Boy, I wonder how he feels about abortion.” I would just like to be able to get one and not have to think about what he thinks about it. That would be great. But I don’t live there. You don’t either.

Why is Girls Gone Wild — separate from Joe Francis, if you can separate him — a cultural force that is worth reexamining?

I think it’s hard to really separate Joe from the company. I really do think he was the company in so many ways. And I think that was by design. But I think part of why Girls Gone Wild took hold the way that it did is because it kind of promised to men and to boys that every single girl you met, every single human woman you met, had the potential to do this. There’s a scene in “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” where they’re talking about why it’s important to find good girls that are going bad. It’s important to see the process.

You don’t just want a girl who’s like, fun and slutty and taking her top off — you want a girl who’s like, good and sweet who gets coaxed into it. Coaxing is part of it — that she could get coaxed into it is part of it. And so I think it took such a hold because it offered boys and men this ultimate fantasy: every girl you know is a slut waiting to be unleashed. And not just that, but she wants it. She wants to do it. She’s into it. She’s excited. And like, yeah, maybe she’s a little drunk — but the ads never showed like, “No,” or “I don’t want to,” but it did show, like, light trepidation. When you watch the tapes, there’s a lot more “No.”

But that’s part of it, that you can always turn a no — you can always get her to change her mind. You can always get her to see why she should do this. There’s always a way for you to get laid. Like, of course, that’s going to take hold. And it’s nothing but really beautiful coeds. You know, sweet girls who are, again, like the most ultimate — and most boring — male fantasy. Like, “Ooh, a virgin, just for me.” Of course, it took hold.

What do you think is next for Joe Francis?

I don’t know what’s going to happen to him. I don’t think it will be jail. I don’t know what it will be. I think he is one of the toughest — he’s a tough person to predict in a lot of ways, and I am not arrogant enough to act as if I know what will happen to someone so unpredictable.

I could not have predicted that I was going to go to Mexico to talk to him and that I would have to tell him that it is actually very possible to rape your wife. Like that was not on my bingo board, in any way. I did not think we would have to have that conversation. And then when I told him that you could, in fact, do it, I didn’t think his response would be, “Oh, you can? OK.”

Because again, in his version of his life, he’s never done that. Despite not knowing the definition of it, he’s never done it. So it doesn’t matter to him. He’s kind of laissez-faire.

Generally speaking. I think if he feels like he’s winning in a conversation, he’s very friendly. I’ll say that about Joe Francis. If he feels like you guys are on the same page, he’s the nicest guy in the world. He’s very charismatic.

I get it. I get why when he was 30, women were like, “Sure, I’ll do whatever you say, Joe.” I totally understand it. There’s no mystery in my mind why girls and women responded to him like that, and, you know, responded to the company like that, and responded to the camera guys like that. He is tall and handsome and rich and like, veiny and has white teeth and lots of hair. Like, he’s cute. Makes sense. And he’s charming, right? He can talk your ear off. And like, you know, it’s 2003 and you’re 18, and this guy shows up, and he’s got a wad of hundreds. He’s driving a silver Ferrari around. You’re from a small town, and he comes up to you, and he’s like, “You’re so pretty.” My God. Like, this is pre-social media boom. Like, obviously the internet very much existed, but now every teenage girl has an inbox full of random guys being like, “You’re so pretty.” But back then, you kind of needed an in-person interaction to tell you that, and there is something transactional about that.

To a lot of men, to someone like Joe, there is something transactional there. And he made the transaction.

“Girls Gone Wild: The Untold Story” premieres on Dec. 3 on Peacock.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Need help? Visit RAINN’s National Sexual Assault Online Hotline or the National Sexual Violence Resource Center’s website.