The Madness of Joe Francis: "I thought we were all just having fun. I was wrong." (18 page)

The press conferences were over and it was time for lunch.

Coincidentally, both Meadows and Francis picked the same restaurant – Smitty’s Barbecue. It had great chicken salad and Texas toast sandwiches and it was the place for the movers and shakers in the community.

“Can you believe that Meadows came in and had lunch in the next booth?” Francis asked a day later. “It was freakin’ hilarious.”

“Let me ask you something, do you think the judge was flirting with me?” he asked. “I’m serious. She seemed smiley and flirty and joking with me.”

“Portions of the tape that we were shown included passages in which two naked 17-year-olds were engaged in mutual masturbation,” Martin Bashir told his audience in a March 2008 broadcast.

He’d promised to put to rest the question of whether Steve Meadows had shown him child pornography at the end of the night’s show and he delivered. If Bashir had seen the girls masturbating, he’d seen everything else. That segment is at the end of the tape.

Bashir’s crew had recorded him and Meadows leaning against a desk and looking toward something off camera. In the background can be heard a shower running and some of the conversation that was going on between the girls and cameraman Mark Schmitz during the shower scene.

In his November 8 broadcast, Bashir had shown a similar scene but in his last story on the subject, he showed another part.

They’re leaning against the desk and Bashir looks embarrassed. His arms are crossed over his chest and his head is down while Meadows is watching the video closely.

“We get it,” Bashir says, pushing himself off the desk and turning toward the door.

“You haven’t seen the most offensive part,” Meadows says.

Meadows had insisted in his filing that he hadn’t shown Bashir pornography. His court filing, while it didn’t specifically address what Bashir was shown, categorically denied the allegation that he’d given Bashir a private viewing of the shower scene.

But after Bashir’s broadcast, Meadows had to admit that Bashir had seen nudity.

“He saw no sexual contact,” Meadows told reporter Ed Offley. “He did see nudity. Simple nudity is not child pornography.”

The tape, however, has only a few seconds in which the girls are nude and not pornographic and it’s well before the masturbation scene. Meadows told Offley that the reason Bashir was shown the tape at all was to disprove Francis’ claim that he wasn’t in the motel room and didn’t know about the filming.

But the only segment of the tape that shows Francis and the girls together is when they’re walking into the room. There’s nothing in the shower scene that indicates Francis was in the room or watching. He can’t be heard giving direction or making comments and is never shown.

Francis crowed over Bashir’s revelation.

“We finally caught State Attorney Steve Meadows,” he said. “He showed child pornography to Martin Bashir. That’s what ultimately led to the resolution of this case.”

Francis’ 11 months in jail were a fairly tumultuous time for Steve Meadows as well. He was preparing for his re-election campaign, and the words “prosecutorial misconduct” were a poor way to start.

On March 3, 2008, a supervisor in Meadows’ office filed a sexual harassment complaint against him with the state Commission on Human Relations. Two more complaints followed and Meadows was looking at the very real possibility that on the eve of the election the reports would become public and he would be painted as a miscreant.

The commission investigated for a year and released its report in March 2009. But reports of the investigation and interviews with people involved, had leaked well in advance and in the midst of the campaign.

Office manager Randy Berling, the man responsible for investigating sexual harassment complaints at the State Attorney’s Office, summed up Meadows’ actions in one complainant by saying, “The boy just can’t help himself.”

The state investigators found convincing evidence to support both the main claims. In their report, they said the State Attorney’s Office was divided into two “factions.” The first, all management within the office, believed that Meadows was a great guy whose only fault was he treated all his employees like family.

The other side were the secretaries, not all the secretaries, but more than a few who suffered the brunt of Meadows’ harassment who described the work atmosphere as constantly tense.

The investigators even validated one claim from a secretary who said Meadows had sex with her on his office couch that she described as “practically a rape.”

Meadows didn’t deny having sex with the woman, only declining to tell investigators where they’d had sex.

Meadows’ primary concern during this investigation, according to the report, was when it was going to be made public. The investigators noted instances when Meadows or his attorney asked to delay the report’s release until after the November 4 election.

Meadows was certain the sexual harassment claims and the investigation were part of a political plot to get him out of office that went “as far up the food chain” as the governor’s office.

I was able to do two stories based on information from those employees who had been interviewed and a Tallahassee attorney, Marie Mattox, who was preparing a lawsuit and was only waiting for the investigation to be completed. For the next six weeks after the stories broke and before the November 4 election, Meadows spent considerable time at public forums fending off questions about sexual harassment in his office. He lost the election by 10,000 votes.

On January 9, 2009, Meadows left office

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Chapter 16

Last lawsuit

I
n March 2008, not long after Francis entered his plea and was released from jail, a new lawsuit was filed in federal court in Panama City. It included the last one of the four girls who were at the Chateau Motel room on March 31, 2003.

Plaintiff V was three days from her 17th birthday when she and three friends met up with Francis and his film crew. They went to room 320 of the Chateau where two of V’s friends were filmed in the “shower scene.” Francis took V and another girl into the bedroom and tried to get them both to jerk him off.

V didn’t sign on to the first lawsuit and missed out on filing for damages three years later when she was interviewed as a victim in Mantra’s federal criminal case. Her statement was the one that Francis was forced to read out loud when Mantra was sentenced to probation in that case.

Now she and three other girls had their own lawsuit and they’d gone with the same attorneys who won the 2003 lawsuit, D. Ross McCloy, Larry Selander, Thomas Dent and Rachael Pontikes. These were the lawyers who Francis cussed during mediation in 2007, ultimately leading to his contempt of court sentence. Francis signed a settlement in that lawsuit from a jail cell.

Besides V, there were two girls, Plaintiff J, 13, and her sister, Plaintiff S, 15, who flashed their breasts for GGW cameras in March 2000. They were passengers in a car that was riding the strip during the height of Spring Break. Traffic was stop and go, mostly stop, and at one pause an independent cameraman came up to the car and asked them to flash. The footage, which was sold to GGW, ended up in two videos.

Plaintiff B was 17 when she came down from Charlotte, North Carolina, to Panama City Beach for Spring Break in 2002. At a party, a cameraman invited her and her friends up to a hotel room, where she was offered alcohol, which she claimed was spiked with drugs that “impaired her judgment and made her susceptible to coercion.” She signed a release, saying she was 18 and wrote down a fake birth date. She then went into a bedroom and had sex with a female friend, which was videotaped and included in two GGW DVDs.

A month after their initial filing, McCloy, Selander, Dent and Pontikes amended the lawsuit as a class-action suit. They claimed there were potentially hundreds of girls who had been victimized by Girls Gone Wild over the years, but the only way they’d be able to say how many there were was to search all of Mantra’s records.

The classes were all minor girls in the nation who GGW had used in its videos; Florida minor girls who were filmed flashing; and Florida minor girls who’d been filmed having some kind of sexual encounter.

Almost as soon as the lawsuit had been filed, Francis filed motions asking Federal Judge Richard Smoak to take himself off the case. Attorney Robert Barnes said Smoak was undeniably biased against Francis because of comments he’d made in Francis’ hearings. Smoak’s friendship with McCloy was also cited as a reason for Smoak to remove himself.

But Smoak insisted his rulings had been justified and his comments harmless. He said his friendship with McCloy, while going back some years, was a disappointingly distant one. He denied all three motions for recusal that Francis filed, but he also denied the motion to certify the lawsuit as class-action and motions to summarily award damages to the plaintiffs because Francis wasn’t providing discovery to the plaintiff’s lawyers.

Francis hired and fired two sets of lawyers in the first 10 months of the lawsuit. He was driving those lawyers, and attorneys in another Panama City lawsuit, to file dangerously aggressive motions accusing Smoak of bias in his case and for the most part his lawyers did what they could to argue for Smoak’s recusal without risking contempt charges themselves.

Shortly after Joe Francis signed the settlement from a jail cell in 2003, a rash of lawsuits were filed against him in federal Judge Richard Smoak’s court.

One was from two girls in Orlando who said they were plied with alcohol and filmed in a sexual situation in a GGW van, even though the cameraman assured them that the film would never be used. Those girls would eventually walk away from this lawsuit when Francis’ lawyers showed them their entire, unedited video and threatened them with a counter suit.

Another was from former cheerleader, who said she was 16 when a GGW cameraman filmed her flashing. Topless pictures of her made it to the cover of a Girls Gone Wild video.

Jean Marie Downing, a Panama City lawyer, filed a motion asking Smoak to recuse himself from the cheerleader’s case because the public might view him as having lost his impartiality when it came to Joe Francis. After all, Downing wrote, he is the judge who gave Francis the “settle or jail” ultimatum.

Smoak was not amused.

“In my more than 34-year history as a trial attorney and judge, the pending motion to disqualify is the first time that anyone represented by counsel has ever filed a motion questioning my ethics or moved to disqualify me from presiding over a case,” he wrote in his order denying Downing’s motion.

“I have never had, nor do I currently harbor, any animosity, bias or prejudice toward Joe Francis or Girls Gone Wild that would cause me to question my ability to fairly and impartially preside over this case.”

Smoak’s order was extraordinary not only in its length and detail, but in the fact that he first notes that GGW itself doesn’t question his impartiality, but only says the public might. He says there’s really no need to go any further because GGW lacks standing, that’s on Page 4 of a 49-page order.

On
Page 5
, he says the motion ignores the fact that Francis was always represented by good lawyers who didn’t object to what was going on and Smoak’s rulings have all been affirmed on appeal. That should have been all that needed to be said.

But Smoak pressed on with a history of the GGW federal case, the rationale for his actions and the inaccuracies in press reports: “The pending motion is not the first time that Girls Gone Wild and its attorneys have made charges of unethical conduct against members of the bar and sought their disqualification,” Smoak wrote, referencing the 2006 motion from Miami attorney Tom Julin asking Smoak to remove Tom Dent and Ross McCloy from representing the plaintiffs in the 2003 lawsuit.

Smoak said he exposed “the motion in Doe v. Francis for what it was – a ‘below-the-belt” cheap shot at plaintiffs and their attorneys.”

In his recusal order, he said “a reasonable person could well perceive the motion requesting my disqualification as simply an attempt by Joe Francis, Girls Gone Wild and their counsel to broaden the campaign of ethical assaults on members of the bar to now include a member of the judiciary.”