Read The Madness of Joe Francis: "I thought we were all just having fun. I was wrong." Online
Authors: David Angier
The Madness of Joe Francis: "I thought we were all just having fun. I was wrong." (49 page)
“The victims suffered diminished lives while Francis became enormously wealthy. Only you can right that wrong. Only you can change that result.”
.
I
t took Judge Smoak almost an hour to read to the jurors all the legal instructions and the verdict form they would have to use to come to a decision.
When he finished it was about 11 a.m. He was ready to send them into the jury room to begin deliberating, but one woman asked if they could be excused to go to lunch.
They’d bonded, she said, and their lunches were something they all looked forward to.
Smoak smiled and agreed.
They returned together at 12:30, trailing behind Dobos as he led them across the parking lot, into the courthouse and took the first group up the elevator. When the elevator reached the second floor, Dobos motioned for the women to wait. He’d done this every time he’d brought the jurors up the elevator throughout the trial. He had them wait, then he put one foot into the hallway, keeping the other inside the elevator, and looked both ways to see who was there, who he might have to clear out before he could let the jurors out. He then led them to a small room where they would spend most of their time deliberating.
Smoak set about trying to clean up some matters on his criminal docket that had been shifted around by the trial. Criminal defendants talked in the hallway while reporters stared out the window or read.
The country voice of a man who was preparing to go before the judge broke my reverie as I stared out at the bay.
“Did you know,” he said slowly, with a rolling Southern drawl, to three people who looked like relatives, “that if you kill someone the most you can get in the federal system is 40 years? Then when you have a person who is in possession of a firearm, who’d been convicted 25 years ago, they want to put you away for three and a half years. It just don’t make no sense.”
I glanced up in time to see his gap-tooth smile. He was tall, with a prominent beer gut and raggedly cropped hair.
“I never left my house with my guns. I hunted on my own prop-tee. I had a gov’ment-issued huntin’ license. Now, if they didn’t want me ownin’ no guns, why did the gov’ment issue me this permit?”
He shook his head.
“Well, you live and you learn.”
“And then you die and forget it all,” an older woman standing next to him said, too softy for him to hear.
“Huh?”
“And then you die and forget it all,” she spoke up.
“Tha’s right. Tha’s right, you die and forget it all.”
“Just read your Bible.”
“Tha’s right,” the big guy said, nodding dramatically. “We in the beginnin’ of the end of days and there’re people out there who are too stupid to know it. We in the bee-GIN-in’ of the end of days. Jus look at wha’s goin on in the world today. All that nook-ler stuff going on in J’pan and blowin’ over to Cal’forna.”
“The Iranians killing all the Jews,” an older man spoke up.
“I say kill em all,” big guy said, leaning back and drawing out the last two words. “Kill em allll.”
“The Jews and the Christians.”
“They can kill em all, let God sorts em out. It doesn’t bother me one bit.”
“It does me, I’m gonna be one of em they’s try to kill. Their God can’t come back till they kill all the Christians and Jews.”
Big gut turned to a younger woman who hadn’t participated in the conversation and started instructing her on how to get along during his absence. He recommended that she file a claim against BP for damages suffered as a result of the oil spill a year before.
“A claim? For what?”
“I got a boat. Just push it into the water and file a claim.”
“That oil ain’t gone,” older guy said pensively, “it’s sittin’ there on the bottom killin’ all the fish.”
“Kill em alllllll,” big gut said, apparently lumping fish in with Jews and Christians. “Let it kill all the fishes.”
Just then a bailiff came out and said the judge was ready to see them, bringing the conversation to an abrupt conclusion.
A television reporter had been trying to read a book but had long since put it down and been eavesdropping on the conversation as well. As the four went into the courtroom, he rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands.
“You should’ve heard the conversation they had earlier,” he said, slowly shaking his head from side to side as he tried to rub the exhaustion out of his eyes.
I had relocated to my truck by mid-afternoon and was typing on my computer when I saw four cars lurch into the parking lot and expel the lawyers in the civil case. They mingled together and filed up the ramp into the front door.
Do they have a verdict? I asked when I caught up to them at the metal detector.
Not a verdict, a question.
Three questions, actually: What is Aero Falcon? Where did the 2006 $2.1 million fine go? Who would get the money if we awarded punitive damages?
Smoak brought the jurors in and told them that Aero Falcon was a named defendant that had been defaulted against.
The fine went to the U.S. government.
And, the plaintiffs would get the money in a punitive damage judgment.
The women of the jury listened closely then filed out to resume their deliberation, leaving behind a rippling wake of speculation and discussion as to what those questions might mean.
“It looks like they’re at least at the end,” Seaton-Virga said to the other lawyers. “The punitive damage question doesn’t come up till the end.”
Actually, there were two places where punitive damages had to be resolved: halfway through and at the end. The juror’s question could not be interpreted to mean that this would all be over soon.
Just the opposite. At 4:45, the jurors sent a note out to the bailiffs that said, “Call our husbands. We don’t know how long we’re going to be.”
Smoak came out of his office and brought the note into court for the attorneys. He bypassed his seat on the bench and leaned against the podium.
“There’s nothing we can do,” he said, then grinned. “This is when you begin to subtly withdraw the comforts. Just wait till the air conditioning suddenly fails.”
The light drained out of the evening sky in a glow of orange that deepened and enriched the blue of the bay. The moon was a sickle pointed toward the horizon, and as the evening turned into night, the sickle sank like the blade of guillotine.
It turned blood red as it severed the horizon.
The courthouse was lit from the inside by office lights that were rarely on this late, and on the outside by the glaring television lights from Channel 13’s live truck.
Rachel Seaton-Virga was on the first floor, in a bailiff’s chair by the metal detector, staring out the floor-to-ceiling picture window. Her movements showed the conflicting forces that were in control of her body: exhaustion and adrenaline.
“What do you think?” she asked without looking at me. She kept her chin in her hand and her gaze out the window. It was the same question she’d asked me a dozen times already since the jury had gone out, and had asked just as many times to anyone else she ran into.
“For what it’s worth,” I began. Speculating on jury deliberations, while the single most common activity for lawyers and reporters at this stage of a trial, is essentially pointless.
“For what’s it’s worth,” she agreed, waving away any thought that she’d hold my speculation against me at a later date.
“When I first heard the punitive damage question I thought what they’d done was quickly go through and zero-out all the compensatory damage claims. Then they started thinking about punishing the company, but when they found out that the money would go to the girls, they went back to square-one.
“I think they’ve been back there the whole time trying to figure out a way to punish Joe Francis while not enriching the girls.”
She nodded her head. She’d been thinking the same thing. It wasn’t a far-fetched speculation considering how the jurors had reacted to both Francis and the girls. They didn’t appear to like either.
So how do you impose punitive damages on the bad pornographer while not making millionaires of the bad girls?
“Joe’s freaking out. He’s calling me every five minutes.”
“He’s thinks it’s bad. Hell, you think it’s bad so why wouldn’t he?”
She’d joked earlier that the jurors were probably trying to decide between the $100 million and $17 million judgments that Selander had suggested.
I thought that it was unlikely, even unfathomable, that the jury would not award a monetary judgment. Not after this amount of time.
The question remained: How much money would be considered a win by either side?
Seaton-Virga thought the judgment would be in the $5 million range. I thought they were spending their time crafting a judgment specific to each girl and what they thought would be beneficial.
“I think they’ll come back with something that says, plaintiff whatever should get $250,000, something that can be used for counseling, and plaintiff whatever should get $150,000. But I think the total will come to less than a million.”
The speculation continued as Wednesday night became Thursday morning.
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R
ight about 1 a.m., the jury announced it had reached a verdict after 12 hours of deliberation.
Seaton-Virga had gone to pick up her son, Tre from Angela’s house. Tre was sleeping in his car seat, so Seaton-Virga decided to drive to the courthouse and wait outside with Gerard as long as she could.
She’d been there just a minute when the bailiffs came out and called the lawyers into the courtroom. Seaton-Virga left Tre with Jim Batton and got into the courtroom as quickly as she could. She was no longer exhausted, the adrenaline was in charge.
She stood by her chair and watched the door that the jurors would walk through. It opened and bailiff Dick Hughes announced, as he always did, “Please rise for the jury.”
Normally startling, his announcement was particularly jarring in the still courtroom. Seaton-Virga watched as the first two women came into the room and looked at her. She felt a small jolt. Jurors in criminal cases don’t look at the defendants when they have decided to convict.
This could be a good sign.
The clerk took the verdict form and began to read:
“What is the amount of damage, including physical injury, pain and suffering, mental anguish, shock and discomfort or any invasion of a personal right that Plaintiff B suffered as a result of Defendants’ sexually exploiting Plaintiff B as a minor by featuring her in the Girls Gone Wild video series?
“Amount, zero.”
Holy shit
. It wasn’t the most sophisticated thought to cross Rachel’s mind, but it was the most succinct.
Zero
!
It was just the first question and Rachel couldn’t immediately surrender to the excitement that was rising in her chest.
A few of the women on the jury began to sniffle into their tissues and dab their eyes. They didn’t believe the girls deserved a reward, but they wanted desperately to punish Girls Gone Wild.
The rest of the questions went along the same path: zero damages.
