The Madness of Joe Francis: "I thought we were all just having fun. I was wrong." (50 page)

The jury had sent a message with one finding in their verdict. They found that Joe Francis had “engaged in extreme and outrageous conduct or behavior that goes beyond all possible bounds of decency and is regarded as shocking, atrocious and utterly intolerable in a civilized community when Defendant Francis or anyone acting on his behalf (including independent contractors) filmed or produced or sold images of 13-year-old Plaintiff J or 15-year-old Plaintiff S or 16-year-old Plaintiff V or 17-year-old Plaintiff B flashing their breasts and/or Plaintiff B engaged in sexually explicit conduct and/or when Defendant Francis coerced 16-year-old Plaintiff V to masturbate him.”

They also found that Francis or someone working on his behalf, took a motion picture of Plaintiff B while she was a minor engaged in sexual conduct.

But Francis didn’t coerce her into prostitution and Francis did not act with intent to cause emotional distress or with reckless disregard of the high probability of causing emotional distress.

Count after count, zero damages.

Then came the big one, punitive damages. Rachel Seaton-Virga was nervous.

“Do you find that the evidence supports an award of punitive damages in favor of the Plaintiffs?”

“No.”

Holy shit
.

Clean sweep.

She didn’t want to think that they’d won, but there it was. They’d won. Seaton-Virga barely heard Smoak dismissing the jury, with his thanks, and sending them home. She stood as they were leaving and looked each juror in the face, nearly bowing under the gratitude she felt.

She shook hands with Larry Selander and Rachael Pontikes, who looked sucker punched.

Then she called Joe.

Someone in his corporation released a statement later that morning.

“After eight days in trial, four of which Girls Gone Wild founder Joe Francis spent defending himself as his own attorney, a federal jury in a Panama City, Florida courtroom of eight women returned a verdict – and Joe Francis won!

“Francis won the federal case against him, while the four plaintiffs – who sought to cripple the GGW Empire to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars – got nothing.

“Francis proclaimed, ‘I am relieved that I have finally been vindicated from these slanderous, disgusting, and now proven false allegations in a federal court by a jury of eight respectful, conservative women.’

“The odds were definitely stacked against Francis, fighting for justice in the Panama City courthouse where he was previously jailed by the same judge for eleven and a half months, because he refused to settle a civil lawsuit brought against him.

“My legal team did an outstanding job and Girls Gone Wild will continue to take strident measures to avoid facing these false allegations ever again,” said Francis. “On behalf of myself and my corporations I would like to thank the jurors and the people of Panama City for their continued support.”

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Chapter 59

“Serving justice”

T
he jurors first discovered the contempt of court order against Joe Francis when they began their deliberation and found the order in the file.

Before that, they had no idea why Francis was no longer in the courtroom.

Juror 6 found the order as she was leafing through a box.

“Ladies, that’s why he isn’t with us any longer,” she announced to the rest of the panel.

Fairly quickly in the process they began to ask themselves some of the same questions that Rachel Seaton-Virga had posed: Who was Aero Falcon. So they decided they would ask the judge.

When Smoak called them in to court he could only tell them that Aero Falcon was a named corporate defendant in the case.

“We weren’t given a straight answer on it, by no means. It was almost like, ‘We’re not gonna tell you.’ All that did was make me mad. I asked a question, now answer the question. That’s all you gotta do.”

It was obvious that when they began deliberating the case they were split 6-2 or 5-3, with the majority in favor of finding that Girls Gone Wild had not damaged the girls. But two, definitely, were of the opposite opinion.

So what Juror 6 decided to do was start from the beginning of the verdict form, go through it count by count and decide which ones they could all agree on. When they reached one that they disagreed over, they would set it aside and come back to it.

The first thing they all agreed on was the issue of a minimum award for damages if they found Francis or his companies had intentionally inflicted emotional damage.

Everyone thought it was appropriate that Francis pay something.

“But we don’t believe we should be told a minimum amount he should have to pay,” Juror 6 said. “I said, ‘I don’t have a problem with a dollar, but a dollar meant $50,000.’”

She took a calculator out of her purse and put it on the table. She figured up $50,000 times the four defendants who would each have to pay – Mantra Films, MRA Holdings, Aero Falcon and Joe Francis – which meant that each plaintiff would receive $200,000.

“Everybody was not okay with the $50,000, times the four, times the four. So when we got through the first page it was like, it was 5-3, with 5 for zero and no and three for yes, but they didn’t want to give them any dollars.”

That led them to the question of punitive damages and who would get that money. Most of them felt strongly that they would like to punish, but they resisted the idea of rewarding the girls.

They would have been willing to find against Girls Gone Wild for some damages, but only if they could designate the money to counseling. “But when it was told to us that that we couldn’t tell them how they were gonna be able to spend their money, it all changed and it changed for everyone, all eight of us,” Juror 6 said.

That issue came up four hours into the 12-hour deliberation. The next eight hours were spent crafting the appropriate verdict. That required negotiation.

“When we went through it initially it was basically 5-3. There was one or two questions that all eight of us … there was one person that stood alone, that was a holdout. The school teacher, on every one of them she was a yes.”

The school teacher was even willing to give the girls money, if it meant punishing GGW. But even she balked at the $50,000 minimum.

The $17 million that Selander had suggested never even crossed their minds.

The question that took the longest to resolve was on the second page, about intentional infliction of emotional distress, and it nearly caused a mistrial.

“There were people who did not want to vote yes,” she said. “He didn’t cause the emotional distress. It got down to, it was 6-2. Besides the school teacher, there was the other one, the young black girl, Juror 1. It was Juror 1 and Juror 5, and Juror 5 said, ‘It sounds like to me that it’s a hung jury.’ I said, ‘No, it’s not a hung jury.’”

That discussion happened around 10 p.m. and almost immediately after that, they were allowed to step out of the jury room and take a break.

The discussion continued outside.

“I said, ‘We’re not gonna have a hung jury,’” Juror 6 said.

She had an ally on the panel, Juror 3, a woman from Wassau, who agreed with her, “No, we’re not going that way. They’re not gonna get another chance.”

They returned to the room, and that’s when the negotiations really began. Juror 6 described it this way:

“It must have been about 12 o’clock, Wassau was telling the school teacher, ‘I’m not buying it. I’m not buying it. You tell me how he can do that to them? You’ve seen everything.’

“The school teacher was very emotional, ‘I just cannot let him off. I cannot let him off.’ It’s a debate back and forth and back and forth and, at this time, I just backed out of the conversation. I sat there and I listened to it. I was sitting at the end of the table, the school teacher was sitting here (to her right). The Wassau woman was sitting here (to her left). I looked at her and I said, ‘OK, let me ask you this school teacher: if I agree with you on ‘yes’ will you go for zero dollars?’

“And she looked at me and my Wassau friend said, ‘I’m not buying that. And I said, ‘OK, let me ask you this: do you not feel that you could vote for a ‘yes’ but not give them any money? Do you not think that that doesn’t send a message?’ At this point in time it was 6-2, six no and two yes, and everybody said, ‘I’ll go with what you go with, foreperson.’”

“I put it out there. And I looked at the school teacher and said, ‘Can you go for that?’ And she said, ‘Yes, I can.’ I said, ‘I’m not going for 50 ($50,000) it will have to be zero.’ And she said, ‘I can go for that.’ And I looked at Wassau and I said, ‘Can you not go for that?’ And she said, ‘I’ll do that.’ I said, ‘That’s better than a hung jury and doing this again with taxpayers’ dollars.’”

After the verdict was read, the jurors returned to the jury room to collect their things. There was very little conversation, the women were all drained by twelve hours of debate and the intensely emotional reading of the verdict.

Into this hush walked Judge Smoak with his usual quiet and purposeful walk which carried him unobtrusively through the doorway. He stopped and looked around as all eight sets of eyes settled on him.

“I appreciate your deliberation,” he told the women, moving his eyes to the faces around the room. I believe you did a very good job and you have restored my faith in the judicial system.”

Juror 6 recalled that moment as a justification of all her hard work, all her frustration. Smoak thanked them and left the room as quietly and purposefully as he had entered.

Juror 6 walked out behind him and felt for the first time in a week that she was breathing easily.

“I felt like I served justice,” she said later. “I believe the judge believed we served justice.”

Later that morning, Rachel awoke to a horrible noise and the blurry sight of someone standing by her bed. She didn’t remember going to bed or even sleeping.

“Court! Got to get to court!” she jerked upright.

“You don’t have court today,” the figure by the bed said.

“What is that noise?” she groaned, focusing her vision on the person standing bedside.

“It’s your alarm,” Angela said. “I don’t know how to shut it off.”

“My what?”

“Your alarm,” as in the house alarm that Angela set off, and couldn’t disarm, when she used her key to open the front door.

Rachel rolled off the bed, padded across the floor, looked at the keypad and tried to bring her thoughts on line. Finally, she got the code and the shriek silenced abruptly.

“You didn’t answer your door.”

“What time is it?”

After 7. Angela was dropping off Vivi, who had spent the night with her.

“Oh, there’s Vivi,” Rachel said, still not clearing the sleep from her mind. But she was thrilled to see her daughter.

She felt like she was hungover, pounding headache and the real threat that she’d vomit. It took hours, as she worked her way into the morning, for her to shake off the physical effects of exhaustion. It would take days for her to fully recover.

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Chapter 60

The end of the beginning

O
n May 9, 2011, Rachael Pontikes filed a motion asking Judge Smoak to grant the plaintiffs a new trial.

“The judgment entered in favor of Francis is fatally flawed, requiring a new trial. Many factors made it impossible for this jury to render a reasoned verdict: Francis’s disruptive behavior; the de facto admission of unauthenticated medical records; and a closing geared to stigmatize these plaintiffs.”

Pontikes said Seaton-Virga essentially characterized the plaintiffs as sluts, “a category of persons so fundamentally damaged that they could not be damaged further.

“This made it impossible for the jury to ignore the issue of consent as this court directed the jury to do and as the law requires.”

She said stereotyping the girls as sluts implied that they could do nothing else but consent to the sexual performances “and a pornographer simply reveals her true nature no matter how young she is.”

Pontikes cited three lines from Seaton-Virga’s closing to illustrate this point: When she told the jurors that “these aren’t innocent girls who aren’t somewhat familiar with what goes on on Spring Break,” and then said the Spring Break atmosphere was “a moral cesspool” and “these girls knew exactly what went on at Spring Break.”