The early 2000s had been a mad time for self-crowned “party girl” Jannel.
With a badass beneath-lip piercing, rock star-reminiscent locks and a petite frame, the vivacious 18-year-old was a normal on the Chicago nightlife scene.
But the thumping club anthems hit a shrieking record scratch at all-around 2:30 a.m. on Aug. 25, 2006.
That’s when Jannel statements that “Girls Absent Wild” creator Joe Francis brutally raped her in the back again of his emblem-wrapped tour bus, which was parked close to Chicago’s Club Envy, wherever they’d partied previously in the evening.
She statements that Francis cherrypicked her from the crowded dance floor, fed her alcohol “like it was h2o,” incessantly complimented her appears to be like and then invited her onto the bus — where by she assumed the worst she’d be requested to do was flash her breasts at a “Girls Long gone Wild” digicam.
Rather, she stated, she was forced to “touch” herself with objects that he’d saved on the sleeper bus in a bedside dresser drawer. Then, Francis allegedly pounced on her.
“He kept striving to kiss me and saying, ‘It’s going to be Ok, it is going to be Okay.’ And I was like, ‘Get off of me, get off of me,’ ” Jannel claims in “Girls Long gone Wild Exposed,” the initially episode of TNT’s new legitimate-crime anthology series “Rich & Shameless,” airing Saturday. “He mainly pressured himself on me, and it damage for the reason that I was not ‘turned on,’ so it definitely damage . . . He took maintain of me. I was this 100-pound minimal lady. I didn’t give my consent that evening, and he totally raped me. And then he received off of me like I was rubbish.”
Directed by Katinka Blackford Newman, known for blowing the whistle on big pharma with the nonfiction guide “The Tablet That Steals Lives,” the TNT demonstrate attracts back again the curtain on the “Girls Absent Wild” equipment. What was marketed as alluring, sunny Y2K-era spring crack hedonism — and even intercourse-good woman empowerment — was truly, according to Blackford Newman, darkly exploitative and sinister. And irrespective of substantial-profile lovers and buddies, Francis was a cruel, abusive ringmaster.
“Behind the enjoyment, the wet T-shirt competitions and the faux-feministic liberation centered about flashing your breasts in front of a camera, lives were being staying ruined,” Blackford Newman told The Submit.
“Young ladies like Jannel considered Joe Francis was Okay since he hung out with stars,” the Emmy-nominated filmmaker continued. “Nobody could feel that someone who rubs shoulders with the Kardashians, Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston could be a violent abuser and a legal.”
(Joe Francis did not immediately reply to The Post’s ask for for a remark.)
Introduced in 1997, “Girls Absent Wild” raked in $20 million in its 1st two a long time of procedure. By 2004, the in no way-ending, boob-centric occasion was amassing a neat $100 million each year, and quite a few celebs have been component of the occasion.
The documentary capabilities footage of Pitt chatting about currently being a enthusiast of the films and noting that Aniston gave him some as a gift.
But the wild superior moments the “GGW” videos portrayed were being in fact terrible for a lot of of the women of all ages on the other side of the digital camera.
Blackford Newman recounted footage from the documentary in which a Francis personnel tips hardly authorized, inebriated females into capturing exact-intercourse pornography. An off-digicam person can be read coaching a few woman to accomplish oral intercourse on one an additional and make captivating appears even though he films.
1 of the girls confusedly asks, “My moms and dads are not heading to see this, are they?”
“It basically turns my abdomen,” Blackford Newman, a 50-anything mom of teenagers, reported of this kind of footage. “That could have conveniently been my young children. Some popular fellas who’s close friends with the Kardashians arrives alongside with a camera, asks them to indication a thing, they’re drunk and do not know what they’re undertaking, and bam [their sex tape] is out there for the following 20 several years.”
Significantly of the 90-minute documentary is devoted to Francis’ sordid story and his twisted journey from troubled adolescent to smut-peddling superstar to accused child pornographer, sexual assault abuser and domestic violence offender.
A social outcast who experienced to be transported off to boarding faculty for undesirable actions in the late 1980s, he was heralded as the Hugh Hefner of the new millennium at the height of “Girls Absent Wild.” Then, in 2003, he was arrested on baby pornography rates for allegedly filming two underaged women obtaining intercourse in a shower. He was also accused of forcing a pair of 17-year-olds to massage his penis. That similar yr, a female named Michelle Padilla submitted a federal lawsuit in opposition to Francis for nonconsensually plastering her topless photograph on “Girls Absent Wild” DVD addresses and paraphernalia.
In 2007, he was arrested on contempt of court docket costs for telling the opposing counsel in his boy or girl porn scenario to “suck my d – – k.” That similar yr, he reportedly suggested excellent pal Kim Kardashian on how to make the most of her leaked sex tape.
Francis served 11 months in a Reno, Nevada, jail for $20 million tax evasion in 2009, even though celeb fans like Kardashian stood by him, sporting a “Free Joe” T-shirt in community. While in jail in Reno, Francis also concurrently served his 339-day sentence in the baby porn circumstance.
In the many years that followed, he avoided legal outcomes above a slew of alleged assaults on ladies, and a Thanksgiving Day attack on his aged mom and dad, Raymond and Maria — who finally secured a five-12 months restraining get towards him in September 2011.
Then in August 2020, Francis invested 73 days in a Mexican jail for allegedly brutalizing his estranged girlfriend and the mother of his now 7-year-old twin daughters, Abbey Wilson, whom he experienced to start with fulfilled when she received his “Girls Absent Wild: Most popular Lady in America” competitors in 2012.
Blackford Newman reported the audio from his alleged attack on Wilson at his Casa Aramara resort in Punta Mita, Mexico in 2020 was “the most unbelievably chilling” footage she uncovered for the duration of her research.
“When you hear a story about abuse, that’s a single point,” said Blackford Newman. “But when you really listen to any person becoming overwhelmed up … it is certainly chilling.”
In a recorded call to vacation resort stability, which is showcased in the documentary, Wilson is read screaming, “You’re scaring me. Joe, halt. Stop it. You are hurting me, you are killing me.” To which Francis — who, at the time, experienced examined positive for COVID-19 — responds, yelling, “Good. I hope you f – – king die. You f – – king bitch,” right before spitting in her facial area.
Wilson is now claimed to be raising their daughters “in hiding,” out of reach from Francis and without his monetary help. Francis, now 49, is residing as a fugitive in Mexico to escape battery and fake imprisonment costs.
Blackford Newman told The Post that she arrived at out to much more than 100 of Francis’ A-lister pals, which includes burgeoning social activist Kardashian, for a comment on his alleged reign of terror, but no 1 responded. (Reps for Brad Pitt, Kim Kardashian and the Kardashian family members did not promptly respond to The Post’s requests for comment.)
The documentarian hopes that her exposé serves as a wake-up phone to the Kardashians and other major pictures to be more mindful of the corporation they keep.
“Younger, impressionable women, like Jannel . . . dependable Joe Francis mainly because of his celeb [affiliation],” she reported. “[These celebrities] require to fully grasp that they have a accountability that if they befriend abusive boy or girl pornographers like Joe Francis, they are giving them trustworthiness.”
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