Joe Francis' Lawyer: My Client Is A Well-Hung, Consensual Devirginizer
On late Friday afternoon, we urged you to check out Claire Hoffman's piece in the LAT on America's most successful purveyor of drunkenly flashed jailbait mammaries, Joe Francis of Girls Gone Wild, because between Francis' reported roughing up of Hoffman and her retaliatory cold-cocking of the handsy titty-mogul, his insistence that he's "been anally raped over and over by the media" that brings back memories of his infamous, non-penetrative dildo-menacing by a kidnapper, and about twenty other anecdotes that suggest Francis might have the makeup to one day run his own wildly successful Central American dictatorship, there is far too much to cover in a single blog post. Still, we find ourselves coming back to the story of the 18-year-old virgin who surrendered her maidenhead to Francis and was rewarded with three pairs of coveted Girls Gone Wild booty shorts and lingering doubts about how consensual the experience had been. An excerpt follows:
When I talk to Szyszka seven days later, she says she "didn't quite realize" she was being filmed. "But I didn't care because I was drunk and who cares?" Then she adds: "It didn't feel good to me at all, but I was totally faking it because I was on 'Girls Gone Wild.'"
Eventually, Szyszka says, Francis told the cameraman to leave and pushed her back on the bed, undid his jeans and climbed on top of her. "I told him it hurt, and he kept doing it. And I keep telling him it hurts. I said, 'No' twice in the beginning, and during I started saying, 'Oh, my god, it hurts.' I kept telling him it hurt, but he kept going, and he said he was sorry but kissed me so I wouldn't keep talking."
Afterward, she says, Francis cleaned them both off with a paper towel and told her to get dressed. Then, she says, he opened the door and told the cameraman to come back, saying, "She's not a virgin anymore." [...]
She's confused, she admits, about what happened. She feels guilty, she says, for getting herself into the situation in the first place. She says she never would have undressed for the cameras if she hadn't been completely drunk. And she is adamant that she said "no" to Francis. She says she's haunted by that night.
"I feel like it was planned," she says. "Sometimes I'm driving along, and I think about it and all of a sudden feel weird."
Six weeks after that night outside Chicago, when I call Francis on his cellphone and ask him about the incident, he says he doesn't remember Szyszka and that he didn't have sex with anyone that night. He seems to lose control, repeatedly referring to me by a crude word for female genitalia. "If you print that, I will [expletive] sue the [expletive] out of you. If you print that, baby, you just put the nail in your own coffin," he tells me. "You are a [expletive expletive]. You decided to blast me . . . You are a [expletive] bitch . . . I will get my last laugh on you. I will get you." He then refers me to Burke, his lawyer.
In an e-mail, Burke says Francis and Szyszka did have sex—consensual sex—and that neither Francis nor anyone affiliated with "Girls Gone Wild" gave her any alcohol. "Neither Mr. Francis nor any of the GGW staff in or around the bus recall Ms. Szyszka making any complaint or comment about Mr. Francis. In fact, Ms. Szyszka was in good spirits after the encounter, and numerous witnesses have stated that she danced with her friends outside the bus for nearly two hours afterward," Burke writes. He adds: "Though Mr. Francis cannot speak to Ms. Szyszka's discomfort during the encounter, other news stories have commented that Mr. Francis is reputedly well-endowed."
Whenever this queasy feeling subsides, we'll probably be able to better appreciate the courage and skill it takes for a lawyer to refute an allegation of rape with a reference to his client's allegedly impressive penis size. Perhaps Francis' PR team will follow up this official statement with an announcement of a telethon to fund the legal defense of overendowed millionaire pornographers who are ruthlessly victimized by inebriated, exhibitionistic co-eds.