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Yesterday, Girls Gone Wild mogul and dildo-adjacent kidnap victim Joe Francis pleaded guilty to not keeping adequate documentation of the ages, identities, and dangerously low Self Esteem Index scores of the improvisational performers in his popular line of instructional drunken-titty-flash videos, agreeing to pay the equivalent of his yearly private-jet fuel expenditure in fines. While Francis' guilty plea will not carry any jail time, the Spring Break documentarian, perhaps still skittish after years of being repeatedly sodomized by the media, got a little scare from the judge. Reports the LAT:

The 33-year-old Francis spent about 30 minutes in the downtown Los Angeles courtroom. He stood before U.S. District Judge Margaret M. Morrow with his hands tucked in his pockets, shifting from foot to foot, responding briskly to the judge's questions.

But when Morrow asked Francis if he understood that, given the felonies he was admitting to, he could be sentenced to as many as 10 years in prison, he seemed surprised. "Um, I don't understand that," he said. His lawyer, Aaron S. Dyer, stepped forward, explaining to him that it was not the sentence he would be receiving because of the agreement, but the maximum sentence allowed for the felonies. Under the agreement he will serve no jail time. [...]

Dyer said that the underage girls who had appeared in the videos, which feature young women exposing their breasts and engaging in other sexual activities, had lied about their age to the company. "No 17-year-old will ever be allowed to lie to Mantra films to appear on camera again," he said.

Francis, standing beside him, wearing a dark pinstripe suit and a pink tie, said he was happy to put the incident behind him. "It's all over and no one went to jail," he said with a smile.

Yesterday's plea deal will usher in a new era of diligence in Francis' empire, with each video now containing a segment depicting every prospective candidate undergoing a lengthy age verification process, with only those presenting a valid birth certificate or passport moving on to the stage of the production where they're allowed to move on to either the mammary-baring or consensual-devirginization stage of the production.