That man elevates the status of pond scum in my eyes.
He has a long history of belittling, harassing and abusing women. He just found a way to get rich doing so.
I read that he harassed a manager of a building he lived in, as well as a female reporter that was following him for a story(she details some in her story below). He also threatened her if she should dare to try to use information from a young woman that alleged he raped her in the article.
From her LA Times article:
Joe Francis, the founder of the "Girls Gone Wild" empire, is humiliating me. He has my face pressed against the hood of a car, my arms twisted hard behind my back. He's pushing himself against me, shouting: "This is what they did to me in Panama City!"
It's after 3 a.m. and we're in a parking lot on the outskirts of Chicago. Electronic music is buzzing from the nightclub across the street, mixing easily with the laughter of the guys who are watching this, this me-pinned-and-helpless thing.
Francis isn't laughing.
He has turned on me, and I don't know why. He's going on and on about Panama City Beach, the spring break spot in northern Florida where Bay County sheriff's deputies arrested him three years ago on charges of racketeering, drug trafficking and promoting the sexual performance of a child. As he yells, I wonder if this is a flashback, or if he's punishing me for being the only blond in sight who's not wearing a thong. This much is certain: He's got at least 80 pounds on me and I'm thinking he's about to break my left arm. My eyes start to stream tears.
---------snip-------------
Francis has aimed his cameras at a generation whose notions of privacy and sexuality are different from any other. Nursed on MySpace profiles and reality television, many young people today are comfortable with being perpetually photographed and having those images posted on the Internet for anyone to see. The boundaries that once contained sexuality have also fallen away.
-----------snip-----------
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
sue the out of you. If you print that, baby, you just put the nail in your own coffin," he tells me. "You are a . You decided to blast me . . . You are a bitch . . . I will get my last laugh on you. I will get you." He then refers me to Burke, his lawyer.
------------snip----------
When I start to pull police and court records, I find that I'm not the only woman who's made Francis mad.
In 2000, the property manager of his Santa Monica apartment, Stephanie Van de Motter, obtained a restraining order requiring that he stay at least 100 yards away from her. According to court documents, she said that Francis, upset about the noise garbage collectors made in the mornings, had harassed and threatened her, twice climbing up to her bedroom window and pounding violently on the glass and screaming obscenities at her whenever he saw her. He appeared in her office several times, she said, asking for her by using the crude word for female genitalia, and left messages with a co-worker: "Tell the bitch this is war." Francis' lawyer says he can't comment on the case.
In 2003, Darian Mathias-Patterson, who scouted locations and arranged for the rental of a space for a Halloween party Francis threw, filed a police report, saying he had threatened to kill her when she told him she couldn't return his $25,000 deposit because the 2,000 guests had trashed the place. He hurled profanities at her, she told police, saying, "I'm going to get you, you whore" and repeatedly used the same crude word.Two weeks later, Mathias-Patterson, who was pregnant, miscarried. She later sued Francis and his company in Los Angeles County Superior Court for emotional distress, and the case was settled for an undisclosed amount. Francis' lawyer says he can't comment on the case.
----------------snip-----------
excerpted from:
http://www.latimes.com/features/printedition/magazine/la-tm-gonewild32aug06,0,5620406.story?page=1&track=mostviewed-homepage
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
