‘Girls Gone Wild: The Untold Story’ Producer Scaachi Koul on Exposing Joe Francis’ Criminal Enterprise: ‘He Will Be Relevant Forever’

Anyone flipping past a cable channel late at night in the back half of the 1990s and early aughts probably had ads for “Girls Gone Wild” seared into their brains.  The instantly recognizable infomercials projected purposefully pixelated footage of young women pulling up their shirts to flash the cameras between shots at a college town bar, or in the fog of spring break in Miami. The “Girls Gone Wild” logo strategically covered any explicit nudity, while an announcer with all the subtlety of a foghorn hocked VHS tapes and eventually DVDs full of the unobstructed footage “too hot to show on TV.” All of it was pitched as a chance to see the good girl next door go bad — for a low price, plus shipping and handling.

For most people, the heyday of “Girls Gone Wild,” the brainchild of Joe Francis, feels like it happened a lifetime ago. Francis’ close association with people like the Kardashians and Ashton Kutcher at the height of “Girls Gone Wild” certainly places his meteoric ascent in a specific time at the dawn of reality TV and before widespread social media. But the new Peacock documentary series, “Girls Gone Wild: The Untold Story” makes the case that the franchise still has a hand in shaping discourse and popular culture today, even as the women featured in the tapes continue to live with the scars of having been included in them. The documentary, from director Jamila Wignot, is based largely on reporting by journalist and co-executive producer Scaachi Koul, who interviewed Francis’ at his Mexico home in 2022, where for a decade he has been living in exile out of reach of legal action against him in the United States. Francis has vehemently and repeatedly denied all allegations against him.

Koul’s nine hours of audio tapes from the interview, which were first used in her HuffPost piece in 2023, give unprecedented insight into a man who is still clinging to the fantasy of a legacy he has long fed anyone who will listen. At one point, he even calls himself the victim in all this. But the lasting impact of “Girls Gone Wild” is much darker than even previous investigations had presented. Some of the women who, as college students or younger, were featured prominently in the videos and their promotion, have never been able to escape them. As a number of them recount in the series, people still message them online or brazenly come up to them in person asking for autographs or to solicit further adult content. Because they did it once 25 years ago with the help of a few shots, they must be willing to do it on the spot again today, right?

In the documentary, former employees of Francis’ Mantra Films also detail the allegedly coercive tactics they were encouraged to use to get women to reveal themselves for the videos, which went well beyond flashing, and would sometimes lead to the women being plied with alcohol as they filmed hardcore scenes. In-house training videos also reveal how camera operators were told not to take no for an answer.

Yet, the moral implications of the franchise weren’t its downfall. In places like Panama City Beach, Florida, Francis faced months of jail time and persistent legal action from officials who alleged his company had filmed underage girls; and from participants, who sued him for not properly preparing or compensating them for their involvement.

The slow draining of money to pay legal fees and settlements; a very public and costly dispute with Las Vegas tycoon Steve Wynn; and the evolving accessibility of porn online chipped away at Francis’ company until he was left with only the scandals to feed his narrative. Francis did face legal consequences in 2013, when he was convicted of holding three women in his Los Angeles home against their will in 2011, and assaulting one of them, for which he was sentenced to 270 days in jail. But during the appeals process, he fled to Mexico and has yet to return.

After years of work mapping out the “Girls Gone Wild” phenomenon and tracking down Francis, Koul spoke to Variety about the new documentary, the rise and fall of his empire, the cultural and emotional implications of “Girls Gone Wild” today, why celebrities and society so easily bought into the fantasy back then — and whether the Kardashians still have him on speed dial.

Did you ever think you would be an expert on “Girls Gone Wild” and Joe Francis?

Dude, no! There is so much that I know about this company now that I, like, can’t do math — that got pushed out of my brain, because now I have a catalog of every “Girls Gone Wild” tape, the year it came out and what’s on it.

How did your interview with Joe Francis in Mexico and your reporting become involved with this documentary?

Myself and Karolina Waclawiak, who is one of the producers on the doc, started this project four years ago. Karolina is a Gen X baby, I’m a mid-range millennial and one day she just said, “What happened to ‘Girls Gone Wild’ and Joe Francis?” And I was like, “What a good question that I’ve literally never thought about in my life?” But we started looking into it, and once we realized there were these legal issues that happened in Panama City and this piece of Joe being in Mexico and not able to return, we thought that was pretty interesting. Maxine Productions came on pretty early into that reporting process, but I didn’t know where it was going to go then. I spoke to Joe in Mexico in 2022, but I had done a lot of reporting before that and continued to do reporting long after that interview.

Well that question of what happened to Joe Francis took you to an undisclosed place in Mexico for this nine-hour interview that serves as the backbone of this documentary. What was it like going down there and talking with him in this new reality he has built for himself, far from Hollywood?

It’s a beautiful house, I’ll say that. He lives a very glamorous existence certainly, insofar as a proverbial exile would go. I mean, it is a nice life. I do think he is into a lot of myth-making. I think he believes in the story he is telling about how his company came to be and his role as the scion of it or the arbiter of this particular kind of culture. But as for the interview, when I got in touch with him I said it was because I saw there were irregularities with what happened in Panama City, and I think he still thinks about that. He really views the cases that he had there as kind of the epicenter for how the company started to fall apart because there were so many issues that he kept getting brought back there. And he was scared of jail.

Being in exile is also a way to distance yourself from anyone who might try to refute your version of events.

Yes, he is alone down there. His ex-partner has left with their children. He, to my knowledge, has not entered the United States in the last few years, but I don’t know for sure. He does have people visit him from time to time, but I do think it is a much quieter life than he had when he was living in Bel Air and he was going to the club with Kourtney Kardashian or someone like that. It is a very different life now.

For those who weren’t seeking out “Girls Gone Wild” videos or kept up with the craze as it was unfolding, this documentary might be the first time they realize these tapes actually included pornographic scenes. It wasn’t just girls flashing the camera. And yet, “Girls Gone Wild” was widely accepted and even promoted by some of the biggest stars of the time, even when most porn is siloed to one corner of the industry. The documentary shows photos of people like Brad Pitt and Ashton Kutcher wearing the merch. Why was “Girls Gone Wild” the one that broke through?

I think it was always because it was regular girls. So, there are a few things. That last piece of every tape that is porn, there are still people who I would talk to in the reporting today, who don’t believe that that is porngraphy because it is only two girls. To me, it is an incredibly outdated understanding of sexuality, sexual autonomy and body autonomy. I don’t cosign that, but there were so many people who believed it wasn’t porn because it was just two girls messing around. And on top of it, the two girls often knew each other, they were friends, so how could it be coercive or abusive if they knew each other? That is something that is still in our discourse when we talk about sex and sexual politics today.

In terms of why it broke out, these weren’t performers. These were regular girls and that’s a big part of the fantasy. In the heterosexual cis male psyche of 1999, you can have a porn star —ou can have her because anybody can have her. That’s the coding of those videos. But for the average girl that lives down your block or is in your morning classes every Tuesday, the fantasy is that she is a good girl but for you, she isn’t. It sinks into the cultural psyche more because it’s accessible. It’s not really a porn company then, it’s just a brand.

And a brand can be put on a hat.

Exactly, it’s on a hat and then a couple of famous people are into it because maybe they don’t fully know what’s on it at first. They only see the ads and they see this guy at these parties, and he has money and he has girls. It was a different time. I mean, you couldn’t Google “what happens in Act 3 of a ‘Girls Gone Wild’ video.” You needed to have seen it in its entirety, and not just an advertisement for it.

Joe Francis was so closely associated with the Kardashians in the early years of their fame. The documentary shows a clip of “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” when he called into the show from jail in Florida. Kim Kardashian wore a “Free Joe” shirt in another clip from that time, and advocated for his acquittal. Do you know his relationship with them today? Have they disavowed him?

They didn’t comment to me for my reporting on this. I don’t think they have been seen with him or at his property for several years. One of the last times I remember seeing photos of them altogether, Kylie had her 18th birthday at his property in Mexico. She’s 27 now, so I certainly think that in the past few years they have seen him less. But I don’t know the shape or texture of their relationship. I am also curious about it too, because he helped guide them into some of [that fame]. He was part of the reality portion of it for sure.

That’s what’s funny about doing the documentary as well. It will be a reconsideration that people like you or I will watch and think, “Oh yeah, this is what it was like.” But it is also a reintroduction to people who are young and don’t remember what it was like then, and don’t know the roots of the Kardashians and how they kind of came to public consciousness. Or who Joe was, and what his company did and how you still see it in our culture today in the people that we talk about. In the way we talk about women — the way we talk about bodily autonomy. The way people say, “Your body, my choice.” The way Donald Trump was reelected. It is all from stuff like this, or at least it passed through stuff like “Girls Gone Wild.”

In the documentary, we hear from a lot of people who interacted with Joe over the years while working for his company, Mantra Films, and in the media who covered him. But one person who doesn’t make an appearance is Claire Hoffman, a former Los Angeles Times reporter who detailed in a 2006 story him allegedly assaulting her in the process of reporting that very story. Why was she not included in the series?

I do believe we reached out to her and she just didn’t want to talk. We spoke to her editor, Amy Wallace, who gives us all of that insight. But I can understand why she didn’t. Joe Francis has been with me every day for four years, so I can see a world in the future where someone calls me and wants to talk about him and I don’t want to. He is overwhelming. You can hear that in the tape. He’s scary. All these other women are going to tell you that in this documentary, how afraid they are of him and the kind of infrastructure he builds. And he’s exhausting. So I get it. But Claire is my hero, so she can do whatever she wants.

Speaking of the tape, there is a moment in the third episode when you ask him about the allegations from his ex-partner, Abbey Wilson, and he patently denies ever raping her or their two daughters. It is chilling that he adds the last part because that was not part of your question. Do you know why he insisted on saying that?

This came up in my original reporting in the story I wrote. Joe volunteered to me, on the record that Abbey accused him of molesting their daughters. He’s saying Abbey has accused him of that, but there is no accusation from her or from her side of that. She has not put that in any record; her lawyer has not. And her lawyer denies that they believe that that has happened. He has said this, but her side has not, so I don’t know where it is coming from.

So he’s refuting it just to refute it?

He’s refuting it, but it has never been brought up by anybody but him. I have never heard it from anybody outside of him. I don’t think I’m ever really going to be able to understand him in that way. But you can hear in the tape that he has a strange understanding of women and girls. Even when he says, “You can’t rape your spouse” — it is a fact you can. So his version of the world is very different from mine.

The documentary closes by pondering the legacy of “Girls Gone Wild” and Joe Francis, and how his greatest punishment may be irrelevancy. Do you think it is possible that he and “Girls Gone Wild” will ever be irrelevant?

No, I think “Girls Gone Wild” will always be relevant, because it will speak to where we are now and where we are going. A lot of cultural events are relevant even if they are not warm things that make you feel good. And I do think Joe is afraid of being irrelevant. But more than that, he wants to be viewed as somebody who brought something positive into the world, and that I think is very much up for debate. So he will be relevant forever, sure. But what he has given us, I think it depends who you ask and the day you ask it.

You’ve answered the question you set out to: What happened to “Girls Gone Wild” and Joe Francis? But your reporting and this documentary suggests the story now rests with the women whose lives were changed because of their involvement in all this. Is that where you think it goes from here?

It has always been their story, always, and will continue to be. They will tell us where it is supposed to land, and I will follow them, whatever they want to do with it. I feel very aware of how much their lives have changed because they were caught on a “Girls Gone Wild” tape. It is an impact that I will never fully understand, so I feel that responsibility. But the impact is clear. There is a personal impact, and there is a huge cultural impact. I’m 33 and “Girls Gone Wild” has shaped how I go through the world as a woman with men, inevitably without even trying. And I never watched a tape before I started working on this reporting. I saw two ads. I was raised in Canada — I don’t even think they shipped up there! But it still had such an impact on me, which means it will have an impact on how I talk to other people and how they interact with me. It will shape how I talk to my niece, who is 14 and has no concept of this, but how I talk to her about her body and sexual politics, and how she wants to move through this world. I will give him that — he made something that people will remember, and they have.

Have you been able to make room for math again in your brain and allocate less space to Joe Francis now that this documentary is out? Or are you still keeping tabs on him?

He’s still [in Mexico]. He was hanging out with Mario Lopez in Mexico City a little while ago. They were posting about it on Instagram. So you know, I pop in but I don’t linger.

This interview has been edited and condensed.