The founder of Girls Gone Wild is not, in fact, facing down the barrel of a speedy extradition.
For the uninitiated, Girls Gone Wild is a video franchise that involves a camera crew exploring raging party scenes, and requesting that attractive, often intoxicated, young women expose themselves and/or engage in “wild” acts such as making out with each other. (The concept was satirized in the sitcom Arrested Development as “Girls With Low Self-Esteem,” for instance.) The company filed for bankruptcy in 2013, when it was $10.3 million in debt to Wynn Las Vegas.
On Tuesday, a Los Angeles judge issued an arrest warrant for Joe Francis—the 42-year-old, Georgia-born mastermind behind the series and company—after he had failed to turn over a Cadillac Escalade and a Bentley Flying Spur as part of a liquidation agreement. (Francis has maintained that the luxury cars were seized by the proprietor of a strip club in Mexico.) The warrant follows a U.S. Bankruptcy Court judge’s recommendation to the District Court to consider issuing a warrant for Francis last October.
The Girls Gone Wild creator is believed to be residing near Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, with his girlfriend Abbey Wilson and their two twin daughters.
So will Francis be facing extradition from Mexico? In all likelihood, nope.
“It does not appear that Francis is at risk of being extradited based on his outstanding arrest warrant,” Shawn Holley, Francis’s lawyer, told The Hollywood Reporter. “[The] warrant issued by [the judge] is for ‘civil contempt’ … Contempt is not such an offense [as to merit extradition between the U.S. and Mexico].”
This much is true. The treaty between the United States and Mexico pertains to the extradition of individuals facing criminal charges. Thus, the Mexican government is not involved in this Girls Gone Wild -related predicament. “The embassy hasn’t sent us anything at all [concerning this],” a spokeswoman for the Mexican Attorney General’s office told The Daily Beast. “The Mexican government has not been informed about this.”
Francis is no stranger to legal problems, or his own wild behavior. In 2013, he was found guilty of falsely imprisoning three women in his Bel-Air home. (He allegedly grabbed one woman by her throat and hit her head against the floor four times.) He later remarked that the jurors were “mentally fucking retarded,” and that they “should all be lined up and shot!”
However his latest legal issue gets resolved, it’s safe to say he will maintain the same high opinion of himself and his life’s work.
“Sex sells everything,” Francis told the Los Angeles Times in 2006. “It drives every buying decision. … I hate to get too deep and philosophical here, but only the guys with the greatest sexual appetites are the ones who are the most driven and most successful.”
—Additional reporting by Alexa Corse.