The 84-minute film, part of TNT’s Rich and Shameless anthology, digs into the queasy popularity of Girls Gone Wild and assembles a deluge of evidence suggesting that Francis, a fixture of mid-aughts gossip blogs, was a serial physical and emotional abuser.
“Behind the fun and the wet T-shirt competitions and this sort of faux feminist liberation – flashing your breasts for the camera – lives were being ruined,” the film’s director, Katinka Blackford Newman, told the Guardian. “And there are people whose lives are still being impacted.”Īs the film recounts through in-person interviews with former Girls Gone Wild producers and staff and copious footage, the tapes themselves were dubiously sourced and financed. They featured girls, sometimes underage and manipulated into commercial releases while drunk, performing sexual acts on themselves or each other under blatant pressure from Francis.
Some, such as Nichole, who appears in the documentary, did not even know she was being taped. Another participant, Tabitha, says she was 17 and drunk when she was talked into a wet T-shirt contest five years later, she found herself an unwitting poster girl of Girls Gone Wild.
