Afflicting the afflicted

Claire Hoffman’s LA

Times article on Joe Francis reveals the Girls Gone Wild entrepeneur

to be a raging id. This is unlikely to come as a great surprise to anybody who

knows much about who he is and what it is that he sells. It also, however, reveals

a lot about the morals of US journalists.

The article is certainly less than flattering to Francis, who could certainly

be arrested for the things he did to the LA Times reporter alone. (Indeed, one

police officer advises her in the article to press charges against him.) At

the same time, however, Hoffman herself is more than a little bit exploitative

– of exactly the same girls who have already been exploited by Francis.

In the article, Hoffman talks both to Francis and to the girls who get naked

for his videos in return for little more than a free t-shirt. Why do they do

it? 21-year-old Jillian Vangeertry talks about her "15 minutes of fame".

Kaitlyn Bultema is more explicit about her motives:

"Most guys want to have sex with me and maybe I could meet one new guy,

but if I get filmed everyone could see me," Bultema says. "If you

do this, you might get noticed by somebody—to be an actress or a model."

I ask her why she wants to get noticed. "You want people to say, ‘Hey,

I saw you.’ Everybody wants to be famous in some way. Getting famous will

get me anything I want. If I walk into somebody’s house and said, ‘Give me

this,’ I could have it."

We read this, and we are saddened by the delusions and naïveté

of these girls. No one is likely to become an actress or a model through appearing

on a Girls Gone Wild video. If people do see you in the video, they’re likely

to label you as a slut long before they will give you "anything you want".

Later on in life, when you’re working at your job, your subordinates or your

superiors might find video footage of you and a couple of other girls having

sex on camera. This will not be good for your career. And yet given the enormous

potential downside and the nonexistent potential upside, girls still flock in

their thousands to be feature in GGW videos.

Hoffman then tells the harrowing story of Jannel Szyszka, described as "a

petite 18-year-old". Acccording to her acccount, she was plied with alcohol

before she got naked for the GGW video cameras, masturbated with a dildo, and

told the cameraman that she was a virgin. Then Francis himself takes over.

Afterward, she says, Francis cleaned them both off with a paper towel and

told her to get dressed. Then, she says, he opened the door and told the cameraman

to come back, saying, "She’s not a virgin anymore."

At the end of the night, Szyszka has three pairs of underwear, and at best

unpleasant memories of something which might well have been rape. Six weeks

later, however, things go from bad to worse: she agrees to talk, on the record,

to Claire Hoffman. Until that point, her downside to appearing in a GGW video

was confined to what might happen if someone she knew saw the video –

something which might well never occur.

Now, from here on in, anybody googling her (she has a pretty unique name) will

see first and foremost that she was the girl seduced / taken advantage of /

raped by Joe Francis. It’s something which will follow her for the rest of her

life, long after her episode of Girls Gone Wild has stopped being watched

by anyone.

Hoffman didn’t need to use Szyszka’s real name, and certainly didn’t need to

use her surname, but doing so gives her (Hoffman) added brownie points at the

LA Times. After all, getting people on the record is always preferable to granting

them anonymity.

We don’t know how Hoffman ended up talking to Szyszka. We know that Szyszka

first "came out" about her experience to her family a month after

the events took place, and that she seems to have first spoken to Hoffman between

that point and the point a couple of weeks later when Hoffman confronted Francis

about what happened. Who approached whom is unknown. But even if Szyszka approached

Hoffman, I think that a responsible journalist would have taken it upon herself

to shield this vulnerable young woman from this kind of posterity.

As it is, Szyszka ends up as not only a notch on Francis’s belt, but a notch

on Hoffman’s as well. Yet Hoffman comes out with nothing but accolades for her

story. She exposed Joe Francis as an exploiter of young and innocent girls;

has it occurred to her that she could be described the same way?