'Girls Gone Wild' founder Joe Francis
(AP Photo/Dan Steinberg)
Does Ashley Dupre have a case against ‘Girls Gone Wild’?
What happened
Ashley Alexander Dupre, the 22-year-old call girl linked to former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, filed a lawsuit against Girls Gone Wild founder Joe Francis on Monday for $10 million. Dupre claims that Francis exploited her name and image in advertisements for his video series, and that although she signed consent forms before posing before Girls Gone Wild’s cameras while on spring break in Florida in 2003, she was drunk, only 17-years-old, and should not have been bound to the contracts. (AP)
What the commentators said
Is Ashley Dupre really claiming to be “a victim”? said Sean Hackbarth in the blog The American Mind. She “knew all about Girls Gone Wild when she strutted her stuff for them.” It seems obvious “she’s trying to get more than the $1 million” that “slime ball” Joe Francis offered her to pose in his new magazine. “If we’re lucky, when both Dupre and Francis go to court, one of Florida’s famed sinkholes will swallow them both up, never to be heard from again.”
Dupre’s suit “sounds exactly like the one other girls filed against Francis, which landed him in jail,” said the blog Hollywood Grind. But this time, “Francis made sure everything was legal before using the Ashley images and footage. Now Ashley will have to prove her claim in court, which won’t be easy since she herself committed fraud by lying about her age, and is a known prostitute.”
“Is there no honor among oversexed, drunken teenage girls?” said Howard Gensler in the Philadelphia Daily News. “To think that when she was a teen looking to catch some rays and an STD during Spring Break,” Francis “let her sleep on his bus. And this is the thanks he gets? “Yes, she was old enough to strip nekkid and frolic for the camera, but she was not old enough to give herself permission. And if she really was 17, Francis may have another problem.”
