Joe Francis, the man behind the Girls Gone Wild videos, is the contemporary king of softcore, though he's had trouble lately being left alone to enjoy his ill-gotten booty. (Take it away, Beavis and Butt-Head!) Francis managed to spend most of the past year in a prison in Reno, Nevada, basically for having pissed off a judge. Francis had been charged with some seventy counts, but when the charges started dropping off and the smoke cleared, all that was left standing were a couple of felony charges and a couple of prostitution charges that stemmed from a Girls Gone Wild cameraman having filmed a pair of seventeen-year-olds with fake I.D.s Joel Stein reports that "When the underage girls sued Francis for $70 million and a judge, in a bizarre move, ordered the parties to go to mediation, Francis arrived at a hearing and made only one offer to the girls’ lawyers: 'Suck my dick'...Finally, he was thrown in jail for contempt; his jailers later caught him carrying sleeping pills, cholesterol medication, and $700 in cash. This time the judge refused to grant Francis bail." On April 11 of last year, a Reno grand jury indicted him on to counts of tax evasion. Last month, in an agreement with prosecutors, he pled no contest to the minors-in-a-shower-related charges and was sentenced to time served. Last week, the courts agreed to move his tax evasion trial from Reno to his home base in Southern California.

Stein, who has written about Francis before for GQ magazine, visited Francis in the jug recently before his release, and found one unrepentant pornhound waving hello to him from behind that plexiglass shield. "“People want remorse from me? They’re retarded. For what? For fighting for my First Amendment rights? Fuck you.” Words to bring Tom Paine up out of the rave saluting, to be sure. (It's not so clear that Paine would point at a female guard and exclaim, "What a rack!") Francis professed to find his stay at the crossbar motel not so bad--"Nothing will ever happen to me in jail. I’m a god. I’m the cool Girls Gone Wild guy. I’m revered. I’m a rock star”--but unlike Malcolm X or George Bluth, Sr., there is little evidence that the experience has expanded his political consciousness. Certainly he has not bonded with his fellow prisoners: “The one thing I fear is one of these fucking people showing up at my house.” Will things go more smoothly at his trial in Los Angeles? Joel Stein, who has spent a certain amount of time observing the bad boy, believes that his "real passion"--what drives him, over and over, to demonstrate his ability to sweet-talk women into anything- "is dominating other men." And that includes men in black robes who have the power to deprive him of his personal liberty if they get tired of having him look at them cross-eyed. Stay tuned for Part The Next.