Legal
In December 2003, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a complaint against Girls Gone Wild, on behalf of the FTC, alleging that the company failed to notify customers when they purchased subscriptions under a continuity program, rather than single DVDs. In July, 2004, the claim was settled for $1.1 million and agreed to disclose all terms and conditions and get written consent for recurring charges.
In September, 2006, MRA Holdings, a Girls Gone Wild marketer, pled guilty to federal charges for failing to record ages of women filmed in 2002 and 2003. The parties agreed to pay $2.1 million in restitution and fines.
In April 2008, Ashley Dupré filed against Joe Francis with other defendants, claiming that they filmed her without consent. Dupré dropped the suit after Francis released footage of her consent.
In 2008, a Missouri woman claimed that she was filmed without consent when a Girls Gone Wild contractor removed her halter top at a St. Louis bar. A jury found that she consented. On re-trial in 2012, a judge awarded the woman $5.77 million after the defense failed to show at court. Girls Gone Wild included this recording in one of the videos that it sold. On appeal, the judge upheld the verdict.
In March, 2008, four women claimed that they suffered emotional distress by being shown in Girls Gone Wild film. In April 2011, an all-female jury declined to award damages to the plaintiffs.
Read more about this topic: Girls Gone Wild (franchise)
Famous quotes containing the word legal:
“No oppression is so heavy or lasting as that which is inflicted by the perversion and exorbitance of legal authority.”
—Joseph Addison (1672–1719)
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—Ellen Battelle Dietrick, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 13, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.- men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep- hole and missing laundry list school.... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)