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After 16 godawful, Jägermeister-fueled years, the Girls Gone Wild amateur porn franchise is filing for bankruptcy. The Wall Street Journal reports that company founder Joe Francis put GGW Brands LLC and other companies under the Girls Gone Wild umbrella into Chapter 11 protection yesterday to prevent the Wynn Las Vegas Casino and Resort from acquiring them in a multimillion dollar lawsuit:
Wynn's resort has been chasing Francis, 39, for years after he failed to pay a $2 million gambling debt to the hotel during a February 2007 trip. In 2012, the resort got a $7.5 million judgment for defamation "stemming from Francis's public attack falsely accusing Wynn of deceiving customers," according to the resort's lawsuit.
The bankruptcy filing will effectively block the Wynn's continued efforts to collect, which, according to attorneys, have already been blocked time and again by Francis' repeated dodges. "Wynn has confirmed what it has long suspected," Wynn lawyers wrote in their lawsuit, "namely that Francis has avoided Wynn's collection efforts by, among other things, not taking any income and using accounts held by various entities that do business under his ‘Girls Gone Wild' brand to pay all his personal expenses."
For people of a certain age, Girls Gone Wild going bankrupt signals the end of an era. Potentially gone for good are those once ubiquitous late-night informercials, obnoxious, noisy, and lousy with drunk spring breakers whose nipples are pixelated out. If we're lucky, perhaps also gone for good—from the public eye, at least—is Joe Francis, a predatory, violent misogynist who once threateningly pinned a female reporter down onto a car and was constantly getting sued when he wasn't being arrested. He also dated Paris Hilton for a while.
In short, Joe Francis is the scummy, teeth-whitening hangover we're still dealing with after the strange cultural excesses of the early aughts. By, Joe, hope to see you never.
[Image via AP]
