Joe Francis compares himself to protagonist of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’

Peacock‘s new docuseries Girls Gone Wild: The Untold Story dredges up plenty of damning information about Joe Francis, founder of the infamous aughties exploitation empire. But Francis hasn’t let it get to his head. In his own version of events, he isn’t a villain, but a martyr.

Joe Francis and Elisabeth Moss.

Tibrina Hobson/Getty; George Kraychyk/Hulu

“Comparing yourself to a martyred figure, alive or dead, is a really common and long-beloved quirk of Joe Francis’. He does that pretty frequently,” says Scaachi Koul, the journalist who conducted the first in-person interview with Francis in a decade for the series.

“I don’t know if you watch The Handmaid’s Tale,” Francis is then heard saying. “But I’m June, from The Handmaid’s Tale. I’m Offred, or whatever you want to call her.”

Francis is referring to the character played by Elisabeth Moss on Hulu’s Emmy-winning drama. The Handmaid’s Tale is adapted from the 1985 novel by Margaret Atwood that tells the story of Offred, a young woman living in the Republic of Gilead, a theocratic dictatorship that’s overtaken a significant portion of the northeastern and central United States.

In Gilead, women exist in complete subordination to men, especially the handmaids, a class of women who are still fertile despite an ongoing environmental catastrophe that has decimated birth rates. Handmaids’ identities are stripped, and they go by the name of their male Commander. The protagonist once known as June (Moss), for example, is conscripted to a man named Fred and so is called Offred (derived from “of-Fred”). She also eventually incites an uprising.

This is the character most relatable to the man who founded a media company whose sole purpose was to manipulate women into taking their tops off and engage in soft-core pornography on camera and cut them out of the earnings.

As Koul noted, Francis has made eye-opening comparisons before. On a 2006 episode of The Tyra Banks Show (shown in the doc), Francis told the host, “One thing I did do is stand up for what’s right. Mandela sat in prison because he stood up for what is right, against apartheid.” Francis was facing a wave of significant legal pushback to his media venture at the time, including lawsuits in several states accusing the mogul of racketeering, child prostitution, false imprisonment, tax evasion, and more.

“As long as Joe can maintain that delusion that he is the victim, then he never has to take any accountability” says Leanne Horvath, the former controller at Girls Gone Wild, who is interviewed for the documentary.

Francis also claims in The Untold Story that he had “well placed people in the White House” at the time of an FBI raid leading up to his 2008 trial for child abuse and prostitution in Panama City, Florida. That’s how he was able to plead no contest and escape with a sentence of only 339 days in jail, compared to the years he was facing, so he claims. He theorizes that the Bush administration ginned up the charges to “distract from this war in Iraq.”

Decades of grueling litigation and a litany of accusations by several women of battery, assault, and rape — including his ex and the mother of his children, Abbey Wilson — haven’t shaken Francis’ sunny view of his own cultural impact. He invoked TV culture again when asked about the legacy of Girls Gone Wild, saying it’s on the whole positive, because it “created the possibility for the Kardashians.”