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I’d been in L.A. for three weeks when I got the gig selling T-shirts on the Girls Gone Wild tour. It was 2005, and I had graduated from college eight months prior. I’d moved to Hollywood to be an actress and, at that point, had $300 in my checking account. I was relying on a door-to-door sales gig. “Hi, I’m here on behalf of Staples, and I just wanted to stop by to drop off $10 in Easy Bucks to make things a little easier for your business,” I’d repeat over and over, spending my days in the blistering Inland Empire heat. It was pure tedium. When I saw a Craigslist ad seeking a “Merch Girl” for GGW, I didn’t think twice about applying.
I’d grown up with their infomercials on late-night TV. “Warning: This contains adult content that is not suitable for children!” is how the infomercials started. The girls, always attractive and always laughing, would flash the camera—spring break, wooooo!—playful pop-up censors covering their tits. I didn’t want to do any naked stuff myself—by 21, I’d already done my fair share of nudity for the independent films I’d acted in. But those girls looked cool. Maybe we could all be friends?
I got an interview for the merch girl gig, told my boss for the Staples promo that I was sick, and sped to Santa Monica for an interview during which I sucked in my stomach and did my best to indicate that I was a cool girl who would be comfortable in a party environment. I was an actress, so of course I was good at acting fun. I smiled and nodded along to whatever the executive said. I didn’t flinch when he told me that a big part of the job would be to make the other girls feel comfortable enough to get wild. I was hired on the spot. I had no idea what I was in for.
On the surface, my job was really simple. All I had to do was travel around on a gaudy Girls Gone Wild–branded tour bus with a producer and a few cameramen and sell Girls Gone Wild–branded merch—booty shorts, tank tops, and thongs—to the drunken masses at the “parties” we threw at bars and nightclubs. I joined up with a tour in Vancouver, Canada, and from there we traveled from town to town, like porn carnies. Occasionally we’d get hotel rooms, but just as often we were crammed on the bus together, sleeping in our tiny bunks.
My job was not, in reality, that simple. Drunk people are assholes, and plenty of men asked me to flash them to get them to buy a T-shirt. And despite what the infomercials might lead one to believe, the Girls Gone Wild crew wasn’t actually showing up and throwing the best parties ever. We would park the bus outside a bar, much to the chagrin of conservative (or just smart?) locals. Most of the time, the parties were just a regular night out at the bar, except with way higher expectations. It was rarely the fun and exciting atmosphere that I had been envisioning, and people who attended the events often seemed similarly underwhelmed. Then there was the fact that I was the only girl with the crew traveling from city to city—odd for a brand predicated on topless women.
The biggest issue was more insidious, and it didn’t take me long to figure out: the business model was rigged. Bars paid to have Girls Gone Wild show up at their venue, and the producers and camera guys used those events to scout for hot girls to film for GGW DVDs, which could cost up to $29.99. These featured way more than just tits, including scenes of solo masturbation and girl-on-girl porn. The crew was financially incentivized for this footage, so scouting and rating women was nonstop on the tour. The constant objectification was psychologically taxing to endure. In a typical entertainment employment scenario, the girls—the face, the tits, and the product of this porn company—would have been called “talent,” and they would have been paid. (These days, OnlyFans creators get 80 percent of the subscription revenue they bring in.) But in this case, they weren’t treated as talent, and they certainly weren’t paid as talent. Famously, girls would sign model releases in exchange for nothing more than a branded T-shirt.
My first night on the tour, I squeezed into some GGW short shorts, my rump poised to rip the ass seam with one wrong move. I teetered into the nightclub for the event on the heels of one of our cameramen and was instantly greeted with a crude display of idolatry that I would see variations of time and again throughout the tour. A fortysomething man with a beer gut came running up to us, dragging behind him a woman who looked to be in her third trimester. He was a huge fan of GGW. His greatest wish was to gain access to the infamous bus, where all the really wild stuff happened. Eager for an invitation, he dropped to his knees and started simulating fingering and oral sex on his pregnant wife.
“She’s wonderful,” he raved. “She even lets me fuck her in the ass!”
This guy was going to be someone’s dad? I didn’t recognize this from the infomercials.
In fact, I met a lot of guys from the “creepy dad” demographic during this tour. Sometimes we got mobbed by them when we were stopped in the parking lot of, say, a Walmart just to pick up supplies. It was shocking how quickly fathers with their kids, and even moms, went feral, begging, willing to do anything for a hat. But I saw a wild spectrum of responses to the brand from locals in the towns we visited. Some would have given almost anything to get on the bus, but others were offended and considered its mere presence in their streets to be obscene. Once, while we were eating at a restaurant my first week on the tour, someone graffitied PORNOGRAPHERS on the bus in black Sharpie. I was taken aback. I still hadn’t seen the videos at this point, but it was clear that they contained more than just flashing.
Our mission of trying to get the hottest girls to perform for the camera had turned into a 24/7 job with nowhere to escape. At a club in the Alberta province, I was determined to crawl out of my mind and try to relax and have fun. I scored some ecstasy from a local while the cameramen were simultaneously making a score: a threesome scene featuring a Kirsten Dunst look-alike, a professional stripper who wore a wig, and their friend. Afterward on the bus, the stripper cried when she told us her life story. But she’d also been paid by GGW. She was literally the only girl who I know got paid, and it was only because she was already in the industry and knew the ropes. Exploiting girls was part of the business model. In an episode of the documentary series Rich and Shameless, lawyer Lisa Cervantes explains how a client of hers alleged that she was filmed in public and used in a GGW video without providing consent and the company refused to take down the content. Cervantes says that on a P&L statement from 2003 that she found, Mantra Films paid their legal team $198,000, while only $3,000 went to pay talent. In another interview in the Rich and Shameless doc, a former video editor for GGW said at one point he suggested that the girls get paid as a show of good faith. He recalls Girls Gone Wild CEO Joe Francis laughing and responding that he was “crazy.” (Francis could not be reached by Slate for comment).
Earlier during the night of the threesome, another girl had quizzed me about my life in Hollywood while I poured her a drink. “I bet it’s really nice,” she said, eyes wide, eagerly asking, “How often do you see famous people?” Later, she masturbated for the camera and had sex with the weaselly-est camera guy. It made me sad to imagine girls thinking that this in any way could be their big break. I knew what it felt like to want to escape your reality. I also knew what it felt like to take the wrong ticket out of town.
I felt for the male Girls Gone Wild crew members too: They were primarily film majors just trying to make some money and advance their dream careers, like me. A few of them were great and made it possible for me to last as long as I did on the tour. The problem was that all of us were working on a project with a flawed premise—and it didn’t bring out our best behavior.
The next morning, when I woke up, I rubbed my groggy eyes, pulled back the curtain, and rolled out of my bus bunk. The rest of the crew was already up. On the big-screen TV in the bus’s kitchen/dining room/lounge, we watched tape of the women from the previous night like highly competitive NFL coaches reviewing the big game. All I heard was a full account of what was “wrong” with them on a physical, sexual, and sometimes mental/emotional level. One of the girls had a soft body and bad skin that wasn’t up to Girls Gone Wild standards, so the cameramen were instructed to “shoot around her!” Someone else had “beef curtains.” I tried not to listen to the rest. The real life behind those bright, bouncy infomercials was bleak. I don’t know what I had expected, but it wasn’t this.
I lasted about seven weeks. It ended with the conversation in Muscle Shoals, Alabama—or maybe it was somewhere in northern Florida. I always forget that I’ve been to those states. The producer wasn’t surprised when I kicked pebbles in the parking lot and told him, “I’m so sorry, but I’ve gotta get out of here.” He seemed to know that it was coming, welcomed it even, perhaps would’ve fired me soon. “It’s pretty clear you’re not happy,” he said. He didn’t even make me work the last night.
I left the tour with what felt like the weight of the world on my shoulders and a cloud over my head; I felt dirty and guilty. My presence had been tacit approval and made me a traitor to the other women—the silent kind, the kind you thought you could trust. I should’ve said, “Run!” Instead, I’d simply ask: “Would you like something to drink?”
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