LOS ANGELES (CNS) - ``Girls Gone Wild' founder Joe Francis was charged
with misdemeanor false imprisonment stemming from a January run-in with three
women after a college graduation party at a Hollywood club, the City Attorney's
Office announced today.
Francis, 38, accompanied by an attorney, surrendered to Los Angeles
police at the Pacific Station Monday evening. He was booked and released on
$50,000 bail, with his arraignment scheduled for Sept. 16.
He and his bodyguard/driver, Vagram Gegdzhyan, are accused of taking
three women to one of Francis' homes, where a fight broke out and Francis
allegedly slammed one woman's head against a tile floor, according to the City
Attorney's Office.
Francis was charged with three counts of false imprisonment and single
counts of dissuading a witness from reporting and assault causing great bodily
injury. Gegdzhyan was charged with impersonation of a public officer with
intimidation and fraudulently using a badge.
According to prosecutors, Francis was at the supperclub nightclub in
Hollywood on Jan. 29, and at the end of the night, he led a woman to his
limousine. Two other women who apparently believed they were being taken to
their cars also got in, prosecutors said.
En route to Francis' home, Gegdzhyan allegedly showed a sheriff's badge
and refused to let the women out of the limousine, according to Deputy City
Attorney Mitchell Fox.
At Francis' gated home, a fight broke out, with Francis allegedly trying
to drag one of the women away from the other two, grabbing her by the throat
and hair and hitting her head on the floor, according to the City Attorney's
Office.
The women were eventually escorted off the property and told that no one
would call or pay for a taxi if they reported what happened to police, Fox
said. But on the taxi ride back to their cars, at least one of the women called
911 and made a police report.
Francis is no stranger to trouble. Having amassed a fortune is his 20s,
he was arrested in Florida in 2003 on a wide range of charges, including
racketeering and drug trafficking. Most of those charges were eventually
dropped, but Francis paid a $1.6 million fine.
In 2009, he was ordered by a federal judge in Los Angeles to pay
thousands of dollars in fines and restitution for filing false tax returns and
bribing Nevada jail workers in exchange for food.