Six Degrees of Paris Hilton: Inside the Sex Tapes, Scandals, and Shakedowns of the New Hollywood

1 The Hustler, the Heiress, and the Soft-Porn KingThe video is stark and grainy, its color garish, almost fluorescent, from one too many generations of unauthorized copying. A figure lies facedown on a bed, his eyes glassy, his mouth puddled in a stuporous grin, his pants pulled down around his ankles. There is a remote-controlled, multi-pronged pink vibrator resting along the crest of his buttocks, lazily whirring in a clockwise motion, like a rotating finger. A whip-pan stage left shows a driver's license pinned to a wall -- a subtle parody of the countlessb porn ingenues forced to comply with Title 18, Section 2257 of the U.S. Code, the federal record-keeping law passed in the wake of the Traci Lords scandal to make sure the adult film industry stays that way. Except nobody here is acting brazen or flirty or petulant or even just the slightest bit naughty. It's more like one of those hostage videos from war-ravaged Iraq, its subject disheveled, sleep deprived, and, just maybe, fearing something on the order of a live, on'?camera beheading."My name is Joe Francis," he says over and over in a damaged monotone. "I'm from Boys Gone Wild, and I like it up the ass."This blockbuster video, which you cannot buy through late-night TV ads or a vanity Web site, was to have been the centerpiece of what was shaping up to be the first Trial of the Century, an O.J.-size opus for the porn-drenched, fame-addled, meta-logical, proto-YouTube generation, slated for Los Angeles Superior Court in late February 2006. Police say Darnell Riley, now thirty-one, a Hollywood strong-arm enforcer, rough-trade Lothario, and now convicted burglar with an apparent taste for the good life, which he was willing to cultivate by any means necessary, planned to sell the tape back to Francis, thirty-five, theGirls Gone Wildimpresario who parlayed a privileged Laguna Beach upbringing into a $100 million empire of ersatz sleaze -- who for once would be playing the victim. The twist -- the hook, as they like to say in Hollywood -- is that the missing link in the case, in fact the Junior G'?Girl whose phone call to police provided them with probable cause to execute a search warrant on Riley's Hollywood apartment, was none other than accidental porn star and heiress aberrant Paris Hilton, the most famous reality-TV star in the history of the world. (Francis says they "dated"; Hilton begs to differ.)Or at least that was how I spun it in my feature article in the November 2005 issue ofRadarmagazine titled "The Hustler, the Heiress and the Soft-Porn King."In the early morning hours of January 22, 2004, Francis returned home from a nightclub to his tony Bel Air mansion to discover the door unlocked, the houselights on, and a masked, light-skinned black man selectively placing his possessions into a Louis Vuitton valise "like he was on a shopping spree." Francis, soft and doughy, quickly dissolved into tears, while the diminutive intruder held him at gunpoint for more than six hours, all the while talking to someone at the other end of a two-way radio. According to Francis's police statement, after walking him from room to room looking for a safe, Riley removed a Sony DV camera and pink sex toy from a Nike backpack in what was obviously a premeditated act, telling his victim, "Don't get me wrong, I'm not a faggot," and forced him into a makeshift porn audition tape, for which Riley attempted to extort upward of $500,000 in ten subsequent phone calls over the next six months. As dawn broke over the serpentine hills, the terrified Francis was eventually bound with black zip-ties covered with duct tape and forced into the back of his Bentley GT, which his assailant(s) left at the bottom of the canyon. (Francis's Ferrari and Bentley, parked in the garage, can be glimpsed at the tail end of the handheld tape, and a woman's voice heard faintly in the background.) Francis claimed he wasEbner, Mark is the author of 'Six Degrees of Paris Hilton: Inside the Sex Tapes, Scandals, and Shakedowns of the New Hollywood', published 2009 under ISBN 9781416959342 and ISBN 1416959343.