Bloggers everywhere (Boing Boing, which means bloggers everywhere) have been talking about this profile by Claire Hoffman of Joe Francis, the founder and creator of Girls Gone Wild, the video series which– well, you know what it’s about. Girls. Go wild. And take their tops off.

Hoffman is being praised all over the place for the story– mainly, for her lead, which details Francis throwing her up against a car in a demonstration of his own arrest.

Joe Francis, the founder of the “Girls Gone Wild” empire, is humiliating me. He has my face pressed against the hood of a car, my arms twisted hard behind my back. He’s pushing himself against me, shouting: “This is what they did to me in Panama City!”

It’s after 3 a.m. and we’re in a parking lot on the outskirts of Chicago. Electronic music is buzzing from the nightclub across the street, mixing easily with the laughter of the guys who are watching this, this me-pinned-and-helpless thing.

Francis isn’t laughing.

Now, as leads go, it’s not a bad one. It’s a pretty good one. It grabs your attention and makes you want to find out what happens next. But is it good journalism?

Here’s where things get interesting: I’m going to say no.

I’m going to say that Claire Hoffman showed unprofessionalism and ego in her story about Joe Francis. I’m going to say that she did things wrong. And I’m even going to allege– and I know this will be extremely unpopular of me– that she actually did what Joe Francis says she did: let herself be victimized.

Now, before you think I’m crazy (or is it too late?), let me clarify. Joe Francis is a complete tool. He is the kind of guy, as the article says, who would get invited to partner with someone on a money-making idea, and then steal the idea for himself. He degrades and attacks women, and makes money while doing it. He’s accused, in the piece, of torturing women, victimizing them, and even raping, or at least taking advantage of, an 18-year-old girl, a virgin no less. Joe Francis is no doubt a terrible person. And I’m not here to defend him.

But simply telling the story of what a goon Francis is doesn’t seem to be enough for Hoffman. She goes out of her way, throughout the piece, to insert herself and her relationship with Francis into the action. You could say that she simply wants to reinforce that this guy’s still bad by listing her own personal experiences with him, but to me, it sounds like she’s bragging. Here’s what she says about Francis’ own attempt at press.

Francis has manufactured his own celebrity. He has become famous not just by selling soft porn but by affiliating himself with a tribe whose notoriety is perpetuated by the tabloids. He’s been romantically linked to heiress Paris Hilton and Kimberly Stewart, Rod Stewart’s daughter, and the gossip columns have reported that he’s hosted Lindsay Lohan, Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn at his house in Mexico.

Until recently, the New York Post’s Page Six, the paper of record for this world, treated Francis as an inconsequential hanger-on. Then, in March, Francis hosted a bachelor party in Mexico for Richard Johnson, the page’s editor, and within weeks Page Six was wondering if he could be the next Hugh Hefner and even a likely candidate to buy Playboy.

Francis happily acknowledges that he courts attention. The effort, he says, is not about his ego but about selling his product. “Everything that gets covered in my name drives the business,” he says. “The two are synonymous. You have to play the image up.”

But then, here’s what she says about a personal “conversation” (as if this can be called a conversation) she has with Francis.

“My favorite is explaining to dumb chicks why the qwerty keyboard is called a qwerty keyboard, and why the letters aren’t in order,” he tells me. “They’re, like, 18 years old, and they’re, like, ‘Wait a minute, there were typewriters?’ And you got to start there.”

I give him a look that says I have no idea what he’s talking about. I haven’t spent much time with 18-year-old girls lately, but the ones I know have usually heard of typewriters. But a qwerty keyboard? Never heard of it.

His eyes register my blank stare and he pounces, full of glee. “Hold on,” he says excitedly. “You are a writer for the L.A. Times and you don’t know this answer to this question?” He is shouting, turning to the back of the plane, making sure that everyone hears. “Unbelievable, she’s 29 years old and she doesn’t know about the qwerty keyboard!” It’s a game, it seems. He’s being playful. Sort of.

“She’s going to slaughter me now,” he shouts to the group as I keep smiling, writing in my notebook, tape recorder running. Apparently, he wants more of a reaction. He’s pantomiming me typing furiously, writing an article.

How much of that is about him, and how much is about her? Is she pointing out that Francis considers her a “dumb chick” for a reason? We don’t need to see this conversation at all– if the worst thing Francis ever said to her about eighteen-year-old girls during their whole time together is that they don’t know what a “Qwerty” keyboard is (so called because of the top left line of letters on a keyboard placed that way because commonly used letters were supposed to be placed as far apart as possible, to keep the typewriter hammers from jamming– Hoffman leaves the answer to Francis’ question out of the article), then she probably wasn’t listening very well.

Here’s her following Francis around at a club in Chicago.

I follow Francis and his bodyguard through the crowd to find Kaitlyn Bultema. She’s dancing on a podium and leaps off at the sight of Francis. She’s wearing a skirt-and-shirt ensemble that exposes her stomach, most of her breasts and much of her bottom. I ask her why she wants to appear on “Girls Gone Wild” and she looks me in the eye and says, “I want everybody to see me because I’m hot.”

It’s then that it hits me: This is so much bigger than Francis. In a culture where cheap and portable video technology lets everyone play at stardom, and where America’s voyeuristic appetite for reality television seems insatiable, teenagers, like the ones in this club, see cameras as validation. “Most guys want to have sex with me and maybe I could meet one new guy, but if I get filmed everyone could see me,” Bultema says. “If you do this, you might get noticed by somebody—to be an actress or a model.”

Now that’s an interesting story. Hoffman also notes in the story that Francis is having problems with Girls Gone Wild being so big– the girls that are showing up to his shoots aren’t as innocent as they used to be. Most of them, for one reason or another, actually want to be in his movies. They want to buy into his schemes. They want to be victimized in that fashion. That, as Hoffman says, is a problem with the culture, and she goes on to describe in detail one such woman’s experience with Francis– an eighteen-year-old stripper who is so impressed that Francis wants to talk to her that she lets him take her virginity. Now that’s a hell of a story, and in those scenes, Hoffman gives us unprecedented access to the kind of monster Francis really is.

Unfortunately, that’s when she starts getting petty.

Francis sounds scared in the message he leaves on my office voicemail: “I’ve seen some excerpts from your article that I guess you’ve sent to the photographer and, um, I want to talk to you about it.”

No photographer has been assigned to the story, and no excerpts have been sent to anyone.

I don’t call Francis back right away, so he calls my editor. He tells her that I have a crush on him, that I have an ax to grind because I am jealous and angry.

“I just felt that Claire may have had a little affinity for me,” he says as she takes notes. “It may have come out when she had a few drinks.” He describes my behavior as aggressively romantic. “Originally she hit on me. That’s how I met her. I took her to a lunch. She called me all the time and it wasn’t about work. It was about me. I know when a girl has a crush on me.”

He tells her I was drinking heavily—”we all were”—and offers to send photographs to prove it. When my editor asks if he put his hands on me that night, he doesn’t hesitate.

“I did absolutely get physical with her—but not romantically,” he says. “We were outside standing by a police car. The officer told her to quit taking notes on what he was saying. I said, ‘There’s no freedom of the press here.’ I took her arms behind her back and said, ‘Let’s take her to jail.’ I said she should go to jail and the officer agreed with me. She didn’t get the sarcasm. She listened to him. She stopped writing. Can you believe that? That’s the 1st Amendment. She’s not a journalist. I stand up for the 1st Amendment. But she didn’t.” My problem, he tells my editor, is that I “wasn’t smart enough” to “get” what he was saying.

Here’s a tip: anytime a writer uses quotes around just one word (in this case “get”), they’re pulling everything they can out of context to tell their own side of the story. I’m not saying Francis isn’t being a total ass. I’m not saying he didn’t grab a woman by the arm and hurt her– I’m under the full belief that he did. I am saying, however, that Hoffman is doing the wrong thing here. She’s writing about herself, not the story. She’s quoting Joe Francis, not because he’s saying interesting things (all she had to do to get a scene like this was look in his police record, obviously), but because he’s insulting her. “Look at me,” I hear her saying. “I’m a great reporter because my subject is angry at me.”

Speaking of getting subjects angry at you, the only other article I can find by Hoffman is this piece on the LA Times website (the Times bio says she “covers Hollywood and the adult entertainment industry”) on “Tom Cruise and Scientology.” Any reporter worth her salt knows that if you want to choose a confrontational subject in Los Angeles, you couldn’t do much better than Tom Cruise and Scientology. And yet there Hoffman is– it’s almost as if she is daring her subject to be angry with her. She puts Tom Cruise in the lead, in the headline, and writes three full pages about him. And yet, even though she’s working with another writer, they couldn’t get the man to say one word to them: “Cruise and Miscavige declined requests for interviews.”

And then there’s that final scene in the Francis piece. The headline comes from there, and it seems like it’s the most genuine back and forth we get to see between Francis and Hoffman. It’s also, not surprisingly, a return to the incident in the lead.

When I think back on that night, our very public scuffle isn’t what seems the most revealing. Instead, the moment I saw Francis most clearly—his charm, his rage, his cunning and even his regret—came later, when no one was looking. I was waiting, still shaken, outside the club for a cab to take me back to my hotel. Francis, who had disappeared inside the bus, returned.

Ignoring the two policemen who hovered a few yards away, he tiptoed past them to stand over me. He rubbed my shoulder. His gestures were oddly gentle—even fond. I felt sick.

“I’m sorry,” he said, reaching over to tousle my hair. “We love our little reporter. Don’t we guys? We love our little reporter.”

I stared down at the dirt as he whispered in my ear, “I’m sorry, baby, give me a kiss. Give me a kiss.”

He just hurt her, and she lets him rub her shoulder? He just grabbed her arm and slammed her up against a car, and she lets him tousle her hair? On what planet does a guy like Joe Francis hurt a woman in this way, and then ask her for a kiss without at the very least getting socked in the face, if not kicked between the legs?

On Earth, apparently. I guess being the victim makes a better story for Hoffman than a woman who’s willing to stand up to Francis and not take any of his crap. There is a great story in this piece: it’s of a horrible man and how he makes his fortunes. It’s a picture that’s worth showing to everyone who can stand it. But I just wish Hoffman could have kept herself out of the frame.