January 23, 2025 • 30 mins
In this Hawk Tuah bonus episode, Jamie connects the man on the street TikTok content that made Haliey Welch famous to its media ancestor — the Girls Gone Wild craze of the 2000s. We talk with former GGW street team member and incredible podcaster Courtney Kocak to learn more about how exploiting drunk women for men’s profit became a million dollar industry.
Follow Courtney’s work @courtneykocak and listen to Private Parts Unknown here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/private-parts-unknown-sex-love-around-the-world/id1154304419
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cold Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
Say Your Excusing.
Speaker 3 (00:24):
Sixty six six Welcome back to sixteenth Minute, the podcast
(01:00):
where we take a look at the internet's characters of
the day to see how their moment affected them and
what that says about us and the Internet. I'm your host,
Jamie Loftus, and today we are continuing to talk about
Hailey Welch, the Hawk to a Girl, well kind of.
When we left off, we were talking about the style
(01:20):
of content that launched Haley to prominence, in her case,
a channel called Tim and d TV that posted clips
across TikTok, YouTube and Instagram. And when I saw the
formula that made their videos popular, it felt kind of
familiar to me. Quickly edited footage of drunk women saying dirty,
(01:42):
silly shit outside of bars, while the men who ran
the show with basically no charisma egged them on to
say more. It reminded me of something, but I couldn't
quite put my finger on what this is. A couple
weeks ago, and then one day, as I was walking
through an outdoor mall to cure my depression, I heard
(02:06):
the distant sound of a steel drum and then it
came to me. My nipples hardened in fear not the
fun way. I knew what these surveillance TikTok channels reminded
me of Girls Gone Wild, Yes, the Girls Gone Wild
home video craze of the nineties and two thousands, videos
(02:30):
of young attractive women, usually drunk and of even more
dubious consent than the TikTok exploitation videos we see now.
The tapes were pioneered by a bag of shit reality
pioneer by the name of Joe Francis, who occasionally appeared
on the tapes goading normal women into flashing their boobs
to the tune of millions of dollars. They were unbelievably popular,
(02:54):
but these tapes legacies weren't examined in detail until recently
by an amazing jost. I have a strong parasocial relationship
with named Scotchy Cole that began streaming on Peacock in
December twenty twenty four. And this docuseries isn't just a
damning profile of Joe Francis, who, by the way, is
(03:15):
a fugitive living in a Mexican villa after a series
of lawsuits that include child abuse for filming and profiting
from the exposed breasts of underage girls, bracketeering, false.
Speaker 4 (03:26):
Imprisonment of women in his home.
Speaker 5 (03:29):
The list gets worse and worse.
Speaker 3 (03:31):
The docuseries is a look into how the girls and
women who appeared in Girls Gone Wild were treated in
the moment and after their appearance was made public. This
series was surveillance an exploitation at its finest, only this
wasn't the proto reality hidden camera surveillance. The appeal of
(03:54):
Girls Gone Wild was how normal these girls were, how
vulnerable they seemed, and how as they were flashing you
they were looking right into the camera. And because these
were distributed by ordering VHS tapes over the phone, they
weren't regulated like normal TV would be, and weren't beholden
to Internet terms of service. And apparently at the time,
(04:18):
no one really cared about the level of consent that
the women who appeared in the tapes had provided them.
And don't even get me started on the Hurricane Katrina
fundraising tape from Girls Gone Wild featuring old clips from
exploited women in New Orleans, hosted by Snoop Dogg.
Speaker 5 (04:37):
A real sentence.
Speaker 6 (04:38):
Warning, this video contains explicit material not suitable for children.
If you think Girls Going Wild with Wild before just
waited you see what these girls do when Snoop Dogg
is unleashed and takes control of the camera. It's not
sold in stores and can't be shown on TV. So
call now and get the all new Girls Gone Wild
Doggy Styles hosted by Snoop Dogg, Yours on video or
GBD for just nine ninety nine.
Speaker 3 (04:56):
I highly recommend the Peacock docu series, whose reveals about
Girls Gone Wild include the dubious or complete lack of
consent of the participants, the many underage girls whose bodies
were exploited for the sake of video sales, first hand
accounts of young women whose lives were damaged or destroyed
by their appearance on the tapes, some of whom didn't
(05:19):
even remember being filmed after being plied with alcohol from
Girls Gone Wild producers, and some who were coerced into
performing hardcore sex acts while not sober without proper compensation.
This is not an anti sex work sentiment. These women
were taken advantage of and had little to no agency
(05:41):
as to what appeared in the final product. Nearly thirty
years later, we can pretty easily understand it to be
a horrific operation, but not before it had a tremendously
big influence on Internet content. Girls Gone Wild began distribution
in nineteen ninety seven, just shy of when the Internet
became accessible in the mainstream, but you can feel its
(06:04):
presence in the hawk Tua style content we're still getting today.
Speaker 4 (06:09):
What's one move in bed that makes a man go crazy?
Speaker 5 (06:12):
Every time? Oh, you gotta give him that hawk dude
spit on that night.
Speaker 3 (06:17):
Of course, there are stylistic changes. Joe Francis wasn't splicing
lazy meme videos between clips of drunk women he presented
as eagerly consenting, and it's important to note that in
Tim and D's maybe defense that the women in their
videos are fully clothed because they have to comply with
the rules of the platforms they're beholden to. And so
(06:40):
I actually agree with The New York Times when they
say that their content is sort of a gen Zhig
thirteen version of Girls Gone Wild. It's a concept they've
grown up familiar with, though they would have actually been
too young or not alive enough to buy the VHS
tapes themselves, but the format was normalized and replicated through
(07:02):
subsequent popular mediums, and that format includes the payment structure
of the subjects. Girls Gone Wild would get paid in
T shirts, petty cash, or hats. And while I cannot
certify this, nothing about Tim and D's workflow as they
proudly describe it in their quote unquote tell all YouTube
(07:23):
video the Hawk Truth sounds any better. In fact, their
system might be worse. It doesn't sound like Chelsea Bradford
or Haley Welch ever got the T shirts that the
guys were printing with Haley's face on them. And while
sure Tim and D did appear to get verbal consent
from their subjects on camera, the issues of both the
(07:45):
possibility of consent due to intoxication and the fact that
they aren't checking the ages of the people they're talking to.
Speaker 5 (07:53):
It's not ethical, period.
Speaker 3 (07:55):
A long way of saying, I don't feel bad for
Tim and D for not getting the credit that they
felt they deserved, And upon watching most of Haley's immediate
post hak Tua interviews, mostly on other video podcasts, I
think she was appropriately dismissive of the men who felt
they should be getting a cut of her likeness and words.
(08:17):
Of course, there are plenty of other stereotypes that were
applied to Haley that made this moment possible. The algorithm
always boosts young white women. The hypersexualization of ordinary women
was well established, as was stereotyping Southern accents as uneducated,
as was stereotyping women who admitted to enjoying sex as
(08:40):
objects of ridicule.
Speaker 5 (08:42):
Or slut shaming.
Speaker 3 (08:44):
But one of the few advantages of coming to prominence
in twenty twenty four was that with the right assistance,
Hailey had a shot at seizing her own narrative for
a while anyway. And so to round this first part
of the Talk to a series out, as Hailey Welch
hard launched herself into pop culture and introduced the version
(09:06):
of herself that would be available to the public, I
wanted to talk to someone who's been through this kind
of process only twenty years earlier, my friend and top
tier podcaster Courtney Kochak. When we come back, Welcome back
(09:35):
to sixteenth minute. Since I started writing this episode, we
had to evacuate our home due to the city burning down,
and we are continuing to dig deeper into the lore
of Hailey Welch, the Hawk to a Girl. By now,
I hope it's clear to you that how one views
Hailey Welch and the Hawk to a phenomenon in general,
(09:56):
has a lot to do with who you are and
what your experiences are, something that only becomes clearer as
Haley's image is politicized, warped, and exploited for money as
the months wear on, as we'll talk about next week.
And while I think the result of all of this
is still pretty bleak for her, I have noticed and
(10:16):
honestly kind of agree with a number of people who
have been put through a similar exploitation ringer in years past,
who were actually heartened to see that Haley was able
to rest control of her image back from the guys
who had posted her without her proper consent. But I
wanted to understand that viewpoint better, so I called up
Courtney Kochak, the incredible host of shows like Private Parts.
Speaker 5 (10:40):
Unknown And maybe you didn't know, because I didn't. She
worked for Girls Gone Wild in the mid two thousands,
and she has some thoughts. Here's our talk. I mean,
this is a story that is obviously very entrenched in
the Internet, but I feel like it has all of
these dynamics that far pre date the Internet.
Speaker 4 (11:01):
So I went to college for acting and was like
kind of be an actor, and so I went out
to LA and I, you know, I'm from like a
small town in Minnesota, so like I for whatever, I
had no idea, Like I thought, you know, I had
prepared myself in these certain ways, like I did a
(11:23):
BFA program and like scoured the Internet and was like
unmodeled Mayhem and was like doing all the things that
I thought that I could do. But I was still
so naive and so sheltered. So when I got to LA,
I didn't have any money. I had like two hundred dollars.
I mean seriously, I was staying with a friend in
Van Eyes, so I had no way to pursue what
(11:47):
I was here to pursue. Really, I did the Girls
Gone Wild tour in two thousand and five, and I
was twenty one. I was working this shit job in
the Inland in it was promoting Staples. So I was
going like business to business in the heat of the
Inland empires. Yeah, do you want the easy button for
(12:11):
your business? Like handing out free shit? It was horrible.
That was you know the context of me searching on
Craigslist on my friend's futan, like trying to find another
job to get out of that Hell, and I saw
like do you want to travel for Girls Gone Wild?
Like do you want to go on the tour? Do
you want to be the merch girl? And I was like, oh,
(12:35):
this solves my problems, Like I don't have a permanent home.
I'm kind of like overstaying my welcome on my friend's couch.
I you know, I need money. I submitted for that
Craigslist ad and it was literally like the next day.
I was at work in the Inland Empire and I
(12:56):
faked that I was sick and I went to meet
with them at their offices in Santa Monica. They had
this office building.
Speaker 5 (13:04):
What did you think when you thought Girls Gone Wild?
What was your stance on it at the time.
Speaker 4 (13:08):
Yeah, I had never seen an actual video, you know,
like I'd never seen their product, but the infomercials were ubiquitous,
like that was and they were fun to watch, right.
It was like steel drum music, right, And it was like, yeah,
these little pop up sensors. It looked like a party.
It looked like what they were selling was a fun party,
(13:31):
and like, yeah, girls flash and like, of course they're
cool and it's fun, you know, That's what I thought. Yeah,
so I had no fucking idea. You know, do the interview,
and I think it's going to solve all my problems
because it's I'm not going to have to find this
place to live. I will have money. I had to
look up my tax return and I made I think
(13:54):
I made fifty dollars a day is what I made.
I was on the tour for like seven been weeks,
and so when you'd like do the math off of
what I made, it was forty six dollars. Anyway, I
get on the flight, I go do the interview. They
basically tell me at the interview, like your job is
(14:14):
to make the girls feel comfortable. What they sort of
didn't say is like enough to be exploited, you know.
I you know, And I hadn't seen the video, so
I didn't know exactly, but I could get the vibe.
But I was like, yeah, I'm cool, I'm fun. I
want to be hot enough to do that, you know,
like totally.
Speaker 5 (14:32):
I mean I think that it's like this weird Oh
I've been entrusted with, Like yeah, I've been hired as
a girl's girl.
Speaker 4 (14:39):
And the guy that I met with he had had
Hollywood kind of experiences. But it seemed adjacent to what
I wanted to do, so I was like I could
kind of kid myself into feeling like it was like
sort of like the entertainment industry. And yeah, I left
like literally the next day, went to Vancouver, and and
(15:00):
then obviously we didn't have work permits in Canada. We
were in Canada like half the time I was on
the tour. It was two thousand and five, so Joe
was starting to have legal problems at this point. And
I never met him, but he definitely loomed large. He'd
already i think, been on People magazine, and when we
(15:21):
went to bars and stuff, it's like people knew about
about him and like wanted to meet him. And then
we were traveling in this garish branded bus that just
said like girls Gone Wild. When we started doing the
club events, I was like, Oh, this is kind of
like a sham, Like we're not bringing the party at all.
Speaker 5 (15:44):
Really, what do you mean?
Speaker 4 (15:46):
If you saw the infomercials, you would think like we
were going to roll up and there were going to
be a bunch of girls, like we were going to
bring the girls, you know, But it was just OK.
I was the only girl, and I was like I
just saw a picture of myself. I was a baby,
Like I was a little like fat cheeked, little bib
twenty one year old baby.
Speaker 5 (16:07):
And you were the only girls that they brought. Yes,
So were they just relying on the like, hey, we're
going to be in this spot at this time and
just sort of had people come do the work for.
Speaker 4 (16:17):
Them basically, yeah, I mean you saw the documentary, so
it's like that was their whole thing was that they
didn't want urban girls either, like we sometimes were in cities,
but we were trying to get out of the cities
asap because cities, college towns. It's like they didn't want
anybody that was kind of like hipped to what they
were doing. They really wanted like a small town where
(16:41):
people were naive.
Speaker 5 (16:43):
Like it would be more of an event versus and.
Speaker 4 (16:46):
Yes, and it would be more of an event. But
they were also not like there weren't you know, a
bunch of feminists to be like, hey, what the fuck's
going on here?
Speaker 3 (16:54):
You know, right right?
Speaker 5 (16:55):
You don't have the counter protesters either.
Speaker 4 (16:57):
What they were doing is drawing the girls from the
town that they could then shoot and have be the
product that they were selling. Obviously, nobody got paid. I
didn't see anyone get paid except one girl was a
stripper and so she knew how to negotiate with them.
She knew to ask for money, you know, she like
(17:18):
had a little savvy about it. But nobody else got paid.
Speaker 5 (17:22):
Were their consent forms? Was there any like checking of
people's ages? Like how did that side work?
Speaker 4 (17:28):
They had already gotten in trouble for this at this point.
I think the age thing, you know, it was pretty specific,
like the girl had to like hold up the ID
and say on camera that she consented and signed the thing.
Like there were like a few steps to the lockdown
the consent form.
Speaker 5 (17:48):
So that's yeah. That's the other thing too, is like
in retrospect, it's like, Okay, I think that honestly, getting
a piece of paper is more than a lot of
these on the street TikTokers do now. But it's also like,
what is that piece of paper if you're got drunk
when you sign it?
Speaker 4 (18:03):
I think they should be obviously, I don't know. It's
like they are over eighteen. It's like technically, yes, it's
a legal document, but to sign a thing where you're
like giving permission to sell your body when you're drunk.
I mean it should be illegal to ask someone to
(18:25):
sign that document.
Speaker 5 (18:26):
I think on a normal night, while you're on this
bus tour, what does it look.
Speaker 4 (18:32):
Like for you? Well, we did. We had so many issues,
like getting dates canceled, so it's not like we were
working every night, thank god. But like when we did
have an event on our good club nights, I would
be selling T shirts, which was kind of hard to do,
or sometimes the T shirts were being given away, you know,
(18:54):
to the girls, but yeah, that was my job. And
then hanging out on the bus us, you know, pouring
drinks and just like being a girl, which they told
me would be the job, Like just to have you
there is gonna make the other girls want to hang out.
I wasn't like in the room when the naked stuff
(19:15):
was happening, but I but I would see them. For me,
the most fucked up part, I mean, this is really
I don't know, we've never talked about this before, but
like this is like a defining thing for me. When
I was twenty and twenty one, it's like I got
raped twice. I did Girls Gone Wild, and then when
I was twenty three, I had an abortion and by
the end, I was like, oh, I don't, I'm like
(19:37):
a totally different person. What I was about to say
is one of the things that really made me depressed
when I was on this tour was like the whole
vibe of it was like, we're rating women constantly on
a scale from one to ten. We're scouting for these
women to be in our scenes, even if we're like
out at dinner or you know whatever. Just like twenty
(19:59):
four to seven guy's got paid five hundred bucks or
whatever for a scene if they could get a scene,
which was it would be like a girl eating an
out another girl, or playing with sex toys, or a
scene is like, you know, like a porn scene.
Speaker 5 (20:15):
So the women doing this are signing consent forums and
doing it for free or for merch But if you're
a guy who could convince them to do it, yes,
you make five hundred.
Speaker 4 (20:26):
Dollars, yes, or I don't know exactly the amount, like
maybe it was like two hundred or something, you know,
but yes, you were getting paid. You make money.
Speaker 5 (20:34):
What was it like sort of observing that and processing
that because I also know you were like a baby
feminist at this point too, and.
Speaker 4 (20:40):
Like, well, and I just I want to caveat this
by saying like I am very yes, I'm a feminist
and I was finding my feminism at the time, but like,
I'm very sex positive.
Speaker 7 (20:51):
I sure have an only fans, Like, you know, I'm
not coming at this like a prude, like I'm coming
at this just in a way of like, oh, I
grew up in the education system and I thought we
were equal, and it turns out these women have no agency,
and actually I don't have any agency either, right, It's
(21:13):
like it was a devastating thing to learn.
Speaker 4 (21:16):
So actually I ate my feelings, Like, is what wound
up happening? I gained like fifteen pounds while I was
on the bus, which was just kind of like a
weird side effect of seeing all this happen, But yeah,
it was. And we didn't have language. It was like
pre me too, so I couldn't be like, this is
what I'm witnessing and you know, this is what's wrong
(21:39):
with it. I was just like, ugh, I can't, I
can't be here anymore. Was what wound up happening?
Speaker 5 (21:58):
So what were the circumstances that you left under?
Speaker 4 (22:03):
We wound up kind of getting kicked out of Canada
or like we had to leave in the middle of
the you know, it was like we had to get
an emergency flight out of Toronto about halfway three or
four weeks into my time on the tour. And then
I went to southeast US and we did like North
Carolina and Georgia and Florida. I always forget I've been
(22:24):
to the top of Florida because I just kind of
blocked it out. We also did Saint Louis, Ohio, and
by the end of my time, I can't even really
it's hard for me to remember that part because it
had just gotten so weird for me to be there,
and I realized, like, oh, I'm not like a girl
gone wild right at all. I got to get the
(22:46):
hell out of here. But I had taken this job
because I needed money. So like the whole time I'm
on the tour, debt collectors are calling me because like
I hadn't paid my credit card. It's not like I
had a place to go back to in LA And
also so I was so adamant about like what I'm
going to do, and I have these like very quaint
(23:06):
Midwestern parents. I wasn't going to call them and be
like listen, so this is what's going on. I was
totally wrong. I was felt trapped, which was like the
worst part of it. Ultimately, I did leave. I left
on I left on September thirtieth, was my twenty second birthday,
and that's when I got back to LA. Yeah, there
(23:28):
was some day where we were in like Alabama or
like Florida or something, and it was just like oppressive
heat and I just could not anymore. And I told
the guy, and I was like I didn't want to.
I was kind of afraid they were going to make
me pay for my flight home or I really didn't
know how I was going to get out of there.
And then yeah, that was like the one night. I
(23:50):
don't even think they made me work that night.
Speaker 5 (23:52):
Because it's like the absolute least they can do. I
hate that. I'm surprised.
Speaker 4 (23:58):
And then I flew back and I was just really
fucked up for a year and a half. I mean,
like best case scenario was kind of like you were
drunk and you actually signed the release form and there
were girls like on the documentary that didn't even consent
to being filmed period right, And.
Speaker 5 (24:18):
I mean it's like cases of like underage girls that
were like I was too drunk to consent and I
was seventeen, And yeah, once you had moved on from
that and you're like, Okay, whatever I want to do,
it's fucking not this. Did you notice as the years passed,
(24:38):
like what girls Gone Wild kind of legacy was? Did
you see it pop up in other areas of media.
Speaker 4 (24:44):
It was such a huge cultural thing, the gone Wild
joke or whatever it was said by like everyone, And
I feel like that's part of the insidious normalization. Is
just like if you're fucking straight laced politician is making
jokes about it too, it seems so normal.
Speaker 5 (25:05):
Yeah, and he's broken through.
Speaker 4 (25:07):
Joe was. It's like he made millions of dollars. I mean,
there was the legal stuff that was sort of like bubbling,
but like he wasn't really disrespected in the culture. He
was like held up as like this guy who made it.
And so that's probably what these guys now. It's so
funny to think about these guys now because they're targeting
(25:30):
specifically drunk people and definitely does have some a whiff
of Girls Gone Wild what they're doing. But I had
written about it for the first time, the Girl's Gone
Wild thing in twenty twelve. And the way that I
write about it today isn't like drastically different from the
way that I wrote about it then, So like I
knew exactly what had happened, and I could articulate it
(25:52):
then before I even had the language, Like I knew
that this exploitation was happening, and I could identify my
role in it. Today feels like drastically different. That's why
it almost until you reframed it, Like I wasn't like, oh,
Huktu is a victim. It's like Hucktua seems like such
a privileged, you know, version of that. It's like she
(26:15):
wasn't naked, she was just making a sex joke. It
had nothing to do with her actually doing a sex act.
Speaker 5 (26:23):
You can't get away with what Joe Francis was doing
in the same way anymore, not even close. No, And
I think that that's an amazing thing. And I but
and then there's also this like whiff of like but
they're there. People will figure out a way to exploit
young women no matter what.
Speaker 4 (26:41):
Really, OnlyFans is like the you know, next level of
girls gone wild. And yes there are people who are
they'll be the management company for these girls and like
they will get a huge cut of the profit and
they'll do the chatting and whatever, and that is a
little bit predatory, but it's nowhere near girls none wild,
(27:03):
and most of what is happening on OnlyFans is girls
themselves being like, oh I'm gonna monotize, and I'm not
saying sometimes it happens also when they're twenty one and
too mentally immature to really like properly probably make that decision.
(27:23):
But they are making the money themselves. They are making
like thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands, occasionally millions of dollars,
And to me, that is like such an encouraging sign.
I am really glad that, like we we have language
now and the only fans thing is is an evolution
in a positive way for sure, and so I do
(27:46):
just want to acknowledge like the positive moves, but yeah,
the culture still is not fixed all the like your body,
my choice stuff too. It felt like, oh, maybe we
really did kind of fix this. And then I was like, oh, mine,
as soon as you think that, you will be shocked
(28:06):
back into thinking realizing like, oh no, we're still there.
Speaker 3 (28:10):
Thank you so so much to Courtney, and you can
follow her across all platforms at Courtney Cochek Kocak. I
wanted to add that little bonus just to give some
more context into where this content comes from. But the
fact remains. We're at the end of week one of
the Hawk Tua series and I have managed to get
(28:32):
us to I think the second day of the Hawk
to as story.
Speaker 5 (28:37):
But stay with me here.
Speaker 3 (28:38):
There are so many repeating patterns inside this story, both
in the ways that Hayley is framed, the decision she makes,
and the way the public reacts to her. And whether
you like this woman or not, whether you agree with
what she thinks, or the kind of audience she pulls,
or the kinds of people she's been surrounded by. Plenty
(28:58):
of this is up for discussion, and she was put
in an extremely weird position to navigate her way through
or out of, and from what I can gather, it
was not necessarily voluntarily. So now that we have a
better understanding of how she got here, who the fuck
is Hailey Welch and how the fuck does she end
(29:20):
up in a crypto scam six months after this that's
next week on sixteenth minute, and a.
Speaker 5 (29:26):
Little foreshadowing to close out this episode. I hate to
interrupt you, but hello there.
Speaker 3 (29:32):
But any who, I'm gonna go to bed and I'll
see you guys next Tuesday.
Speaker 5 (29:37):
Bye.
Speaker 2 (29:42):
Sixteenth Minute is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
It is written, posted, and produced by me Jamie Loftus.
Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans. The
amazing Ian Johnson is our supervising producer and our editor.
Speaker 4 (29:58):
Our theme song is by Sad thirteen.
Speaker 2 (30:01):
Voice acting is from Brant Crater and pet Shout outs
to our dog producer Anderson, my cat's fleeing Casper, and
my pet rock Bird, who will outlive us all.
Speaker 5 (30:10):
Bye.
Cold Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
Say Your Excusing.
Speaker 3 (00:24):
Sixty six six Welcome back to sixteenth Minute, the podcast
(01:00):
where we take a look at the internet's characters of
the day to see how their moment affected them and
what that says about us and the Internet. I'm your host,
Jamie Loftus, and today we are continuing to talk about
Hailey Welch, the Hawk to a Girl, well kind of.
When we left off, we were talking about the style
(01:20):
of content that launched Haley to prominence, in her case,
a channel called Tim and d TV that posted clips
across TikTok, YouTube and Instagram. And when I saw the
formula that made their videos popular, it felt kind of
familiar to me. Quickly edited footage of drunk women saying dirty,
(01:42):
silly shit outside of bars, while the men who ran
the show with basically no charisma egged them on to
say more. It reminded me of something, but I couldn't
quite put my finger on what this is. A couple
weeks ago, and then one day, as I was walking
through an outdoor mall to cure my depression, I heard
(02:06):
the distant sound of a steel drum and then it
came to me. My nipples hardened in fear not the
fun way. I knew what these surveillance TikTok channels reminded
me of Girls Gone Wild, Yes, the Girls Gone Wild
home video craze of the nineties and two thousands, videos
(02:30):
of young attractive women, usually drunk and of even more
dubious consent than the TikTok exploitation videos we see now.
The tapes were pioneered by a bag of shit reality
pioneer by the name of Joe Francis, who occasionally appeared
on the tapes goading normal women into flashing their boobs
to the tune of millions of dollars. They were unbelievably popular,
(02:54):
but these tapes legacies weren't examined in detail until recently
by an amazing jost. I have a strong parasocial relationship
with named Scotchy Cole that began streaming on Peacock in
December twenty twenty four. And this docuseries isn't just a
damning profile of Joe Francis, who, by the way, is
(03:15):
a fugitive living in a Mexican villa after a series
of lawsuits that include child abuse for filming and profiting
from the exposed breasts of underage girls, bracketeering, false.
Speaker 4 (03:26):
Imprisonment of women in his home.
Speaker 5 (03:29):
The list gets worse and worse.
Speaker 3 (03:31):
The docuseries is a look into how the girls and
women who appeared in Girls Gone Wild were treated in
the moment and after their appearance was made public. This
series was surveillance an exploitation at its finest, only this
wasn't the proto reality hidden camera surveillance. The appeal of
(03:54):
Girls Gone Wild was how normal these girls were, how
vulnerable they seemed, and how as they were flashing you
they were looking right into the camera. And because these
were distributed by ordering VHS tapes over the phone, they
weren't regulated like normal TV would be, and weren't beholden
to Internet terms of service. And apparently at the time,
(04:18):
no one really cared about the level of consent that
the women who appeared in the tapes had provided them.
And don't even get me started on the Hurricane Katrina
fundraising tape from Girls Gone Wild featuring old clips from
exploited women in New Orleans, hosted by Snoop Dogg.
Speaker 5 (04:37):
A real sentence.
Speaker 6 (04:38):
Warning, this video contains explicit material not suitable for children.
If you think Girls Going Wild with Wild before just
waited you see what these girls do when Snoop Dogg
is unleashed and takes control of the camera. It's not
sold in stores and can't be shown on TV. So
call now and get the all new Girls Gone Wild
Doggy Styles hosted by Snoop Dogg, Yours on video or
GBD for just nine ninety nine.
Speaker 3 (04:56):
I highly recommend the Peacock docu series, whose reveals about
Girls Gone Wild include the dubious or complete lack of
consent of the participants, the many underage girls whose bodies
were exploited for the sake of video sales, first hand
accounts of young women whose lives were damaged or destroyed
by their appearance on the tapes, some of whom didn't
(05:19):
even remember being filmed after being plied with alcohol from
Girls Gone Wild producers, and some who were coerced into
performing hardcore sex acts while not sober without proper compensation.
This is not an anti sex work sentiment. These women
were taken advantage of and had little to no agency
(05:41):
as to what appeared in the final product. Nearly thirty
years later, we can pretty easily understand it to be
a horrific operation, but not before it had a tremendously
big influence on Internet content. Girls Gone Wild began distribution
in nineteen ninety seven, just shy of when the Internet
became accessible in the mainstream, but you can feel its
(06:04):
presence in the hawk Tua style content we're still getting today.
Speaker 4 (06:09):
What's one move in bed that makes a man go crazy?
Speaker 5 (06:12):
Every time? Oh, you gotta give him that hawk dude
spit on that night.
Speaker 3 (06:17):
Of course, there are stylistic changes. Joe Francis wasn't splicing
lazy meme videos between clips of drunk women he presented
as eagerly consenting, and it's important to note that in
Tim and D's maybe defense that the women in their
videos are fully clothed because they have to comply with
the rules of the platforms they're beholden to. And so
(06:40):
I actually agree with The New York Times when they
say that their content is sort of a gen Zhig
thirteen version of Girls Gone Wild. It's a concept they've
grown up familiar with, though they would have actually been
too young or not alive enough to buy the VHS
tapes themselves, but the format was normalized and replicated through
(07:02):
subsequent popular mediums, and that format includes the payment structure
of the subjects. Girls Gone Wild would get paid in
T shirts, petty cash, or hats. And while I cannot
certify this, nothing about Tim and D's workflow as they
proudly describe it in their quote unquote tell all YouTube
(07:23):
video the Hawk Truth sounds any better. In fact, their
system might be worse. It doesn't sound like Chelsea Bradford
or Haley Welch ever got the T shirts that the
guys were printing with Haley's face on them. And while
sure Tim and D did appear to get verbal consent
from their subjects on camera, the issues of both the
(07:45):
possibility of consent due to intoxication and the fact that
they aren't checking the ages of the people they're talking to.
Speaker 5 (07:53):
It's not ethical, period.
Speaker 3 (07:55):
A long way of saying, I don't feel bad for
Tim and D for not getting the credit that they
felt they deserved, And upon watching most of Haley's immediate
post hak Tua interviews, mostly on other video podcasts, I
think she was appropriately dismissive of the men who felt
they should be getting a cut of her likeness and words.
(08:17):
Of course, there are plenty of other stereotypes that were
applied to Haley that made this moment possible. The algorithm
always boosts young white women. The hypersexualization of ordinary women
was well established, as was stereotyping Southern accents as uneducated,
as was stereotyping women who admitted to enjoying sex as
(08:40):
objects of ridicule.
Speaker 5 (08:42):
Or slut shaming.
Speaker 3 (08:44):
But one of the few advantages of coming to prominence
in twenty twenty four was that with the right assistance,
Hailey had a shot at seizing her own narrative for
a while anyway. And so to round this first part
of the Talk to a series out, as Hailey Welch
hard launched herself into pop culture and introduced the version
(09:06):
of herself that would be available to the public, I
wanted to talk to someone who's been through this kind
of process only twenty years earlier, my friend and top
tier podcaster Courtney Kochak. When we come back, Welcome back
(09:35):
to sixteenth minute. Since I started writing this episode, we
had to evacuate our home due to the city burning down,
and we are continuing to dig deeper into the lore
of Hailey Welch, the Hawk to a Girl. By now,
I hope it's clear to you that how one views
Hailey Welch and the Hawk to a phenomenon in general,
(09:56):
has a lot to do with who you are and
what your experiences are, something that only becomes clearer as
Haley's image is politicized, warped, and exploited for money as
the months wear on, as we'll talk about next week.
And while I think the result of all of this
is still pretty bleak for her, I have noticed and
(10:16):
honestly kind of agree with a number of people who
have been put through a similar exploitation ringer in years past,
who were actually heartened to see that Haley was able
to rest control of her image back from the guys
who had posted her without her proper consent. But I
wanted to understand that viewpoint better, so I called up
Courtney Kochak, the incredible host of shows like Private Parts.
Speaker 5 (10:40):
Unknown And maybe you didn't know, because I didn't. She
worked for Girls Gone Wild in the mid two thousands,
and she has some thoughts. Here's our talk. I mean,
this is a story that is obviously very entrenched in
the Internet, but I feel like it has all of
these dynamics that far pre date the Internet.
Speaker 4 (11:01):
So I went to college for acting and was like
kind of be an actor, and so I went out
to LA and I, you know, I'm from like a
small town in Minnesota, so like I for whatever, I
had no idea, Like I thought, you know, I had
prepared myself in these certain ways, like I did a
(11:23):
BFA program and like scoured the Internet and was like
unmodeled Mayhem and was like doing all the things that
I thought that I could do. But I was still
so naive and so sheltered. So when I got to LA,
I didn't have any money. I had like two hundred dollars.
I mean seriously, I was staying with a friend in
Van Eyes, so I had no way to pursue what
(11:47):
I was here to pursue. Really, I did the Girls
Gone Wild tour in two thousand and five, and I
was twenty one. I was working this shit job in
the Inland in it was promoting Staples. So I was
going like business to business in the heat of the
Inland empires. Yeah, do you want the easy button for
(12:11):
your business? Like handing out free shit? It was horrible.
That was you know the context of me searching on
Craigslist on my friend's futan, like trying to find another
job to get out of that Hell, and I saw
like do you want to travel for Girls Gone Wild?
Like do you want to go on the tour? Do
you want to be the merch girl? And I was like, oh,
(12:35):
this solves my problems, Like I don't have a permanent home.
I'm kind of like overstaying my welcome on my friend's couch.
I you know, I need money. I submitted for that
Craigslist ad and it was literally like the next day.
I was at work in the Inland Empire and I
(12:56):
faked that I was sick and I went to meet
with them at their offices in Santa Monica. They had
this office building.
Speaker 5 (13:04):
What did you think when you thought Girls Gone Wild?
What was your stance on it at the time.
Speaker 4 (13:08):
Yeah, I had never seen an actual video, you know,
like I'd never seen their product, but the infomercials were ubiquitous,
like that was and they were fun to watch, right.
It was like steel drum music, right, And it was like, yeah,
these little pop up sensors. It looked like a party.
It looked like what they were selling was a fun party,
(13:31):
and like, yeah, girls flash and like, of course they're
cool and it's fun, you know, That's what I thought. Yeah,
so I had no fucking idea. You know, do the interview,
and I think it's going to solve all my problems
because it's I'm not going to have to find this
place to live. I will have money. I had to
look up my tax return and I made I think
(13:54):
I made fifty dollars a day is what I made.
I was on the tour for like seven been weeks,
and so when you'd like do the math off of
what I made, it was forty six dollars. Anyway, I
get on the flight, I go do the interview. They
basically tell me at the interview, like your job is
(14:14):
to make the girls feel comfortable. What they sort of
didn't say is like enough to be exploited, you know.
I you know, And I hadn't seen the video, so
I didn't know exactly, but I could get the vibe.
But I was like, yeah, I'm cool, I'm fun. I
want to be hot enough to do that, you know,
like totally.
Speaker 5 (14:32):
I mean I think that it's like this weird Oh
I've been entrusted with, Like yeah, I've been hired as
a girl's girl.
Speaker 4 (14:39):
And the guy that I met with he had had
Hollywood kind of experiences. But it seemed adjacent to what
I wanted to do, so I was like I could
kind of kid myself into feeling like it was like
sort of like the entertainment industry. And yeah, I left
like literally the next day, went to Vancouver, and and
(15:00):
then obviously we didn't have work permits in Canada. We
were in Canada like half the time I was on
the tour. It was two thousand and five, so Joe
was starting to have legal problems at this point. And
I never met him, but he definitely loomed large. He'd
already i think, been on People magazine, and when we
(15:21):
went to bars and stuff, it's like people knew about
about him and like wanted to meet him. And then
we were traveling in this garish branded bus that just
said like girls Gone Wild. When we started doing the
club events, I was like, Oh, this is kind of
like a sham, Like we're not bringing the party at all.
Speaker 5 (15:44):
Really, what do you mean?
Speaker 4 (15:46):
If you saw the infomercials, you would think like we
were going to roll up and there were going to
be a bunch of girls, like we were going to
bring the girls, you know, But it was just OK.
I was the only girl, and I was like I
just saw a picture of myself. I was a baby,
Like I was a little like fat cheeked, little bib
twenty one year old baby.
Speaker 5 (16:07):
And you were the only girls that they brought. Yes,
So were they just relying on the like, hey, we're
going to be in this spot at this time and
just sort of had people come do the work for.
Speaker 4 (16:17):
Them basically, yeah, I mean you saw the documentary, so
it's like that was their whole thing was that they
didn't want urban girls either, like we sometimes were in cities,
but we were trying to get out of the cities
asap because cities, college towns. It's like they didn't want
anybody that was kind of like hipped to what they
were doing. They really wanted like a small town where
(16:41):
people were naive.
Speaker 5 (16:43):
Like it would be more of an event versus and.
Speaker 4 (16:46):
Yes, and it would be more of an event. But
they were also not like there weren't you know, a
bunch of feminists to be like, hey, what the fuck's
going on here?
Speaker 3 (16:54):
You know, right right?
Speaker 5 (16:55):
You don't have the counter protesters either.
Speaker 4 (16:57):
What they were doing is drawing the girls from the
town that they could then shoot and have be the
product that they were selling. Obviously, nobody got paid. I
didn't see anyone get paid except one girl was a
stripper and so she knew how to negotiate with them.
She knew to ask for money, you know, she like
(17:18):
had a little savvy about it. But nobody else got paid.
Speaker 5 (17:22):
Were their consent forms? Was there any like checking of
people's ages? Like how did that side work?
Speaker 4 (17:28):
They had already gotten in trouble for this at this point.
I think the age thing, you know, it was pretty specific,
like the girl had to like hold up the ID
and say on camera that she consented and signed the thing.
Like there were like a few steps to the lockdown
the consent form.
Speaker 5 (17:48):
So that's yeah. That's the other thing too, is like
in retrospect, it's like, Okay, I think that honestly, getting
a piece of paper is more than a lot of
these on the street TikTokers do now. But it's also like,
what is that piece of paper if you're got drunk
when you sign it?
Speaker 4 (18:03):
I think they should be obviously, I don't know. It's
like they are over eighteen. It's like technically, yes, it's
a legal document, but to sign a thing where you're
like giving permission to sell your body when you're drunk.
I mean it should be illegal to ask someone to
(18:25):
sign that document.
Speaker 5 (18:26):
I think on a normal night, while you're on this
bus tour, what does it look.
Speaker 4 (18:32):
Like for you? Well, we did. We had so many issues,
like getting dates canceled, so it's not like we were
working every night, thank god. But like when we did
have an event on our good club nights, I would
be selling T shirts, which was kind of hard to do,
or sometimes the T shirts were being given away, you know,
(18:54):
to the girls, but yeah, that was my job. And
then hanging out on the bus us, you know, pouring
drinks and just like being a girl, which they told
me would be the job, Like just to have you
there is gonna make the other girls want to hang out.
I wasn't like in the room when the naked stuff
(19:15):
was happening, but I but I would see them. For me,
the most fucked up part, I mean, this is really
I don't know, we've never talked about this before, but
like this is like a defining thing for me. When
I was twenty and twenty one, it's like I got
raped twice. I did Girls Gone Wild, and then when
I was twenty three, I had an abortion and by
the end, I was like, oh, I don't, I'm like
(19:37):
a totally different person. What I was about to say
is one of the things that really made me depressed
when I was on this tour was like the whole
vibe of it was like, we're rating women constantly on
a scale from one to ten. We're scouting for these
women to be in our scenes, even if we're like
out at dinner or you know whatever. Just like twenty
(19:59):
four to seven guy's got paid five hundred bucks or
whatever for a scene if they could get a scene,
which was it would be like a girl eating an
out another girl, or playing with sex toys, or a
scene is like, you know, like a porn scene.
Speaker 5 (20:15):
So the women doing this are signing consent forums and
doing it for free or for merch But if you're
a guy who could convince them to do it, yes,
you make five hundred.
Speaker 4 (20:26):
Dollars, yes, or I don't know exactly the amount, like
maybe it was like two hundred or something, you know,
but yes, you were getting paid. You make money.
Speaker 5 (20:34):
What was it like sort of observing that and processing
that because I also know you were like a baby
feminist at this point too, and.
Speaker 4 (20:40):
Like, well, and I just I want to caveat this
by saying like I am very yes, I'm a feminist
and I was finding my feminism at the time, but like,
I'm very sex positive.
Speaker 7 (20:51):
I sure have an only fans, Like, you know, I'm
not coming at this like a prude, like I'm coming
at this just in a way of like, oh, I
grew up in the education system and I thought we
were equal, and it turns out these women have no agency,
and actually I don't have any agency either, right, It's
(21:13):
like it was a devastating thing to learn.
Speaker 4 (21:16):
So actually I ate my feelings, Like, is what wound
up happening? I gained like fifteen pounds while I was
on the bus, which was just kind of like a
weird side effect of seeing all this happen, But yeah,
it was. And we didn't have language. It was like
pre me too, so I couldn't be like, this is
what I'm witnessing and you know, this is what's wrong
(21:39):
with it. I was just like, ugh, I can't, I
can't be here anymore. Was what wound up happening?
Speaker 5 (21:58):
So what were the circumstances that you left under?
Speaker 4 (22:03):
We wound up kind of getting kicked out of Canada
or like we had to leave in the middle of
the you know, it was like we had to get
an emergency flight out of Toronto about halfway three or
four weeks into my time on the tour. And then
I went to southeast US and we did like North
Carolina and Georgia and Florida. I always forget I've been
(22:24):
to the top of Florida because I just kind of
blocked it out. We also did Saint Louis, Ohio, and
by the end of my time, I can't even really
it's hard for me to remember that part because it
had just gotten so weird for me to be there,
and I realized, like, oh, I'm not like a girl
gone wild right at all. I got to get the
(22:46):
hell out of here. But I had taken this job
because I needed money. So like the whole time I'm
on the tour, debt collectors are calling me because like
I hadn't paid my credit card. It's not like I
had a place to go back to in LA And
also so I was so adamant about like what I'm
going to do, and I have these like very quaint
(23:06):
Midwestern parents. I wasn't going to call them and be
like listen, so this is what's going on. I was
totally wrong. I was felt trapped, which was like the
worst part of it. Ultimately, I did leave. I left
on I left on September thirtieth, was my twenty second birthday,
and that's when I got back to LA. Yeah, there
(23:28):
was some day where we were in like Alabama or
like Florida or something, and it was just like oppressive
heat and I just could not anymore. And I told
the guy, and I was like I didn't want to.
I was kind of afraid they were going to make
me pay for my flight home or I really didn't
know how I was going to get out of there.
And then yeah, that was like the one night. I
(23:50):
don't even think they made me work that night.
Speaker 5 (23:52):
Because it's like the absolute least they can do. I
hate that. I'm surprised.
Speaker 4 (23:58):
And then I flew back and I was just really
fucked up for a year and a half. I mean,
like best case scenario was kind of like you were
drunk and you actually signed the release form and there
were girls like on the documentary that didn't even consent
to being filmed period right, And.
Speaker 5 (24:18):
I mean it's like cases of like underage girls that
were like I was too drunk to consent and I
was seventeen, And yeah, once you had moved on from
that and you're like, Okay, whatever I want to do,
it's fucking not this. Did you notice as the years passed,
(24:38):
like what girls Gone Wild kind of legacy was? Did
you see it pop up in other areas of media.
Speaker 4 (24:44):
It was such a huge cultural thing, the gone Wild
joke or whatever it was said by like everyone, And
I feel like that's part of the insidious normalization. Is
just like if you're fucking straight laced politician is making
jokes about it too, it seems so normal.
Speaker 5 (25:05):
Yeah, and he's broken through.
Speaker 4 (25:07):
Joe was. It's like he made millions of dollars. I mean,
there was the legal stuff that was sort of like bubbling,
but like he wasn't really disrespected in the culture. He
was like held up as like this guy who made it.
And so that's probably what these guys now. It's so
funny to think about these guys now because they're targeting
(25:30):
specifically drunk people and definitely does have some a whiff
of Girls Gone Wild what they're doing. But I had
written about it for the first time, the Girl's Gone
Wild thing in twenty twelve. And the way that I
write about it today isn't like drastically different from the
way that I wrote about it then, So like I
knew exactly what had happened, and I could articulate it
(25:52):
then before I even had the language, Like I knew
that this exploitation was happening, and I could identify my
role in it. Today feels like drastically different. That's why
it almost until you reframed it, Like I wasn't like, oh,
Huktu is a victim. It's like Hucktua seems like such
a privileged, you know, version of that. It's like she
(26:15):
wasn't naked, she was just making a sex joke. It
had nothing to do with her actually doing a sex act.
Speaker 5 (26:23):
You can't get away with what Joe Francis was doing
in the same way anymore, not even close. No, And
I think that that's an amazing thing. And I but
and then there's also this like whiff of like but
they're there. People will figure out a way to exploit
young women no matter what.
Speaker 4 (26:41):
Really, OnlyFans is like the you know, next level of
girls gone wild. And yes there are people who are
they'll be the management company for these girls and like
they will get a huge cut of the profit and
they'll do the chatting and whatever, and that is a
little bit predatory, but it's nowhere near girls none wild,
(27:03):
and most of what is happening on OnlyFans is girls
themselves being like, oh I'm gonna monotize, and I'm not
saying sometimes it happens also when they're twenty one and
too mentally immature to really like properly probably make that decision.
(27:23):
But they are making the money themselves. They are making
like thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands, occasionally millions of dollars,
And to me, that is like such an encouraging sign.
I am really glad that, like we we have language
now and the only fans thing is is an evolution
in a positive way for sure, and so I do
(27:46):
just want to acknowledge like the positive moves, but yeah,
the culture still is not fixed all the like your body,
my choice stuff too. It felt like, oh, maybe we
really did kind of fix this. And then I was like, oh, mine,
as soon as you think that, you will be shocked
(28:06):
back into thinking realizing like, oh no, we're still there.
Speaker 3 (28:10):
Thank you so so much to Courtney, and you can
follow her across all platforms at Courtney Cochek Kocak. I
wanted to add that little bonus just to give some
more context into where this content comes from. But the
fact remains. We're at the end of week one of
the Hawk Tua series and I have managed to get
(28:32):
us to I think the second day of the Hawk
to as story.
Speaker 5 (28:37):
But stay with me here.
Speaker 3 (28:38):
There are so many repeating patterns inside this story, both
in the ways that Hayley is framed, the decision she makes,
and the way the public reacts to her. And whether
you like this woman or not, whether you agree with
what she thinks, or the kind of audience she pulls,
or the kinds of people she's been surrounded by. Plenty
(28:58):
of this is up for discussion, and she was put
in an extremely weird position to navigate her way through
or out of, and from what I can gather, it
was not necessarily voluntarily. So now that we have a
better understanding of how she got here, who the fuck
is Hailey Welch and how the fuck does she end
(29:20):
up in a crypto scam six months after this that's
next week on sixteenth minute, and a.
Speaker 5 (29:26):
Little foreshadowing to close out this episode. I hate to
interrupt you, but hello there.
Speaker 3 (29:32):
But any who, I'm gonna go to bed and I'll
see you guys next Tuesday.
Speaker 5 (29:37):
Bye.
Speaker 2 (29:42):
Sixteenth Minute is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
It is written, posted, and produced by me Jamie Loftus.
Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans. The
amazing Ian Johnson is our supervising producer and our editor.
Speaker 4 (29:58):
Our theme song is by Sad thirteen.
Speaker 2 (30:01):
Voice acting is from Brant Crater and pet Shout outs
to our dog producer Anderson, my cat's fleeing Casper, and
my pet rock Bird, who will outlive us all.
Speaker 5 (30:10):
Bye.
Host
Jamie Loftus
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Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.