28-year old Darnell Riley of Los Angeles pled guilty today to robbing “Girls Gone Wild” creator Joe Francis in his Bel Air home and forcing him at gunpoint to pose for an internet extortion video. Snip from hollywoodinterrupted blog:
[Deputy District Attorney Hoon Chun said Francis] is pleased the ordeal is over. In exchange for the plea, the additional counts of burglary, kidnapping for ransom and carjacking were dismissed. Riley admitted breaking into the victim’s home on Jan. 22, 2004. During the preliminary hearing, Francis testified that Riley first wanted $100,000, then increased his demands to $300,000 and $500,000 and threatened to put the videotape on the Internet if he did not pay. Francis testified he was released after being driven a short distance in his Bentley. Francis also testified that he learned who his assailant was in December 2004 when his ex-girlfriend Paris Hilton pulled him aside at a party and told him what she had learned about the defendant.
Link. Image, clockwise from top left: Francis, Riley, Paris. Here’s an earlier post about the video’s contents:
[It is] stark, grainy. The color is garish, almost fluorescent, possibly from too many generations of loosely authorized copying. A shirtless male figure lies face down on a mattress, his head resting on a pillow. His eyes flutter at half-mast. His mouth is puddled in a stuporous grin, and he looks very, very high. The camera pans to reveal his pants dragged down around his knees and a pink vibrator resting on the crest of his buttocks, lazily gyrating with an irritating whine. The mood is hardly erotic. The man on the screen looks like a hostage in one of those videos streaming out of war-ravaged Iraq: disheveled, sleep-deprived, disoriented, and, just maybe, fearing something on the order of an on-camera beheading. “My name is Joe Francis,” he says repeatedly in a damaged monotone, slurring his words in a continuous stream. “I’m from Boys Gone Wild, and I like it up the ass.”
Link to “Six Degrees of Paris Hilton.” (thanks, Mark Ebner)