Joe Francis can’t catch a break.  After finally getting his jail cell all fixed up just the way he liked it, he cuts a deal with Spitzer’s purported very close friend “Kirsten” for $1 million, only to find that he doesn’t need to spend a dime because he already had her on tape, nekkid.  Woo hoo!  Cha-ching!

“Girls Gone Wild” founder Joe Francis originally reached out to Dupre, offering $1 million for her to appear in a non-nude spread for his company’s new magazine and a chance to join the “Girls Gone Wild” tour bus. But on Tuesday “Girls Gone Wild” employees found archived footage of Dupre filmed in 2003, and Francis retracted the offer.

But as told by the New York Lawyer, that dark cloud over Joe’s head just keeps raining on him.  After all those accusations of underage girls appearing in the GGW videos that gave Joe so much tsuris, it’s now back to bite him in the butt again.

In an e-mail to one of Francis’ publicists — forwarded by Buchwald to the AP — the attorney said he was “informed by Ashley that the video was in fact taken when she was underage (that is 17).”

Buchwald added in the e-mail that Francis was aware of Dupre’s age during the filming.

Francis said he bought Dupre a Greyhound bus ticket back home to North Carolina in 2003. Dupre returned home after she spent a week on the “Girls Gone Wild” bus in Miami and filmed seven full-length tapes, which included nudity, after signing legal papers, the company said.

“It was because she was underage that he sent her home on a Greyhound bus back to North Carolina. It would be outrageous at the very least to play the video of an underage female on the Internet,” Buchwald said in the e-mail.

There’s no suggestion that Joe (or his peeps) knew that she was underage at the time.  Indeed, there plenty of reason to believe that this woman, like many others, say that they are of age when they may not be entirely truthful, thus misleading Joe and his posse into filming young ladies in compromising positions.

But to have the rug pulled out from under him yet again has got to hurt.

Now I’m not terribly sympathetic to Joe Francis because of the effort by his publicist a while back to engage me in  his scheme to  garner support for getting Joe out of jail.  But my issue wasn’t so much with Joe as with his publicist.  Still, I’m no fan of the stuff Joe produces in general, and I’m specifically disturbed by the fact that there are so many problems underage women going “wild” at his urging.  No, I’m not suggesting censorship, but I’m also not prepared to exert much effort to help this dubious commercial enterprise.

“It’s kind of like finding a winning lottery ticket in the cushions of your couch,” Francis told the AP — before he saw the e-mail from Dupre’s attorney.

Bummer.