May 19, 2025
SHARE
CANADALAND
#1160 Confessions of a Girls Gone Wild Merch Girl
“ It was hot girls having a blast. There's nothing wrong with that. I thought it was aspirational. I did not yet realize that we were in fact shooting porn and that that was actually happening in the back room of the bus that we were living on.” - Courtney Kocak, former Girls Gone Wild “Merch Girl”
Jesse Brown
Host & Publisher
Julie Shapiro
Executive Producer & Editor
Bruce Thorson
Senior Producer
Tristan Capacchione
Senior Production Supervisor
max collins
Director of Audio

In 2005 Courtney Kocak was a “merch girl” on the Girls Gone Wild tour bus. She doled out the swag, T-shirts, thongs, drinks, to help get the GGW parties started. The GGW party on wheels rolled through places like Red Deer, Banff, Kelowna, and promised small town kids a “wild” time. By the time the tour was over Courtney and the bus crossed back across the border with boxes of release forms and video of marketable footage of young Canadian women flashing their breasts at the camera and having sex with each other. 

Courtney has been processing this experience ever since. Was it fun? Was it coercive? Was it even legal? Was she exploited or was she the exploiter? Or was it all of the above? 

 

Courtney Kocak (Writer and presenter), Julie Shapiro (Executive Producer), Michael Castaneda (Sound Design), Tristan Capacchione (Audio Editor & Technical Producer), Bruce Thorson (Senior Producer), max collins (Director of Audio), Jesse Brown (Editor and Publisher)

Fact checking by Julian Abraham

Additional music by Audio Network

 

Sponsors: 

Fizz: Visit https://fizz.ca to learn more about Fizz and its long list of added-value features, and activate a first plan using the referral code CAN25 to get 25$ off & 10GB of free data. 

The Oat Company: Head over to https://oatcompany.com and use code CANADALAND20 for 20% off your order. They ship across Canada so you can enjoy them anywhere.

BetterHelp: Visit https://betterhelp.com/canadaland today to get 10% off your first month.

 

If you value this podcast, support us! You’ll get premium access to all our shows ad free, including early releases and bonus content. You’ll also get our exclusive newsletter, discounts on merch at our store, tickets to our live and virtual events, and more than anything, you’ll be a part of the solution to Canada’s journalism crisis, you’ll be keeping our work free and accessible to everybody.

You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music—included with Prime.

More from this series
“What’s my crime? Journalism? … I get that I piss off a lot of people with my articles.” -David Pugliese
October 5, 2026
 ”These are a group of white men coming to our area saying, "We bring you the gift of nuclear waste.” - Dennis
October 1, 2026
You can't really call Regina a news desert. They still have a newspaper. But if you actually look under the hood you’ll discover that they stopped printing the newspaper in Regina. They stopped editing it in Regina. The editor lives somewhere else. And as far the CBC goes, well, that acronym is now synonymous with layoffs. 
September 28, 2026
1438
I f you don't like what you're hearing, it's because it doesn't agree with your worldview, but you're interviewing an expert, and I'm giving you my expert analysis. -Dr. Peter McCullough
September 21, 2026
 We can surveil you. We can also perhaps even influence you, change the way that the game interacts with you in a way that might kind of subconsciously impact your understanding of the world. - Dr. Vinita Singh, associate professor of law, University of Minnesota
September 14, 2026
“ If they wanna draw Garfield and expose his  genitals,  you know, that's up to the fans.” -Nathen Mazri
September 7, 2026
“Everything changed when I treated it like a 9-5.”
September 3, 2026
“ I was fired because I condemned Hamas by calling them Nazis.” - Paul Finlayson
August 31, 2026
all podcasts arrow All Podcasts
CANADALAND