Sex slavery at the Cannes Film Festival is something we would have guessed would be restricted to the Grand Palais and other Croisette event screens. In the form of a documentary, short, tawdry “marché” title or marquee feature narrative sub-plot.

But sadly, this is something that some of the event’s richest attendees have helped abet in real life. From a Hollywood Reporter piece about the infamous illegal-solicitation activities of Elie Nahas on behalf of Muammar Gadhafi‘s late son Moatessem and other super-rich Middle Eastern attendees [bolding is ours]:

The women ran the gamut, from full-time escorts to models to beauty queens, and they serviced men in hotels, on yachts and in the palatial villas in the hills above Cannes, police said. Philippe Camps, a lawyer for a Paris-based anti-prostitution organization that was a civil plaintiff in the trial, tells THR that some of the women were brought to Cannes under false pretenses and coerced into prostitution.

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Tomorrow at the Roosevelt Hotel, Miami based organization Women in PR will host an awards luncheon for Eileen Koch. The event is timed to coincide with this weekend’s MTV Video Music Awards.

Koch moved from New York to LA at age 16, working initially as a dancer. But in recent decades, she has made her mark with celebrity PR moves under the banner of Eileen Koch and Company. Clients past and present include Jamie Foxx, Derek Fisher, Guess?Marciano, Carmen Electra, and Marisa Miller. Her path to publicity began in the corridors of personal management and a certain Ukrainian beauty:

Koch decided in her late 20s to start her own management company specializing in children and teens. One of the first young faces to catch her eye was Milla Jovovich; Koch discovered and managed the Ukrainian beauty secure pivotal jobs that would propel her from obscurity into a top model and actress virtually overnight.

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Film Threat, the snarky, biting answer to the film industry’s constant inhouse sniping, opens its 50 Most Frigid in Hollywood with Heath Ledger and the politically incorrect, bad taste query: “Why so deceased?”

Heath Ledger was an actor on the climb, albeit a rather subtle one, to the upper ranks of his profession. While “10 Things I Hate About You” and “A Knight’s Tale” weren’t necessarily Oscar-contenders, at least one of them was based on Shakespeare. And while playing second fiddle to Mel Gibson in “The Patriot” wasn’t a star-making turn, playing the skin flute with Jake Gyllenhaal in “Brokeback Mountain” and playing pseudo-Bob Dylan in “I’m Not There” were worthy of increased respect and recognition. Everything was pointing up and Ledger’s role as the Joker was the prize fruit he’d been climbing towards.

The pesky mag goes on to bemoan:

Carmen Electra: Mindless tits and ass have their place in society, but her body has been duping people into paying for shit cinema for far too long, and it’s not even as if folks are paying to see her naked! We’re not saying the only good Carmen Electra is a naked Carmen Electra (okay, maybe we are), but how bad is it when Pamela Anderson is making more informed, and memorable, career decisions?

Pacino and De Niro: “Everybody said how great it was that De Niro was getting together with Pacino again after teaming up in ‘Heat,’ conveniently forgetting that one of the things that made ‘Heat’ so effective was the fact they were only in one scene together…”

Katherine Heigl: “It’s so simple it’s cliche, but if she doesn’t have anything nice to say, and she wants to keep working, she might want to shut up…”

You said it, Film Threat…