Matt Lauer got a sitdown with Anna Gristina, the so-called soccer mom madam, who sits in a jail cell on Rikers Island. Gristina is accused of running a multimillion-dollar Manhattan escort service. But Gristina tells Lauer it was just a dating service “very much like Match.com.” Gristina says she got the idea for the service from watching the Bravo TV show “Millionaire Matchmaker.”
“I was out one night and a friend of mine had suggested, you know, ‘Why you’d be really good at it,'” Gristina tells Lauer. “So I had looked into opening up something called, you know, the same thing except instead of single and seeking it was married and seeking. And we called it The Sugar Daddy Matchmaker. You know, 100% above board. Just like it’s run by Patty at Millionaires’ Club. And I was even approached about a television show version of that.”
Gristina’s lawyers, who sat on either side of her during the interview, answered, or rather didn’t answer, many of Lauer’s questions. Watch after the jump…