A Tennessee couple who claims to have one of the three winning Powerball tickets have not yet gone to state lottery officials, instead they went on the Today show.
“Why did you guys come to us first?,” Savannah Guthrie asked John and Lisa Robinson. “It was his idea,” said John Robinson motioning to his lawyer, Joe Townsend, who was also part of the interview.
The couple also had the ticket with them. In fact, John Robinson pulled the $500 million ticket out of his front shirt pocket. “Now I’ll be nervous, because everybody knows!” he said. The Today show averages about 5 million viewers a day.
After verifying the ticket, and hiring their lawyer, Lisa Robinson called her supervisor at work, telling her she wouldn’t be in today, which made her suspicious: “She said, “did ya’ll win?’ I said, “Just watch the Today show.'”
Townsend, the lawyer, thought it best to go to a national media outlet first, rather than Tennessee lottery officials, so they could control the story. “I think the American public wants to hear from them,” Townsend says. “They want to let the public know they’re the winners.” Townsend then called his daughter, who is a reporter in Memphis, and was also on the show this morning: “I Googled, ‘How do you call NBC.”