I’ll expose sex secrets of US’s wealthy elite, warns jailed Scots madam
Vice queen’s threat over court case
A SCOTS madam who ran a New York vice ring has threatened to expose the sordid sex secrets of America’s wealthy elite.
For years, Anna Gristina earned a living pimping Penthouse and Playboy models to bankers, politicians, chief executives and property tycoons.
Her well-heeled clients paid from $1,000 (£820) per hour – with a two-hour minimum – to up to $25,000 (£20,500) for a weekend at Manhattan hotels while Gristina allegedly built up a multi-million dollar fortune.
Now caught up in a legal battle with US authorities, the 54-year-old has told The Scottish Mail on Sunday she is ready to name names and expose the identities and sexual preferences of her ‘patrons’, including a ‘world renowned billionaire’.
To back up her threat, she said that information she had already handed to the FBI had directly led to the high-profile prosecution of a Hollywood producer who was last month jailed for sex crimes.
Gristina, from Kirkliston near Edinburgh, pleaded guilty in a New York court in 2012 to promoting prostitution and was sentenced to six months in prison. Prosecutors said she made $7 million (£5.7 million) from her vice empire, with the high-profile case sparking lurid headlines around the world.
Now the mother of three is demanding her plea deal be thrown out and she be given a chance to go to trial.
Gristina wants to see transcripts from the original proceedings that she claims will help clear her name. But she has been
‘I’ve a dead man’s trigger so I don’t end up like Epstein’
denied access to them – a decision she is appealing. Gristina said she is now ‘considering naming names’ in a memoir she has already written.
She said: ‘It depends on how my case goes. If it doesn’t go well I will release every name, the politicians and the johns involved. I’m still pondering if that’s what I want to do.’
She said the power and influence of her ex-clients has left her fearing for her life and she has taken steps to guarantee she doesn’t ‘end up like Jeffrey Epstein’ – the disgraced US financier who was found dead in a Manhattan jail cell as he awaited trial for sex crimes.
While officials ruled he took his own life, many believe he was murdered to stop him incriminating others in court. Gristina, who lives in upstate New York, said: ‘I have what they call in America a dead man’s trigger: if something happens to me everything will get released.
‘Every newspaper will get a copy. All the names, places, pictures, files, phone records, everything. It’s my guarantee so I don’t end up like Epstein. If I didn’t have this I would end up like him.’ Gristina, who was known as ‘Anna Scotland’ when she was a madam, said she stayed quiet for 11 years out of a ‘sense of honour and loyalty to her clients’.
She added: ‘I felt they’d trusted me and I didn’t want to ruin families. They were regular patrons. They paid for discretion’.
But Gristina is now furious at the same men as she says they are blocking her new trial and that one billionaire made a large donation to prosecutors to ‘make my case go away’. She said: ‘He’s among the ten richest men in the world’. According to Gristina, she handed the FBI a dossier of 2,600 people, including some paedophiles, on a ‘silver platter’ and in exchange they promised her a US passport. But she claims the FBI reneged on the deal, meaning Gristina, who has a green card that allows her to stay in the US, cannot return to Scotland to care for her ailing mother, 74, who is in hospice care.
She said: ‘If I leave there’s no way they’ll let me back in. I want to be there for my mother’s final days.’
Among the cases Gristina says she helped bring to court was Dillon Jordan, a movie producer jailed last month in New York for five years for running a prostitution ring.
The 50-year-old had worked on films such as The Kindergarten Teacher, which featured Maggie Gyllenhaal, and The Kid, starring Ethan Hawke and Chris Pratt.
According to Gristina, Jordan ‘was top of the list I gave them… they said they’d give me a passport but they went back on the deal’.
The FBI and prosecutors did not comment on Gristina’s role in the case. Manhattan District Attorney’s office did not respond to requests for comment.