BURNING WITH ANGER
Livid 'Tan Mom' strikes while irony is hot: School let kid get sunburned!
OH, the irony.
Five years ago, Patricia “Tan Mom” Krentcil was arrested and charged with child endangerment for allegedly taking her then-5-year-old daughter into a tanning bed with her. Today, Krentcil alleges that her daughter, Anna, now 11, returned from outdoor recess at school last month with a sunburn — and she’s pissed.
“She was totally burned,” Krentcil said. “I packed her [sunscreen] and she came home like a french fry.”
The mom is furious not only about her child’s sunburn, but because it was a nurse at Lincoln Elementary School in Nutley, NJ, who called police on her back in 2012, after Anna mentioned the mother-daughter tanning trips. (Krentcil admits her daughter has accompanied her to salons but denies Anna has ever been in a tanning bed.)
“After what they did to me, they didn’t put lotion on her? This time, I’m going after them,” said Krentcil, 49, adding that her lawyer is fashioning a potential case against the Nutley Public School District for neglect.
Krentcil added that teachers “harass [Anna]. They always ask her, ‘Are you OK [at home]?’ ”
The mother of five (her children range in age from 8 to 23 years old), may have faded from the spotlight in recent years, but things haven’t cooled down for this Internet Age celebrity.
“The pain’s there. It will always be there. It broke us — $100,000 at least,” she said of the legal and medical fees she and her then-husband, Richard Krentcil, shelled out, including voluntary family therapy for them and their children. (The Krentcils divorced in 2014.)
And Krentcil insists she got burned in more ways than one.
She claims the unsupervised interrogation by Nutley police of her daughter back in 2012 was unfair.
“Next thing I know, I’m being arrested. I went down to the station and they put me in the cage,” she recalled of her weeklong jail stay, after which she says she emerged “pale.”
(A grand jury refused to indict the twice-divorced UV devotee in 2013 on the child-endangerment charges.)
“I didn’t know if I’d see my kids again,” Krentcil said. “I still have nightmares. I did nothing wrong.”
BUT that didn’t stop her from milking her newfound celebrity — on red carpets, at nightclubs and on the talk-show circuit, chatting with the likes of Dr. Drew and Howard Stern. There was the 2013 rap single “It’s Tan Mom” and a 2013 gay-porn flick, “Kings of New York 2,” in which she remained clothed.
All this added up to a nice chunk of change.
“I made a ton of money — all the shows paid,” said Krentcil, who estimates she broke even given her legal and therapy fees.
She claims Stern occasionally gives her money out of his own pocket, as
[Daughter Anna] was totally burned. I packed her [sunscreen] and she came home [from school] like a french fry. Patricia Krentcil, who’s considering legal action against the Nutley, NJ, school district that once got her into trouble over Anna’s tanning-salon visits.
she’s not paid to appear on his show. “He keeps me alive,” Krentcil said. (Stern representatives did not respond to requests for comment.)
She admitted that life has sometimes been grim when the camera isn’t rolling.
“I turned into a mess,” she admitted of the year or so after her arrest. “I couldn’t leave my home. I couldn’t eat out — I couldn’t get detergent at Kmart. Everyone looked at me like I was a horrific mom. Basically, everyone here hated me.
“My kids were angry and fed up. They were embarrassed, made fun of. Teachers made fun of me in front of my kids.”
(The Nutley Public School District declined to comment on all matters.)
“At that point I was drinking to forget what was going on. [But] I don’t think I was an alcoholic,” said Krentcil, who in 2013 went to a 28-day rehab program in Florida for drinking. “Everyone turned their backs. I was all alone.”
Even her beloved tanning salons threw shade. “I was banned from all [Nutley-area] salons,” she said. “They put up wanted signs: ‘Do not let this woman tan here.’ ”
Beach Bum Tanning owner James Oliver, who ordered the ban in all of his 50-plus locations, told The Post in 2012, “Absolutely, we would not allow her to tan.”
She’s working to find a way around the problem, however. Krentcil claims she invested $15,000 into the salon Sun of a Beach in Nutley, where she is a regular — and that she recently took out a $25,000 loan in order to become a co-owner of the place.
Salon co-owner Martino Poli, however, said that nothing is official yet.
“She’s expressed interest. She said, ‘I have the money. I want to partner up,’ ” Poli said of Krentcil, adding he’s thinking about it. Krentcil just wants to catch some rays. “I love the sun — it’s healthy,” she said, adding that toasting in a tanning bed is her “‘me’ time. This whole [dangers of] UV bulls--t — you can die from anything.”
These days, however, menopause and hot flashes make sunning extra hard, Tan Mom said, and she’s toned it down.
“Right now, I’m a good tan,” she said, explaining she hits the tanning bed three times a week, down from her 2012 peak of every day. “I’m not as dark as I used to be.”
Still, Krentcil admitted that her notoriety isn’t always good for business.
“Some people won’t [tan here] because of me. They’ll say, ‘ She tans here?!’ or ‘You let
her in?’ ” she said. “Yesterday, this woman standing behind me made fun of me.”
KRENTCIL said she comes by her tanning habit naturally: Her father, a banker at Goldman Sachs, kept a sunlamp at their tony Cold Spring Harbor, NY, home, where he would apply goggles and bake every morning before work. Krentcil, who graduated with a degree in business from the University of Florida and said she was once a buyer at Bloomingdale’s in Chicago, began tanning in earnest at 23.
It was only a few years later when something happened that, Krentcil said, changed her life forever. She was four months’ pregnant with her daughter Ashley, now 23, and out at a bar in Chicago with her first husband, when a man began harassing her.
“He cold-cocked me,” Krentcil said. “Every witness said I went flying.”
She was left with four plates in her head and, “I was proclaimed dead twice.”
The incident left her with poor balance, causing some to mistake her for being drunk.
“Don’t judge until you’ve been in someone else’s shoes,” she said. “I’m not drunk. Sometimes I fall . . . But I conquer. I’m a tough cookie — most of the time.”
And while she might complain about the attention being Tan Mom has brought her, Krentcil also said that it’s inevitable.
“I couldn’t walk down the street anyway — I’m attractive,” she said. “People are intimidated by me.”
On a recent afternoon stroll through Midtown, she claimed, “I got hit on three times. No matter where I go, guys will hit on me.”
A few weeks ago on Stern’s show, Krentcil claimed [actor] John Stamos asked her out.
“He’s not my type,” she said. “I told him no — I like Ray Liotta.”
Krentcil plans to one day spill even more of her woes in a memoir, to be called “Why Me?”
“I’ve always been judged because I’m a little different from everybody, but I’m a human being with feelings,” she said. “I didn’t ask for this. Sometimes I wish I was just a normal mom. But I’m not that person; I’m different. I’m a mom who tans, but . . . I’m more than Tan Mom.”