Call Girl Confidential

by Rebecca Kade

  I was still stunned a month later when Anna went on the Dr. Phil show. Dr. Phil McGraw went up to Anna’s farm and interviewed her at her round oak table, near a wood-burning stove and with views of the pastures through the glass doors. When he asked her if she was the madam of an escort service, Anna looked Dr. Phil in the eye and said with a straight face, “I have a matchmaking company I just started with a partner.” When Dr. Phil asked Anna whether Maz Bottone and Catherine DeVries were call girls, Anna again looked Dr. Phil straight in the eye and said, “No.”

  I guess I wasn’t a call girl working for Anna. I guess I was just working for a matchmaking company when I was having sex with rich men for money, of which Anna got a 40 percent cut.

  Anna told Dr. Phil that the prosecutors wanted her to talk about two clients in particular, but she wouldn’t. She also said that she had so little money “she could barely put food on the table.” It’s hard swallowing that when you’re looking out the window at two hundred acres of meadow.

  And while her attorney, Norman Pattis, who was sitting nearby and clashing with Dr. Phil, didn’t allow her to answer questions about her case, Anna said she would take a lie-detector test and swear that she had never been a part of the business. Even though I had just heard her lie, that made me feel better.

  Not two weeks later, on September 25, Anna was brought to the criminal courthouse in the prison bus from Rikers. She was in handcuffs, looking dowdy and defeated in a black sweater studded with silver. She was a far cry from the glamorous woman in furs with whom I’d once gone to Vegas with clients.

  After four months on Rikers Island and three months lugging an ankle bracelet around the farm, she had had enough. Pattis had convinced her to “take the plea.”

  But Charlie Linehan also looked defeated. He rose and addressed the judge. “Over the years, the defendant made numerous claims that she had connections and influence in any number of city, state, and federal agencies, including the NYPD, the FBI, the DA’s office, the governor’s office, and Customs, among others,” he said. “We have spent time investigating the defendant’s claims, and we have not found evidence to support any of those claims.

  “We are left with a straightforward promoting-prostitution case—a defendant who ran a brothel for many years who profited from the sex trade. That is all.”

  The ponytailed Pattis, who kept calling Charlie “my brother,” said, “I don’t expect anyone in this room to nominate Ms. Gristina for sainthood. But she has many good qualities, and among them is loyalty, despite the pressure that was brought to bear—not illegal pressure, but pressure nevertheless. We would recommend that if she were to enter a guilty plea that she be sentenced to time served. She is a first-time offender without a criminal record.

  “I hope your honor will consider a plea of guilty to one simple count of promoting prostitution in July 2010.”

  Even the judge seemed in disbelief that it had come only to this. He seemed annoyed, and not just because Anna’s husband, Kelvin, had brought their nine-year-old son into the courtroom to hear his mother called a trafficker in prostitution.

  Judge Merchan scolded, “I have to say that I am certainly not pleased with some of Ms. Gristina’s conduct during the proceedings. By way of illustration, I will say that I am not happy that Ms. Gristina’s young child is in the courtroom.”

  Neither Anna nor Kelvin Gorr got the hint to have the boy brought outside, so Judge Merchan had to discuss the sex business in which Anna had engaged in front of him.

  “Is it true, Ms. Gristina, that you arranged a sexual encounter with a man, then known to you as Anthony, between two prostitutes?”

  “Yes,” Anna answered meekly.

  “If this had gone to trial,” Judge Merchan continued, “you would face up to two and one-third to seven years incarceration, and I have promised you six months of a jail/probation split.”

  Anna would be on probation for five years.

  “During probation, you must meet with a probation officer, have a job or go to school, not take illegal drugs, and submit to testing for illegal drugs. Do you agree?”

  “Yes,” she answered meekly again.

  Judge Merchan then gave her a stern warning:

  “Your guilty plea will subject you to deportation, and may interfere with any naturalization process. You may very well be deported as a result of this.”

  In quick succession in the next few weeks, Maz and Catherine, who had already flipped in May and were going to testify against Anna, were freed from having to go on the stand. They had a lot more to talk about than the one “girl-on-girl” incident. It turns out that, unbeknownst to each other, Anna had hooked them up separately with one of the wealthiest men in New York, a man who used his funds to influence elections. But for now, their testimony became moot. Maz left the courthouse with a jacket over her head, and Catherine’s lawyer said she had been mortified by the experience, especially when her family found out how she had secretly been earning a living. She didn’t throw a schmatte over her head, and so her face was all over the news. Catherine fled to California after pleading guilty to misdemeanor prostitution charges and getting off with no jail and no probation.

  On November 20, two days before Thanksgiving, Anna was back in Judge Merchan’s court for a perfunctory sentencing.

  “Do you have anything to say, Ms. Gristina?” asked Judge Merchan.

  “It’s probably better that I don’t, Your Honor,” Anna replied.

  She would save that for Dr. Phil.

  Anna was released, free to go, ankle monitor off, after being sentenced to the four months time served and five years probation.

  That’s it. That’s all she wrote, as they say.

  The DA claimed Anna had a lawyer friend who helped her invest and launder her money. “This is not that lawyer,” said Jaroslawicz’s attorney. Investigators seemed to find nothing in Jaroslawicz’s papers and didn’t bring charges against him. Jonas Gayer went scot-free, despite being taped by me with money launderers. They couldn’t find Anna’s money, though I had seen records of it on Jonas’s computer. And despite Anna boasting on tape of her law enforcement connections, it came to naught. And somewhere out there, a very rich man is likely still pursuing his desires to have sex with a child.

  TWENTY-THREE

  naming names

  Just before Christmas, Anna, who had said during the trial she’d rather “bite off her tongue” than name names, immediately told the press that she would start naming clients during a second appearance on Dr. Phil. The New York Post’s Page Six quoted Anna as saying, “There is going to be a giant name dropped—actually, a couple of them. Everyone’s going to have to watch Dr. Phil. I will tell you that one of the names is high-level [NFL] management. Then there’s an older [football] player who’s still very well-known. Tune in to Dr. Phil!”

  But all Anna’s shilling for Dr. Phil had billionaires and other bigwigs who had been clients getting increasingly nervous, including one power player interviewed by top journalist Murray Weiss of DNAinfo.com. He admitted that Anna had hooked him up with a woman who worked as an interior decorator, as Maz did, after soliciting him via e-mail.

  “I don’t understand why [Anna] is sort of offering people up,” the client told Weiss, who described him as a “50-something mogul.”

  “It has been an uncomfortable period for me, and I am sure for others, since all this began. But I can’t figure out if she wants to sell books . . . or get on talk shows. . . . I think she feels she needs leverage, and it’s a form of currency when you have something that is potentially sexy and salacious and worthy of a lot of curiosity. That may be the card she has to play.

  “If it goes one way and she drops my name, there are relationships in my life that I will have to talk with. Not to be cliché, but I will not be open and trusting of someone who presents themselves one way and are not that way at all. It was bad judgment.”

  The power player said that he had had several “dates” with the pretty young decorato
r, yet he denied paying for sex. But in the very next breath he admitted that he had paid for her to fly home to see her family, and that he had helped pay her rent.

  But as generically as Weiss had described the mystery man, New York cognoscenti soon figured out who the wealthy man with a well-known family was after a series of angry rants were posted by a commenter identified as “Anna Christina-Gorr.” I clicked on the posts, and they linked back to Anna’s usual Facebook page. In her rants she said the client’s attorney was megalawyer Ben Brafman, and she knew that Weiss knew Brafman. She knew the client had made political donations, and why he made them.

  One post read like a populist rallying cry: “And suddenly the Scared Mogul with all his Billions . . . now he is taking the ‘I-knew-nothing’ road. ‘I’m a victim.’ REALLY N.Y. do you believe that? People of N.Y., ask why he never came forward . . . to tell his story of events and how innocent everything was. I’d have had all charges dropped if he did come forward . . . and do the proper legal thing to clear my name since it was all SO INNOCENT on his part. But instead [I] sat for 4.5 months in Rikers.”

  An hour later, “Anna Christina-Gorr” posted this: “Really, it looks a lot like he is trying to worm out of any legal and moral responsibility due to his Billionaire lifestyle. . . . This is damage control in case I do a book with names. Well, let’s look at his history in both coasts with paper trails, texts, phone records, voice messages and emails, and let him be the first to stand and be tried as a man involved in this, and I will be happy to bring forth women who may have a very different story than his ‘poor-me’ version. MONEY WON’T BUY YOU OUT OF THIS ONE, as I plan on sitting in the Bonnie Island of Scotland where I will have total freedom with solid verifiable facts to write all I have uncovered.”

  The comments were taken down by DNAinfo.com almost immediately.

  Judge Merchan gave Anna permission to fly out to LA to tape her second appearance on the Dr. Phil show, which aired in February 2013. Dr. Phil McGraw was not happy that she had denied during her first appearance in September that she’d ever promoted prostitution, only to plead guilty to doing so not two weeks later.

  “You were either lying then, or you’re lying now,” Dr. Phil said. “You can’t say ‘yes’ then and ‘no’ now. There are not versions of the truth. You’re insulting my intelligence.”

  Anna then had the nerve to say, “I’ve never owned an ‘escort service.’ That’s below the level of what I was comfortable doing. . . . But, yes, older men met with younger, beautiful women with the expectation of having sex. . . . I knew it was going on, but it was not something anyone ever talked about.”

  Dr. Phil: “What’s the most money you ever made in a month off of this?”

  Anna: “I think a bumper of a month was like Super Bowl weekend. It was amazing. I made a lot of money.”

  Dr. Phil: “So for weekends, this doesn’t sound like people test-driving girls for a long- term relationship, it sounds to me like they come in for a weekend and you hook them up with a hooker.”

  Anna: “Yeah.”

  Dr. Phil: “So you were a pimp?”

  Anna: “If that’s the way you want to call it, yeah.”

  Anna admitted to having a “global roster of fifty to one hundred girls,” but said she had an “active database” of ten to fifteen girls at any one time.

  Dr. Phil brought up her claim that she was going to name some of her clients on his show. He said he wasn’t interested in divulging any names, since “I don’t think you have credible information.”

  Anna claimed she took the plea deal to protect people who had enemies in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office.

  She said there was a man who “was like a father to me.” She said that, even though she had pleaded guilty to protect him, he wouldn’t talk to her now. She started to cry. Dr. Phil wasn’t having any of it. He said, “You’re trying to make yourself out to be a victim?”

  I have my suspicions as to who that is, and I will say that, yes, if it is that person and he did leave her stranded, I do feel badly for her. I knew him, and I know how very close they were. I would be equally hurt.

  EPILOGUE

  a whole new life

  As for me, I continue to fight for my daughter, though it’s really just down to legal technicalities now. She is with me a lot of the time, and her father and I have begun talking again, for her sake.

  I left the escort business for good a long time ago. I went back to school to become a forensic psychologist. I became a student at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. I decided to work on the right side of the law instead of the wrong side. I want my daughter to be proud of me.

  I’ve been in compromising situations. I understand the low end and the high end of the business. I understand the madams—and the clients. I understand the young women who turn to prostitution for whatever reasons they have, and then want to get out.

  Forensic psychologists are often called in to decide whether defendants are of sound mind, and whether they’re telling the truth. I found that a lot of girls in this business lie so much. I guess that’s how they cope. And sometimes you have to lie in order to keep that part of your life a secret. Regardless of the reason, it is very stressful.

  I have gotten very involved with my community and was even elected to the Community Education Council, and then the council elected me first vice president. I have lobbied in Albany against budget cuts for public education in New York City. I have stood in front of numerous groups, whether at a press conference at the courthouse or meetings within the community discussing land use, new schools, budget allocation, or school rezoning. I took chances that I would be recognized and somebody would say, “You are that girl who is a prostitute!”

  I took that chance because I am not that girl for life. It was a short period of time in my life that certainly changed it forever. Some people will never be able to handle my truth. It doesn’t matter how good a person you are—there will always be someone who judges you, and it is that person for whom I feel sorry. I learned along the way that those who judge are the ones with the biggest secrets and the most fearful that they will come out.

  I am often asked by those who don’t know me very well why I chose to tell my story. The question always brings to mind a simple line from the movie Cloud Atlas. When asked why she embarked on her chosen path, the main character, Sonmi-451 states, “If I had remained invisible, the truth would have stayed hidden. I couldn’t allow that to happen.”

  There are so many truths that had to be told, yet one thing inspired them all: my beautiful Isabella.

  acknowledgments

  It would be impossible to thank and express appreciation to each person who has influenced my journey and reminded me to “keep my chin up,” as my Pop would say, during the difficult times and celebrate life’s incredible moments.

  My deepest gratitude to my incredible literary agent, Frank Weimann, who sat down at a table with me one day and listened to my story, and from that moment on had faith in me and in this project. Thank you for getting me through this!

  My sincerest thanks to my editor, Emilia Pisani of Gallery Books, who has patiently dealt with me during every stage of this project and, more importantly, worked closely with me on writing subject matter that was difficult on many levels. Also, to my publicist, Stephanie DeLuca of Gallery Books, for making sure Call Girl Confidential has a future once released. And to Simon & Schuster for working with me for these many long months.

  To my family, thank you for your support and love and understanding. I have never been the easiest one to decipher, but I have always had my reasons for what I do. Mom, you are an amazing grandmother, and it has been wonderful to watch my daughter grow up so happy visiting with you. Thank you for creating those memorable moments. Aunt ML, our special bond is something I value deeply and never take for granted. To Saint Bridget, who loves gentle round barrel-makers, the thought of writing anything to thank you makes me cry. You are my everything: my parent, my sister
, my best friend, and the most incredible person. Your brilliance is not lost on me, and I am glad the rest of the world has caught up and sees it too. To say thank you would be but a drop in the bucket of what I owe you. My heart will always be so full of love and gratitude.

  Thank you, Timmy, for being the brother I never had. We have always been able to count on you for anything and everything, but most of all for your unconditional love. You inspire, you love, you give, you teach, yet you ask for nothing in return.

  Oh, Shahana. I don’t think there will ever be enough room to thank you for all you are and have done for me and my daughter. Our souls were connected long before we met, and the place you hold in my heart is so deep and powerful that nothing I can say here will be good enough to honor and justify the friendship we have. So, simply put: thank you for your constant love and support. I am . . . because of you.

  Steve Caton, long before the days chat rooms ever existed, you were one of my dearest friends in college and the person I knew I could confide in without any judgment. This still holds true today. My life could be a complete disaster if you were not a constant support. I may never be able to cheer for your college team, but I will love you forever!

  A fun night would never be complete without my daughter, Twizzlers, a good movie, and you, Jason Baron. Jason, I will forever be grateful that I met you at your own birthday party all those many years ago. You redefine friendship. You continue to surprise me with your fierce loyalty and love, and it continues to grow with us. Whenever we’re at a party and there’s a piano bench, you can be sure I’ll be saving that spot next to me only for you! I truly love you, and your support while writing this book has been absolutely essential to its completion. Thank you for being family.