And the New York Post comes full-circle: Continuing its recent not-terribly-flattering coverage of the Mommy Madam, there's a great old-school tabloid tidbit in Tuesday's paper about Anna Gristina having to evict her pigs from her upstate New York farm. Following last week's report that the alleged madam had claimed to be a "very, very good friend" of Post editor Col Allan on surveillance tape (a claim the Post editor and his staff have vigorously denied), the paper has been noticeably less friendly to Gristina in its pages.

In the original days of this story, much was made of Gristina's pig-loving roots as a way of supporting her overall good character. She was kind to animals, spent spare time working with rescue pigs, and kept an assortment of pot-bellied pigs and dogs on her farm in Monroe, New York. One of those pigs, named Wilbur, "a 300-pound, fanged boar" who clearly has a way with slapstick comedy, had chased a cop around the farm in February when the officer came with a search warrant to seize Gristina's computers and paperwork. 

But due to the financial complications related to her continued stay in Rikers and, of course, the charge of promoting prostitution that's keeping her there, the Post's Laura Italiano and Dan Mangan write that Gristina "is so hard up for cash that she’s had to evict most of the pigs she keeps in her upstate home to save money while she remains locked up in jail on $2 million bond." Five of the seven pigs have been found new homes at two other farms. The good news, according to Gristina's husband Kelvin Gorr: “They’re not going to be eaten.” (Whew.)

Now, "Only two relatively small sows — Gerty and Iris — remain on Gristina’s 200-acre farm in Monroe."

It seems like just yesterday the Post was reporting on Gristina's once-uttered brag, "I own New York!" (Perhaps because it was yesterday.) Now the pigs are being booted out the door, and the Madam continues to sit in Rikers. One would be tempted to make some sort of joke about pigs, but the poor, displaced pigs are clearly the true, and probably the only truly faultless, victims here. Except for Wilbur of course. That one's trouble.

Image via Shutterstock by Alexander Kuguchin.

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Jen Doll