ATLANTA — For the first time, we’re hearing directly from Todd Chrisley about his experience of living in prison.
Chrisley and his wife Julie, mostly known for their reality TV series “Chrisley Knows Best,” were found guilty last year of conspiring to defraud banks and the IRS out of millions of dollars.
In an interview with News Nation last week, Chrisley spoke of being fed expired food, rats and squirrels roaming the prison, and black mold.
Chrisley even says the prison guards are trying to blackmail him.
“There was a photograph taken of me while I was sleeping and sent to my daughter, asking for $2,600 a month for my protection,” Chrisley said.
For months, Chrisley’s daughter Savannah has been talking about what she says are the deplorable conditions her parents have been living in on her weekly podcast. A family insider said they were “living in their hell hole” jails.
Chrisley told News Nation that inmates are being fed expired food and not getting enough nutrition.
“It is so disgustingly filthy. The food is literally -- I’m not exaggerating -- the food is dated. It’s out of date by, at minimum, a year. And they are literally starving these men to death here,” Chrisley said. “These men are getting, I don’t know, they are getting 1,000 calories a day.”
Chrisley said the only food he eats is what he’s able to get from the prison commissary.
“I eat tuna. I eat peanut butter. That’s where I get my protein. I eat like a pasta salad that I make. Pasta that I get in the commissary, and then I start over again doing the same thing the next week,” Chrisley said.
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He said the prison warden has limited the amount of things he can get from the commissary as a way of “trying to break me.”
“Before she came here, you could buy 12 packs of tuna a week. And then it went from 6 to 3. She had not given a reason. She said, when I asked her about it, she said commissary is a privilege,” Chrisley said.
He went on to say that the prison is full of rodents and black mold.
“You’ve got squirrels in the storage facility where the food is. They just covered it up with plastic and tore the ceiling out because all the black mold and found … in the ceiling and dropped down on the top of the food,” Chrisley said.
News Nation had tried to do an in-prison interview with Chrisley, but their request was denied by the jail over security reasons, the new organization said.
Chrisley told them there was a reason for that.
“They don’t want you in here where you can see what’s really going on,” Chrisley said.
News Nation reached out to the prison about Chrisley’s allegations, and it told them they serve nutritious food and have up-to-date facilities.
Todd and Julie Chrisley are in the process of appealing their conviction.
Channel 2 Action News first started investigating the Chrisleys in 2017, when we learned that Todd Chrisley had likely evaded paying Georgia state income taxes for several years.
Court documents obtained by Channel 2 Action News showed that by 2018, the Chrisleys owed the state nearly $800,000 in liens.
The couple eventually went to trial and a federal jury found them guilty of bank fraud and tax evasion in June 2022.
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