Dina Lohan Dodges Questions, Berates Judge and Defends NYC-Bound Lindsay

Lindsay Lohan's mother faces off with Matt Lauer in tense, wide-ranging (and wide-blaming) interview about daughter's legal drama

By Gina Serpe Aug 13, 2010 2:51 PMTags

Well, well, well. Look who came to play fight.

Dina Lohan sat down with Matt Lauer on the Today show this morning and while she stopped short (but only just) of calling the newsman glib, their tense 13-minute Lindsay-centric interview ran the gamut from combative to very combative to could not be more combative.

Denial, thy name is Dina.

And even before she opened her mouth, her exasperation with Lauer (clearly a stand-in for the media at large) was apparent. She held her head in her hands as the anchor rattled off LiLo's resume—two stints in jail, four times in rehab, the first three of which, Lauer said, clearly did not work.

Dina quickly attempted to set the record straight, saying her 24-year-old daughter had only been to rehab twice, the first time in 2007. (Not by our count, but fine.)

"I actually put her there," Dina sniped. "When you say works or don't works, I don't know where you're getting that."

She continued on like that for the entire interview, questioning the sources for nearly all of Lauer's questions and placing the blame for Lindsay's current (and ongoing) situation on everyone from the tabloids to the Internet to the California legal system to Michael Lohan to Judge Marsha Revel—whose name, incidentally, Dina could not let pass without snide comments that she went "overboard" and claims that she was about to get fired.

"I think she went overboard and played serious hardball with Lindsay," she said of the recently recused Revel, adding that she didn't believe her daughter deserved any jail time at all "for this particular offense."

And just in case that didn't drive the point home enough, here's a sample of Dina's most hammered-home bits:

"We have a new judge on the case, I don't know if you know that fact...She was in for just missing a couple of classes that she made up, and she was working at the time. The judge went overboard and went into serious lockdown…She went against the district attorney's advice…The judge played hardball. Lindsay was in with alleged murderers and she's become friends with a lot of them… The judge recused herself or she would have been fired. But I don't want to talk about that right now. "

Clearly.

However, once Lauer managed to pry her off trash-talking the judge (for the time being), she said that Lindsay is doing "great" and will be out "soon."

She would not go into further specifics, despite new reports that LiLo could be excused from her 90-day treatment program in as little as 45 days. So far, she's been in for just 11.

As for the hard-to-avoid public sentiment that her longer jail stint and court-ordered rehab was both something that Lindsay had coming as well as something that could do her some good, Dina wasn't having any of that talk.

"I think that's all propaganda. As you know, you're in the business of entertainment, I think a lot of it is preorchestrated and you're reading things that are not fact."

While Lauer agreed that our rumor-crazed society probably didn't help things, he did argue with Dina that, "You can't blame it all on the tabloids, she has made some wrong decisions."

Guess who got defensive?

"As a parent, you have to let them go a little bit and when she went out to Los Angeles when she was 19, I had to let her go and live and fall and fail and survive, and without failure there's no success. You can't make your child not go out and go to a club and not get behind the wheel of a car and I certainly don't condone that type of behavior."

She also doesn't think that Lindsay is so alone in her problems.

"I think every child goes through a lot of difficult things. Lindsay, her life is magnified, so I really think her life is under a microscope. I raised my children to be normal and Lindsay doesn't realize she does have people watching her and media surrounding her, she can't even go to Starbucks without 12 cars following her. It's not fair. They can't really live."

As for Michael Lohan, after a bizarre and awkward argument with Lauer over semantics and a dig at his allegedly abusive past (and present), she offers only this: "He doesn't speak to us, he doesn't speak to Lindsay, he doesn't speak to our other children."

But the real woman of the hour is Lindsay, and when asked if she had a desire to take her daughter away from Hollywood, Dina assured Matt that yes, that was the plan. Though something tells us she didn't quite grasp the heart of the question:

"Well, she'll be coming back to New York," she said of Lindsay's post-rehab plans. "Los Angeles…California's a wonderful state, but in that world, it's different there. It's a different game you play there. The court system is a little different."

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Sorry to break it to you, Dina, but NYC's not all that different to L.A. Just take a look at our Big Apple Party Pics!