Joyce Mitchell breaks her silence on prison escape

The upstate New York prison worker who pleaded guilty to helping two inmates escape says she got swept up in a fantasy that spiraled out of control.

"I just got in over my head," Joyce Mitchell told Matt Lauer in a jailhouse interview that aired on NBC's "Today" show Monday. "And I couldn't get out."

Mitchell, 51, was a seamstress at Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, N.Y., when she befriended convicted murderers Richard Matt, 48, and David Sweat, 34 — ultimately agreeing to be their getaway driver for an early-June prison break.

"I couldn't tell anybody," she said. "I couldn't tell my husband. Couldn't tell my family. I couldn't tell my co-workers. I couldn't tell anybody. There's nobody you can tell."

Mitchell, a mother of three, said she was suffering from depression when she met the pair and that her marriage to Kyle Mitchell, another prison worker, was crumbling.

"I was going through a time where I didn't feel like my husband loved me anymore," she said. "I was going through a depression, and I guess they saw my weakness. And that's how it all started. ... Their attention made me feel good."

But Mitchell denied having a sexual relationship with either of the inmates.

"It started out as a flirtation thing, but that's all it ever was," Mitchell said about her relationship with Matt. "There was never any love between myself and Mr. Matt."

"There was never any actual sexual intercourse," she continued. "Mr. Matt had grabbed me a couple of times and kissed me. And then there was one point where he wanted me to perform oral sex on him. And I said no. And when I said no, he grabbed my head and pushed me down."

Mitchell told Lauer that she initially didn't know the tools she smuggled into the prison — including a star-shaped drill bit, a chisel and hacksaw blades — were being used by the inmates to cut their way out of the maximum-security facility. And by the time Mitchell did, she said she was in too deep.

"Who could I tell?" she said. "Who could I trust?"

Mitchell says she began receiving regular reports on the pair's progress.

"[Matt] actually had told me at one point in one spot they had found a toolbox," she recalled. "And Mr. Sweat picked the lock and they found power tools in it."

The plan was for Mitchell to flee with Matt and Sweat after they killed her husband. But she told investigators that she loved her husband too much to go through with it and backed out of the plot.

The escape resulted in a three-week manhunt that captivated the country. Matt was shot and killed on June 26, and Sweat was shot and captured two days later.

"I am so sorry for everything that everyone went through because of me. I never, never wanted this to ever happen. Never. I would take it all back, if I could. But I can't," she said. "But I'm not the monster that everybody thinks I am. I'm really not."

Mitchell faces up to seven years in prison for her role in the plot.

"I deserve to be punished," she said. "But, you know, people need to know that I was only trying to save my family."