Drea de Matteo

Introduction

Drea de Matteo is an Emmy-winning American actress best known for playing Adriana La Cerva on HBO’s “The Sopranos,” the 2004 Emmy winner for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series. In September 2026, she told Page Six she was detained by French customs after brass knuckles were discovered in her luggage during a Paris stopover en route to a London Fashion Week runway collaboration between designer Natasha Zinko and OnlyFans. She described being held in a jail-cell area and released in time to make the show; no arrest or criminal charge has been reported.

Background Information

Andrea Donna de Matteo was born January 19, 1972, in Queens, New York, and raised in Malba. Her mother, Donna, is a playwright and playwriting teacher at HB Studio; her father, Albert, owned the furniture makers Avery Boardman and Carlyle. She is of Italian descent and grew up Catholic. After the Loyola School in Manhattan, she earned a BFA in film production from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, intending to become a film director, and studied acting at HB Studio.

Her breakthrough came as Adriana La Cerva on “The Sopranos” (1999–2006); she won the 2004 Emmy for the role and received a Golden Globe nomination the same year. She went on to play Gina Tribbiani on “Joey,” Wendy Case on “Sons of Anarchy,” Angie Bolen on “Desperate Housewives,” and Detective Tess Nazario on “Shades of Blue.” In 1997 she co-owned the East Village clothing store Filth Mart with then-boyfriend Michael Sportes; it closed in 2004. She was engaged to musician Shooter Jennings, with whom she has two children. In 2015, a gas explosion and fire destroyed the Manhattan building where she had kept an apartment for 22 years.

Her finances had unraveled: in a Daily Mail interview quoted by Deadline, she said she had two children, a mother with dementia, a flooded house, a foreclosure, and $10 in the bank when she joined OnlyFans — announcing the account in 2022 and putting it live in August 2023 — and has said her refusal to get the COVID-19 vaccine had left her out of work.

The Controversy or Incident That Led to Their Cancellation

Allegations. The account in this section comes from de Matteo’s own on-the-record description of the episode in a Page Six interview, and from that outlet’s reporting on it. She was briefly detained and released; no arrest, criminal charge, or court proceeding has been reported, and nothing about the episode has been adjudicated in court.

De Matteo’s account is, by her own telling, an anecdote rather than an ordeal. During a pit stop in Paris en route to the Zinko × OnlyFans show — the platform’s London Fashion Week debut — customs officers found brass knuckles in her bags, she said. “I got detained in customs. They brought me up to a nice little jail cell area,” she told Page Six. “But if you were to get semi-arrested or detained anywhere in the world, I’d have to say that Paris is the place to do it because they were lovely. They were actually very apologetic because they felt like it was ridiculous. They had to do it. It’s the law.” She then added, jokingly: “But they didn’t catch any of the knives in the bags, which was even more f–king insane.”

The detention did not keep her from the runway. The show, which also featured Kelly Osbourne and was staged as part of Zinko’s 18-piece “Pay Per View” capsule, marked OnlyFans’ first appearance at London Fashion Week, and de Matteo made it — describing her turn as sitting provocatively in a chair smoking a cigarette. She said her friend Leah McSweeney, the former “Real Housewives of New York” star who hosts “OnlyFans Fashion Files,” had recommended her because, in de Matteo’s paraphrase, “she’s all about independence and her freedom.”

Public Reaction and Consequences

The immediate consequence, as reported, was the detention itself: a hold in an airport cell and a missed connection’s worth of delay, with officers she described as apologetic. No fine, charge, or formal action has been reported, and de Matteo treated the episode as a war story rather than a grievance. Page Six published her account as an exclusive on September 20, 2026, while the fashion week was still running.

In the same interview she leaned into that image, saying: “Fashion designers are real free thinkers, independent artists, always bending the rules. OnlyFans speaks to that. It’s the ultimate freedom.” There was no reported statement from French authorities, and no reported comment from her representatives beyond her own remarks.

Current Status

De Matteo was released the same day by her account and appeared in the Zinko × OnlyFans show as planned. She remains an active OnlyFans creator and says she has no plans to quit; the platform itself is in transition following the death of its owner, Leonid Radvinsky, in March, though she says operations feel unchanged — “I only know about the business of it when I get my 80%,” she told Page Six. She is also preparing to return to acting after a five-year hiatus: she says she has filmed a TV role she cannot yet name and a movie with John Travolta. No French legal action over the brass knuckles had been reported as of the latest coverage.

Impact on Their Career/Life

The Paris detention is unlikely to rank among the serious consequences of de Matteo’s post-“Sopranos” life; the harder chapter was financial. By her own account, OnlyFans rescued her from foreclosure: “In five minutes, I was able to pay back Compass real estate who kept the sale of my house,” she said, adding, “It saved us. OnlyFans saved my life, 100 percent.” She has been unapologetic about the judgment the platform attracts — “I just don’t care. I don’t. I’d rather save my family than save face” — and the revenue financed her streetwear brand, Ultrafree.

Against that backdrop, the customs stop read publicly as a comedic beat that reinforced the freewheeling persona that made her a fit for an OnlyFans runway in the first place. Page Six reported that the platform’s financial freedom has made her willing to take acting work again, on her own terms — “It can’t just be bulls–t,” she said. The episode did underline the odd legal terrain she navigates as a public face for the platform: a detention “because it’s the law,” with no reported charges and no evident harm to a career she is choosing to resume.