The newest New York City housewife was arrested back in 2002, she told PEOPLE, during an altercation outside the Hammerstein Ballroom.

As McSweeney recalled, she had been at a concert that night until roughly 4 a.m., dancing the night away with her then-crush. Like the rest of the attendees, she piled out into the street when the concert was over, and soon found herself in the throws of a makeout with her date. But during their kiss, police swooped in to clear the crowd and wound up separating McSweeney from her kissing partner.

“I felt him being pulled away from me, and there was five police officers beating him up,” recalled McSweeney, who was 20 years old at the time. “It was really scary. And I had a half-empty plastic water bottle with me and I threw it — not even directly at someone, just threw it in that direction. It was just a total knee-jerk reaction. But it hit a cop in the back.”

“He turned around and lunged at me and punched me in the face,” she recalled. “I fell onto the sidewalk, and suddenly I had four cops on my back, cuffing me. I just felt so many knees on my back. And one of them slammed my face into the subway grates and knocked my tooth out.”

Luckily, McSweeney was able to turn that situation into something good. She pursued legal action and wound up with a $75,000 payout that she used to kick-start her women’s streetwear company, Married to the Mob.