There are several intense scenes on Real Housewives of New Jersey season 12, but one involves Dolores Catania getting nearly physical with Jackie Goldschneider.
The castmates started arguing after Jackie accused Dolores of not being a good friend to Jennifer Aydin (whose husband Bill’s affair was exposed by Margaret Josephs). In a later episode, Dolores told Jennifer what Jackie had said about it: “I feel worse for Jen than I feel for Bill. Don’t cheat on your wife then. How about you don’t stick your d**k into someone else? How about that?”
In an interview with ET, Jackie explained: “I think that Dolores realized that she was sort of outed as a flip-flopper — and I love Dolores — but she was being very wishy washy… She was looking for something to grab onto, to make me look like the bad guy, and she was pissed off. I mean, No. 1 to Dolores is loyalty. So when I questioned that, she was looking for something to get back at me with, so she twisted my comments.”
The star went on to say, “My comment was actually in defense of Jennifer… because I felt like Jennifer was shouldering all of the blame and all of the hurt for all of this and saying, ‘Oh, Bill’s such a great guy…’ which he is, he’s a great guy, but she was taking all the blame onto herself, and I felt like, why is she taking all the blame and taking all the responsibility when it’s Bill who did something?”
“Perhaps I used a dirty word, sorry,” said Jackie. “I mean, I love all of these people clutching their pearls now, they’re calling it a vulgar term. From these women? From these women? Are you kidding?”
She then explained, “I’m a really calm person and I generally do not lose my temper ever… And you’ve seen through the years, I don’t scream and curse. I’m not one of those hot heads, but when somebody disrespects me, like, I black out. Cameras melt away. I was just like, ‘You are not going to disrespect me like that!’ I don’t like that. I didn’t think that anything I said warranted being called ‘this,’ like, being belittled like that. And certainly not from one of my castmates.”
“It was a very aggressive moment and I didn’t know what would happen,” Jackie expressed. “I was 99 percent confident that Dolores wouldn’t hit me or hurt me because A, we really are friends. I mean, we do butt heads, but B — not to break the fourth wall — but you’re going to get kicked off the show, probably. So I kind of knew that she wasn’t going to touch me, but either way, I wasn’t scared at all… I think that her days of biting through the hands of people she’s going to fight with are probably over.”
She added, “I mean, verbally, I don’t think anyone can beat me… I worry about some of the other people because they just can play very dirty, and they can say things out loud on the air that can really damage your family, like what Teresa [Giudice] did last year. So that’s why I worry about fighting with somebody who has no qualms about fighting dirty, really dirty.”
Last season, Teresa brought up a rumor about Jackie’s husband’s alleged affair. Teresa, however, thinks her actions were different from Margaret’s because Teresa was repeating a rumor.
“I don’t think [Teresa’s] a bad person, I just think that she tells herself what she wants to believe,” explained Jackie. “She wants to believe– especially now she’s with Louie [Ruelas], who’s all about like being reflective and being your best self — and I think she knows she did something really bad last year and she doesn’t want to appear to him like she’s a bad person. So she’s trying to validate what she did last year.”
“It makes no sense to anybody. I’m not even sure it makes sense to her, but I don’t care anymore… Evan and I know our truth… So whatever she wants to believe, let her believe she knows what she did.”
After Teresa exposed the rumor, Jackie “felt very alone,” and therefore “didn’t want Jennifer to feel like that [this season]. If she went digging on my husband, that makes her a crappy person, not me. So there was nothing going on in my life telling me, ‘Oh, stay away from her! She’s dangerous for you!’ I wasn’t broken at all. I also don’t like to see somebody struggling and I felt like she needed a friend.”
Jackie expressed, “Jennifer really does horrible things sometimes… And I like her — I’m not saying I don’t like her, I do — [but] the whole digging [thing]… I want that to stop… It makes it really hard to get to a better place when you go so low… It’s not petty drama when you’re digging for information on somebody that could really destroy their family. What were you going to do with that?”
“Were you going to just keep it in your pocket and keep it a secret?” she asked. “You were calling because you wanted to do something to destroy my family, but now you’re crying about somebody doing that to you. So, it’s just a lot of hypocrisy. So I think for us to truly get to a better place, this really underhanded stuff has to stop.”
Jackie refuted Jennifer’s theory that Margaret recently learned of the affair. She stated, “Margaret’s known this for a very long time… I think that Jennifer just pushed and pushed and pushed until the point that Margaret had no choice.”
“I watched that conversation back, like, 10 times at the pool party and Jennifer should have known what was coming by Margaret’s comments and she kept going with it anyway,” said the star. “If it were me, and I knew that my husband had cheated and I was in a conversation where somebody’s going, ‘You’re not being honest. I know something. I’m going to say it…’ I would’ve ended that conversation if I didn’t want that to come out. I would’ve been like, ‘You know what? I’m sorry for everything I’ve ever done for you…’ and walked away… I think it’s pure cockiness that she didn’t think that Margaret would reveal that.”
Jackie shared, however, that the costars worked out their problems during the season. “Margaret likes to reconcile,” she said. “She doesn’t want to have enemies. She doesn’t want to fight with people. And the whole point of being on the show is to be able to get back to a better place after you have an argument. So I think that there is definitely hope for them.”
The star also discussed Margaret’s altercation with Teresa, who unloaded food and drinks from a table after Margaret questioned Louie: “I don’t think physical violence is ever warranted… I have a whole problem with this, ‘Don’t talk about the love of my life’ thing, ‘He didn’t sign up for this…’ I’m sorry. Clearly he signed up for it.”
She added, “He signed up for it as much as my husband signed up for it… So if you can go around talking about my husband last year, spreading rumors about my husband talking about what he’s doing at the gym, talking about girlfriends he has, spreading these rumors all over the place when I have four little children and he’s got parents watching and siblings watching and he’s got the whole world watching, but nobody can utter a word about things that are actually on the internet about your boyfriend? Give me a break.”
“Teresa thinks of herself– and listen, I am not invalidating the fact that Teresa has been on this show for the longest. She is an OG. She has carried this show for many, many years,” said Jackie. “However, we are an ensemble cast. We all carry this show. We all give something. I think Teresa thinks that different rules apply to her and she has called herself — in an interview this season — she called herself ‘the GOAT’ [aka ‘the Greatest of All Time’], and I think that she thinks that when you question her, nobody can question her.”
She continued, “When she doesn’t want to answer something, it doesn’t get answered. So I think that she thinks that she plays by a different set of rules than the rest of us.”
According to Jackie, fans can “wait and see” how this turns out for Teresa. “Brace for next episode and brace for the trip to Nashville,” she revealed.
Photos Credit: Astrid Stawiarz/Bravo, NANCY RIVERA/INSTARimages.