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Caroline Manzo claimed she would “whisper” answers to Teresa Giudice on the red carpet, and she revealed that she “warned” Teresa not to pay in cash on Real Housewives of New Jersey. Caroline also recalled her husband Albert Manzo‘s “screaming” reaction when she told him that Brandi Glanville allegedly sexually harassed her on Real Housewives Ultimate Girls Trip.
Apparently, Teresa got on the government’s radar after she paid in cash during an expensive shopping trip early in the show. Later on, she and her then-husband Joe Giudice went to prison for bank fraud. She later accused Caroline, her former friend, of calling the Feds on her.
On the Legally Goff podcast, Caroline hinted that her later dynamic with Teresa on RHONJ was like a “horse race.”
“I was never threatened by it. I don’t know if she was or not,” said Caroline, via @housewivesfromahousewife on Instagram. “What makes me sad is, you know, she would say, ‘Well, Caroline called the feds on me.’ My God, I would never in a million years do something like that.”
“You have to be a special kind of animal to do something like that,” she went on. “She’s got young children. Plus, I knew nothing about her finances or anything. But the irony of all that is when it all came out, she would call me, and we’d be on the phone for hours. I would hold her hand on red carpets and just whisper in her ear. I was her voice because she didn’t know how to answer the questions.”
Later on, Caroline addressed the infamous scene of Teresa paying cash on a shopping trip, which allegedly led to her investigation.
“[Teresa] called me the night before and told me she was doing that,” she said, via @nochaser_tv on X. “And I said to her, ‘Why are you doing that, Teresa?’ [She said] ‘Well, it’s fun.’ I said, ‘Teresa, you’re only putting $1,000. It’s not $10,000 … You’re creating a problem for yourself.’ … I warned her. I won’t say who, [but] somebody else said, ‘Oh, do it, it’ll be fun.’ And she listened to that other person.”
At one point in the podcast, Caroline was asked about what happened with Brandi on RHUGT — and the allegation that production didn’t step in to help her.
“To be honest, I don’t remember a lot of it,” said Caroline. “I don’t remember walking out of the bathroom. I don’t remember a lot of it. I remember the things that I shouldn’t, I wish I didn’t remember, but I don’t remember a lot.”
“Every night I would check in with my husband, and [after I told him what happened], he was screaming, ‘Where are you? I’m coming to get you,'” she said. “And I didn’t know where I was. I said, ‘I don’t know where I am. I’m at a villa somewhere in the middle of the desert.'”
Caroline said Albert was “screaming his lungs out.”
“I can’t get that out of my head. His voice, all that,” she said. “And feeling so utterly and completely alone, alone on a different continent. I still, daily, I still am trying to get through all of that.”