Teresa & Joe Giudice No Longer Getting Spin-Off, Future of RHONJ Is Uncertain

August 1, 2013 by Hollywoodite

Things are going from bad to worse as Teresa and Joe Giudice are facing the consequences of years of fraud that helped them acquire the wealth they flaunt on the Real Housewives of New Jersey.

Teresa is the woman who said on the RHONJ it’s “disgusting” to live in a “used house,” when showing viewers around a home they were having built at the time. That’s their attitude: big, gaudy, gold, marble. If it’s overpriced, it’s good. It’s not a matter of taste. They just need people to know how much money they have.

There have been whispers for YEARS about where the money comes from, and now I guess we all know. They allegedly lied on loan applications then didn’t pay taxes on any of their income. And now they’ve been indicted and face 30 years in prison each. They’re currently out on bond having surrendered their passports (Joe, who was born in Italy, also faces deportation even if he beats the fraud wrap since he’s up on unrelated charges of identity theft).

All this negative publicity is starting to affect the RHONJ, the future of which is no longer certain. Moreover, Teresa and Joe can forget about any chance of a spin-off.

Teresa and Joe Giudice face a fate worse than prison — getting their reality TV show canceled.

The show has become a headache for Bravo in light of the recent flurry of bad publicity about the Giudices. “Nobody wants to see their talent in this kind of a situation,” a network source told The News.

Teresa has, in recent months, been pitching her own spinoff show to Bravo honchos, sources said. “They are not interested,” said an insider. “Bravo only spins off happy situations — marriages, baby news. Not prison.”

Teresa is in denial about the charges, which could send her and her husband to prison for 50 years, sources said. “Teresa thinks people are coming after her because she is famous,” one source said. “She honestly thinks she has done nothing wrong.”

Neither Teresa, 41, nor her 43-year-old husband have entered a plea. And Teresa is letting Joe direct their defense strategy, sources said. “She is old-fashioned and thinks her husband knows best,” a source said.

While Joe supported the family for years running everything from a stucco company to a pizzeria, Teresa now brings home the bacon. She gets paid $33,000 an episode and makes thousands more promoting her cookbooks and a specialty food line called Skinny Italian.

Recently, Teresa was hoping to give her show a sweet plot twist before things went sour with the feds. Just days before she and Joe were indicted, they were scouting locations for a “cupcake cafe,” sources said.

Teresa saw the shop generating new plot lines for her Bravo show along the lines of “2 Broke Girls.” That CBS sitcom is about two Williamsburg, Brooklyn, waitresses — one formerly rich, the other always poor — who scrape up enough dough to open a cupcake shop that quickly goes bust.

The Giudices had zeroed in on a restaurant for lease located in a strip mall just a mile from their tacky $1.7 million mansion in Montville Township, N.J., the sources said. Last week, Teresa came by herself to scope out the site, they said.
Alas, there is already a bakery that sells cupcakes and other treats in the strip mall, along with a salon, barber shop and a deli.

Teresa likely did not come up with the cupcake cafe idea on her own. Kathy Wakile, her cousin and castmate, has been trying to launch a career as a pastry chef for the past couple of seasons. She is often seen creating desserts for parties and pop-up shops on the show. And she just inked a cookbook deal.

That Teresa would filch an idea from a castmate will come as no surprise to regular “Housewives” watchers. Teresa frequently feuds with sister-in-law and castmate Melissa Gorga. But Gorga noted on the show that after she wrote a self-help book about keeping a “hot and happy marriage,” Teresa began speaking at conventions about having a happy and healthy marriage.

Jon Fellgraff, an architect who claims Joe still owes him $7,000 for work he did, said it’s a marriage made in hell. He told The Daily Mail that Joe treated Teresa like a “lowly housewife” before she got rich. “He was the boss,” he said. “She would try to speak and he would put her down.”

Teresa and Joe are charged with conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud, bank fraud, making false statements on loan applications and bankruptcy fraud. Joe is also accused of failing to file tax returns for 2004 through 2008. – via NYDN.