The Naked Truth: The Real Story Behind the Real Housewife of New Jersey--In Her Own Words (17 page)

Although I didn’t know the exact psychological term, I thought Kevin suffered from a split personality disorder.
I have to keep him from turning back into that other deranged person,
I thought as he kept rambling on and on.

“If we just had a baby together,” Kevin pleaded, “then everything would be okay. Please.” At that moment I realized that I might have a chance to end this destructive relationship. While Kevin was in his apologetic and sedate state, I decided to take a shot and let him know that we were finished. I simply couldn’t be with him anymore. I was crying as I told him our relationship was over.

Amazingly, Kevin seemed okay with it. He actually said that he was going to leave the house.

Really? That almost seemed too easy,
I thought as it made me
suspicious. I had never imagined that all I had to do was wait until he was on the timid side of one his mood swings and he would just leave. Before he left the house, Kevin said he had to go to the bathroom; a couple of minutes later I heard heavy sniffing going on inside. Kevin was snorting coke—big-time.

When Kevin came out of the bathroom, he immediately took me by the back of my neck and threw me up against the wall.

I prayed for an angel to hear me, because nobody else was going to hear my screams in the wilderness. The peaceful and isolated home that I had thought might change our relationship for the better turned out to be the most dangerous place I could have been in.

THE LAST DANCE

Ring, ring, ring…

I could hear the phone in the kitchen of our Poconos home, but I didn’t have the strength to answer it. I could barely move. I was lying on the floor near the staircase, terrified and in severe pain.

The brawl that had been going on for hours between Kevin and me had finally reached a time-out. Kevin was sitting on the floor nearby, confused. This was, of course, a now-familiar pattern to me—he would come on like a crazed animal and exhaust himself by beating the hell out of me. Then he would usually sit there crying, telling me how sorry he was, claiming that he couldn’t understand why he did these terrible things to
me. But this time he wasn’t saying anything at all. Kevin just stared straight ahead with a blank look on his face.

The police arrived and tried to enter the house a few times by knocking on the front door, but to no avail. Eventually they went to the back sliding-glass door, and they could see through the window that the house was in disarray. They forced their way in and discovered me at the bottom of the steps. I didn’t have the strength to say much, but they could tell that I was pretty beaten up. They asked me who did it to me and I told them that it was my husband.

Kevin was still sitting near me in a daze when the police arrived. He admitted to the authorities what he had done. What choice did he have but to confess? From the way I looked, it was clear what had happened. Kevin was put in handcuffs and was cooperative with the cops—a much calmer scene compared to the time that he was arrested at Gallagher’s.

The officers helped me to my feet. Suddenly I heard my name called out by my mother: “Beverly!” At first I thought I was imagining things. Then my mom appeared before me with my cousin Barbara, who was quite a bit older than me. She immediately wrapped her arms around me, so happy to find I was still alive.

My mother had been phoning the house, trying to reach me. She had become extremely concerned because she hadn’t heard from me in a few days because, the last time we spoke, I had told her that things weren’t going well between Kevin and me. Mom was aware of Kevin’s violent behavior, and my silence
and her intuition about what it meant had prompted her to jump in the car and come to my rescue.

While they were driving en route, Mom and Barbara had kept stopping and calling my house from pay phones, desperately trying to contact me. But I wasn’t answering. Along the way, they checked the clubs where I had been working and learned that I hadn’t been seen in days. Mom was extremely worried and feared the worst, so she called the local police.

While Kevin was put in the back of a police car, I was put in the back of an ambulance and taken to the nearest Pennsylvania hospital. I spent a couple of days recovering from a concussion and assorted contusions. My cuts and lacerations didn’t require stitches, but my head was pretty banged up. The hospital did various CAT scans on me and conducted several blood tests; the doctors discovered my blood pressure was dangerously low and monitored me for a few days.

When I got out of the hospital, my mom decided that I should stay at her home for a while to regroup. When my mom finally divorced my dad, I wanted to help her so I bought her a modest home in Jamestown, New York, a small town close to Buffalo and known for being the birthplace of Hollywood legend Lucille Ball. My mother had since settled into her life there and was quite happy. She was working as an insurance agent and lived a modest but fulfilling life.

When I arrived in the town, located at the heart of a snow belt, it was winter with subzero temperatures, but everyone who
lived there shared a closeness. On Sundays, we’d all pile into a house the size of my living room to watch a football game. The women weren’t catty and the men didn’t treat me like a piece of meat. Nobody was flashy. Everyone would just throw on a pair of jeans and snow boots—not Burberry or Gucci boots, just boots—and go about his or her business. It was a nice change of pace and the perfect place for me to finally get some much-needed rest and relaxation.

One night, I came home from a local pub with a group of friends. When we pulled up to my mom’s house, she ran outside, panic-stricken. She pulled me into the house and said, “He was here!”

Kevin had a restraining order against him. Maybe he thought that since I was now in New York State and not Pennsylvania it couldn’t be enforced.

My mom told me she had taken care of the situation. I didn’t ask her any questions. I didn’t want to ask questions. My mom had taken care of me—her daughter. It was rare for me to relinquish all control, but I was exhausted and gave in.

After some time, I left Jamestown and headed back to New Jersey. I moved into an apartment with a couple of friends in Parsippany. My next step was to divorce Kevin. I didn’t think Kevin was going to sign divorce papers, so my attorney advised me to file for divorce due to abandonment, which didn’t require Kevin’s signature. He informed me that if you’re seeking divorce on the grounds of abandonment, you have to make it seem as
if you’re actively looking for your spouse, so we ran a “missing person” ad in the local newspaper every day for eighteen months. With Kevin in jail, the plan worked.

I started dancing again and was making good money. I moved into my own place and things finally started looking up. One afternoon while working at Shakers, I met a customer named Tom. I didn’t pay him much attention, but I must’ve certainly caught his eye because he tipped me extremely well. The next afternoon he came back, and the day after that and the day after that.

Tom had sandy blond hair, blue eyes, and looked to be in his thirties. He told me he was recently divorced with no children. He worked in the area and would come to Shakers on his lunch break. Tom was a successful businessman; along with his brother, Jerry, he owned and ran a lucrative family business that manufactured the best-selling in-home treadmill unit in the world. Tom made a good living, to say the least.

Tom began coming to the club more and more often and giving me expensive gifts—TAG Heuer watches, diamond rings in the shape of the letter
D
in script, and other lavish items. The other dancers saw how Tom treated me and tried to make their own moves on him, but he would brush them aside. His focus was on me.

Tom told me that he fell in love with me at first sight.
Love? More like lust,
I thought. Even though I wasn’t really buying it, he did seem genuine. Tom wanted to take me out on a date, but he was a customer and I didn’t want to go there. Plus, for the first time in a long time I wasn’t in a relationship, and I was enjoying my newfound freedom.

While the abandonment papers were being processed, I went to therapy. During my probation, I went to group counseling, but I’d never attended a one-on-one session. I knew I had a lot of unresolved issues in my life, and I realized that I needed to work on myself before I could be good for anyone else.

While in therapy, one of the issues I tackled head-on was my previous nineteen marriage engagements. When I talked about being engaged nineteen times on
The Real Housewives of New Jersey,
people immediately jumped to conclusions and thought,
Oh, my God, Danielle slept with all of those men!
Did I have sex with some of them? Absolutely. Did I sleep with all nineteen? Absolutely
not.
Some of these men asked me to marry them after just one kiss. Some after just two dates. For me, it was all a big, twisted game—a contest within myself to see how fast these men would ask me to marry them and put a ring on my finger.

Looking back, these nineteen men loved me enough to marry me and spend the rest of their lives with me. In return, I took a major chunk of their hearts, ripped them out, and stomped all over them. I didn’t stop there. I allowed these guys to take me home to meet their families, even though I knew that
I had no intention of marrying them. Their mothers would ask me a series of questions, mainly regarding devotion, dedication, and wifely duties, and I would always respond enthusiastically. I told them anything they wanted to hear to secure their blessings, and once I got the ring, I handed it back to the guys and said, “Bye-bye.” It was a sick cycle and a nasty thing for me to do. I’m not proud of it. I wasn’t proud of it back then. I was just caught up in it.

Through therapy, I realized that my putting these men through this rejection and heartbreak was a direct result of my being sexually abused as a child. I felt that by hurting these men, I was punishing the past abusers. But what I didn’t realize was that I wasn’t punishing anyone except myself and these innocent young men who were falling in love with me. I wanted to see them suffer. I wanted them to feel pain. That’s what made me feel good, until it didn’t feel good any longer. I don’t remember what triggered me to stop this horrible behavior, but one day something clicked and I realized that what I had been doing was terribly wrong. Although I didn’t understand yet why I was doing it, I did have an epiphany of sorts. That was the beginning of my realization that you need to do unto others as you see fit for yourself.

I decided during therapy that it might be healthy to seek out some of these men. I wanted to apologize for hurting them, and hopefully we could both have some closure. Over the next few months, I made attempts to locate many of them and made a lot of trips to Canarsie and Mill Basin—predominantly Jewish
sections of Brooklyn, because I dated mostly Jewish men. Jewish men were attentive and treated women extremely well. They also didn’t like girls who quickly jumped into bed with them, which worked well for me. They all also seemed to appreciate that I was pretty, lively, and fun. Sure, I was different from what their Jewish parents might have had in mind for their sons. But as soon as Mom and Dad got to know me and I told them that I was willing to convert to Judaism, they quickly fell in love with me, too.

When I finally located and met with some of these men from my past, I’d tell them with genuine remorse I was sorry. Some accepted my apology. Others were standoffish. And then there was Robert.

Robert and I had dated for quite some time. He was a great guy and I would have been wise to stay with him. Robert was attractive, successful, and would have taken care of me for the rest of my life. But I didn’t love him the way he loved me. When I broke up with Robert, I not only gave him back the engagement ring, I also gave him back all the jewelry he ever bought for me. I felt it was the right thing to do. I wanted him to move on, and in a way, by breaking up with Robert, I did him a favor: I gave him the chance to find true love.

When I met with Robert to apologize for what I had done to him, he told me that he was seriously dating someone. I was happy to hear that. But soon after our brief meeting, he called me up and said my sudden reappearance in his life had rekindled a lot of emotions inside him, and he realized that he
was still in love with me. He broke up with his girlfriend and wanted to marry me.
Uh-oh. Here we go again,
I thought.