Authors: Danielle Staub
The Naked Truth: The Real Story Behind the Real Housewife of New Jersey--In Her Own Words (2 page)
END ME AN ANGELThe headline on the flyer handed to me at the Chateau hair salon in Franklin Lakes, New Jersey, said “Jersey Girls: My Fabulous Life.” It was advertising the casting of a new televised reality show, and the flyer created quite a buzz among all the local girls, who imagined that their “fabulous” suburban lives would fascinate audiences everywhere. My reaction was quite the opposite: “My life sucks, so no thanks.”
Six months later, I was again approached about appearing on the reality show. The only show airing on Bravo within the
Housewives
franchise at the time was
The Real Housewives of Orange County
and I hadn’t seen it, but it had gotten a stamp of approval from my eldest daughter, Christine (who has become my “go-to” girlfriend for all of my big decisions), so I checked the show out for myself. I definitely liked what I saw.
After viewing an episode, I found it offered refreshing insight into families as well as friendships among married and
single women alike. Single moms on the show were going through their problems while getting advice and support from their castmates. This made me think I should consider participating in the show.
In the beginning, I believed being on
The Real Housewives of New Jersey
was going to be an uplifting, quirky, fun, joining-of-the-hands experience that would perhaps entail a little drama shared by all of us. I soon found out how wrong I was. I became the focus of a character attack delivered at the hands of those who would, I thought, be holding mine in friendship. As the first season played out, my castmates’ biggest source of ammunition was a book (that came to be referred to as
“the
book”)—the expose written about my first husband, Kevin Maher.
Ironically, being exposed on TV forced me to reconcile my present with my past and realize that those experiences, for better or worse, made me who I am today. As I dealt with the scrutiny of my castmates, something clicked. People were taking so much interest in someone else’s take on my life that I decided they would perhaps like to know how it had
really
happened. And my fellow housewives had no right to turn what was my tortured past into the present. I realized that if the public had this much interest in my life, then it was time that I told my story in my own words. There are no two sides to one’s life story. If you didn’t live it, it’s not yours to speak of.
don’t want to pretend or claim to be a voice for every housewife. But I have a voice and I intend to use it. I will lend my life as an example for others.
I get notes every day from people who pour their hearts out to me about their own challenges and how they can relate to my life’s struggles on many levels. These are the people whom I wrote this book for, as well as my children and myself. Every story that’s been written about me—and there have been a lot—has been edited. This book is the
unedited
version of my life. What you read in the following chapters is what happened the way I remember it.
In this memoir, I’m finally baring it all. The title,
The Naked Truth,
doesn’t refer to being naked without clothing. It means naked as in stripped down and laid bare. It means naked without skin—totally raw to the bone. That’s exactly what this book is. No matter what has happened in my life, good or bad, I am now in a place where I can make some sense out of it and hopefully help some others to do the same. It’s time to set the record straight and correct all the lies. If hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, then hell is a quaint suburb in New Jersey and the woman scorned is resident housewife Danielle Staub.
You either love me or you hate me, there is no in-between. But people
are
going to pay attention when I’m around.
THE NAKED TRUTH
LIFE BEFORE BIRTHI didn’t need my mother and father to tell me I was adopted. I figured it out for myself. When I was five years old, I sat down on the couch in the living room and said matter-of-factly to my mother, “I don’t look like you. I don’t act like you. I don’t talk like you. I don’t look like anyone in our family. Who am I?”
I was born in the summer of 1962, in the United States. It was the era of JFK, the year of the Rolling Stones’ first performance, and the year Marilyn Monroe suffered an untimely death. It was also the year my mother traveled all the way from Italy to America to give birth to me.
Everything I understand to be true about my birth family is just stories I’ve heard. I haven’t been able to confirm anything—
not even by birth mother’s name. As the story was told to me, my birth mother grew up in an extremely strict Sicilian household. She was born into a big family of devout Catholics. In those days, especially in Italy, the rules of the Catholic Church were extremely strict and unquestioningly followed, almost like laws. Out-of-wedlock pregnancies were highly unacceptable. If a woman had a child out of wedlock, she and her entire family would be looked down upon and ostracized from the community; they would even be excommunicated from the Church.
So, when my mother got pregnant as an unmarried teen, it created much chaos and dissension within her immediate family. The Russos (my biological mother’s maiden name was Russo, from what I was told) were a family of much power and wealth and social status in Sicily—so much so that I have been told that the family was “connected” in the true sense of the word.
My mother was fourteen years old when she met my birth father, who was then nineteen. They had consensual and unprotected sex. The result: me. This love affair between them caused an uproar within my mother’s family. Once my mother’s situation came to light, my grandparents concluded that my mother would have to leave Italy as soon as her pregnancy started showing. My aunt would escort her to the United States to give birth to me. If the pregnancy wasn’t handled privately and secretly, it would be a disgrace to the entire Russo family. As a mother of two daughters, I wonder what my grandmother’s
position was in all of this. Why didn’t she stop my grandfather from sending my mother to America and making her give me away? Did she even have a say, or was she helpless because she was living in a society dominated by men? How did my mother’s family explain to everyone in Italy why my mother and my aunt were going away to America for all those months? Is all of this true? I have so many questions about this aspect of my family—my existence—that may never be answered.
I was told that my father was actually killed for getting my mother pregnant.
Killed?
If it’s true, I’d have to think that my father’s murder was a reflection of the ignorance and tendency toward violence that was prevalent in that part of Italy at that time, and the hypocrisy of his death is quite clear to me: you gain one life but lose another for no valid reason.
In a scene in
The Godfather,
Michael Corleone (played by Al Pacino) kills a crooked police sergeant in New York and goes to Italy until things cool off back in America. While he’s there, Michael walks the streets of his Sicilian hometown, Corleone, with two bodyguards who are both carrying guns. He notices that hardly any men are walking the streets. “Where have all the men gone?” Michael asks his bodyguards. One responds, “They are all dead from vendettas.” The three continue walking down the street, and Michael sees Apollonia for the first time and is impressed by her freshness and beauty. A bodyguard cautions Michael, “In Sicily, women are more dangerous than shotguns.” Apparently Sicily at that time was a Wild West
show with almost no governing laws. Danger was all around in the form of men and women alike, especially when it came to personal relationships.
The first person who told me that my father was killed was a family friend who looked into my family history for me when I was not quite ten years old. I was shocked. Over the years, I have buried the pain and disappointment of that revelation in a fantasy that my birth mother and father had a genuine, passionate, one-of-a-kind true love that you only read about in romance novels—a modern Romeo and Juliet. They were forbidden to see each other by their families, and like most things that are forbidden, their seeing each other became more enticing and exciting for this young, daring couple. They couldn’t help but taste the forbidden fruit of their love, and nobody would stop their passion. I imagine that they met secretly in romantic places such as vast fields and beautiful gardens to consummate their relationship. I know it sounds like storybook imagery, but it’s important for me to believe in this. I hold on to it to this day.
When I was five, my mother confirmed that I was adopted. While it was healthy for me to know this, I was somewhat abused by the other kids in my kindergarten class for being adopted. Eventually the teasing subsided, and by the second grade I found myself hanging out with the rich kids. I should never really have fit in with these kids, but somehow I mixed with them comfortably. I seemed to instinctively know etiquette. I knew how to behave in a nice home—places that smelled good
and had expensive furnishings and attractive artwork. It seemed natural for me to be in that kind of environment, which was the complete opposite of how I felt in my house. This wasn’t because I felt I deserved to be rich, but in my own home I felt like an outsider, never in the right place at the right time. We were poor—
really
poor.