It’s really starting to look like there’s no way for Teresa Giudice and Luis Ruelas to ever mend fences with her brother Joe Gorga and his wife Melissa — because every time they try to settle their issues, a massive fight breaks out instead.
That’s exactly what happened again on Tuesday’s new hour of “The Real Housewives of New Jersey,” which began with the foursome again re-litigating why Melissa’s family members weren’t invited to Teresa and Louie’s wedding. As Margaret Josephs told Joe and Melissa that Louie actually tried inviting Melissa’s mom to the celebration at a luau the prior night, the pair expressed their skepticism about the whole situation.
“Is that coming from a genuine place, that Louie truly believes Teresa is wrong?” asked Melissa, while Joe said that when it comes to Louie, “There’s days that he’s trying to be the nice guy and there’s days when he’s being a dick.”
As Joe continued to slam his future brother-in-law in confessionals, a producer off-screen asked whether something happened between the pair that viewers maybe didn’t know about. “Yes,” said Joe, before both he and Teresa shared their respective sides of the story.
“I’ve kept my mouth shut a lot all these years, protecting my brother to keep the peace and I’m so tired of it and I’ll speak the truth,” said Giudice. “My brother came up with this idea, this pizza oven, ‘I wanna do with my sister,’ so Louie’s like okay, and he put out 250K.”
“But then [Louie] spoke to our attorney and said, ‘What percentage should I give Joey?’ I guess they came up with 5%, so my brother went nuts. He wanted 50%,” she continued. “I called my brother like, ‘[Louie] put out all the money.’ And then Louie took the loss.”
“There was a business dealing and my fiancé lost a quarter of a million dollars,” she added, saying she warned him about mixing family and business. “All I said to my brother was if you want half, you have to put half in. And he didn’t want to.”
Sharing his side of things, Joe said Louie “screwed me with the pizza business.”
He explained that it was his idea to honor their father with a line of pizza ovens called Nonno’s Pizza. But after placing orders for the ovens with Louie’s money, Joe claimed he found out from another relative that Teresa had done a photoshoot with the product with her daughters and called it “Skinny Pizza or something.”
“When I find out, I called him and then Louie starts giving me some lip. And then my sister out of nowhere goes, ‘Did you put the f—ing money up?! ‘I go, ‘What, you think I couldn’t put 200k up? It was my f—ing idea,'” he continued. “And it became very ugly, yelling, my sister saying, ‘This is why you don’t do business with family.’ Bulls—. You can do business with anyone if you go in with trust and you’re not looking to cheat somebody. I didn’t want this. It’s terrible. You think she would just try to make it right.”
Melissa went on to call Teresa “selfish,” and added that Joe believed “they stole” the idea from him.
Later in the show, the wedding invitation drama was brought up again as the entire cast met up for another party. At the event, Teresa said her brother was “making a mountain into a mole hull” — or, you know, mountain out of a molehill — and claimed that if he and Melissa wanted her family to be invited, they should have just called her and said that instead of expressing their anger to everyone else.
She even told Joe directly that she would have invited Melissa’s mom “in a heartbeat” if they addressed the issue with them directly … though the fact they were snubbed in the first place still rubbed Joe and Melissa the wrong way.
“This wedding has been like beautiful but it’s also been like bombs going off. Your mother has been nothing but beautiful and sweet and kind to me and my boys,” Louie also told Melissa as he grabbed her for a one-on-one … one Teresa eventually interrupted, to her then-fiancé’s frustration. He snapped at Giudice, telling her she was “ruining a moment,” before asking her to “respect” their space.
Teresa briefly left as Joe sat down with his wife and Louie, who once again tried to force a peace treaty between all parties involved. After T said Melissa had “daddy issues” just out of ear-shoot, she joined the rest of the group to hash things out. While Teresa said she was upset with her brother and sister-in-law for not doing more to stop Margaret from bringing up Louie’s past on the show last season, Melissa and Joe said they were equally frustrated with them for not having their backs either.
The conversation was going nowhere, leaving Melissa to tell Teresa, “I hate when you talk bulls—” — which then caused T to get up and yell to Louie “fix it.” Gorga said she believed Teresa has “deep hate in her heart” for them, before Joe asked his sister why she was “so mean” now.
“This is your blood. Jennifer made fun of him and you chimed in,” Melissa added, referring to Jennifer Aydin calling Joe a “bitch boy” last season. “She called you bitch boy, but you’re playing it real well,” Louie shot back — prompting Joe to jump out of his seat and start exclaiming, “Shut up!”
He then brought up the business deal drama, saying that Louie “f—ed me” just months after they met. “Shut the f— up. We became the biggest disappointment in life,” he added of his family situation.
With that, Joe and Melissa walked out of the party … but then couldn’t get out of the driveway because Louie’s car, of all vehicles, was blocking them from exiting. Joe had to then go back inside and ask him to move the car, but snapped when he saw that Teresa and Louie were talking to “dirty” Margaret. That comment and Joe’s continued taunts then set off Louie — who pushed Gorga away from him while shouting, “Get off me, I’m gonna f—ing punch him in the face.”
As Joe got in Louie’s face, Ruelas just told him to “Stop please. Stop, stop, stop, it’s not worth it,” before cooler heads prevailed and they went to move his car. As Joe and Melissa pulled out of the driveway, Louie still continued to plead with them about how much he hoped they’d be part of he and Teresa’s lives going forward.
The last line of the night went to Melissa, who was heard saying, “I’m exhausted Joe,” as the episode ended.
“Real Housewives of New Jersey” airs Tuesdays on Bravo.
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