Viewers were immediately fascinated by the fist-pumping, GTLing and boardwalk antics of the Jersey Shore cast when the MTV reality show premiered 14 years ago. But behind the scenes, star Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino was swept up in addiction to prescription pills.
Sorrentino, 41, details the struggle in his new memoir Reality Check: Making the Best of The Situation — How I Overcame Addiction, Loss, and Prison.
So do not let their words grieve you ˹O Prophet˺. Indeed, We ˹fully˺ know what they conceal and what they reveal.Do people not see that We have created them from a sperm-drop, then—behold!—they openly challenge ˹Us˺?(The Quran - Chapter Yasin : 76 - 77)
“ Reality Check is my story of Hope, Loss, Love and Redemption. About hitting rock bottom but never giving up,” Sorrentino wrote on Instagram. “It’s the first time I’ve been able to truly share my full story, and I didn’t leave anything out. It was important of me to be completely honest about how deep my drug addiction ran and to tell all the crazy stories from those years, as well as how hard I worked to find a lasting sobriety.”
Now eight years sober, Sorrentino pulls back the curtain on what the MTV cameras didn’t show, how much his costars knew and what he really meant when he asked to bring “girls” to the club on Jersey Shore.
Keep reading for the biggest revelations from his new memoir, out now.
He stopped stripping after giving his mom’s friend a lap dance
Sorrentino writes that, as a young adult, he saw stripping as “a way to flaunt my God-given gift: my body.” Without his parents’ knowledge, Sorrentino stripped at Club Abyss in New Jersey, but his mom Linda and dad Frank found out about his side hustle when one of Linda’s friends called her to say she received a birthday lap dance from her son. That sent the future reality star into an “early retirement from the stripping life,” he writes.
Sorrentino chose going on Jersey Shore over getting back together with his now-wife Lauren
The reality star met his wife Lauren while taking classes at Kean College in Union, New Jersey. His pill consumption eventually drove them apart, but they continued to keep in touch as talks for Jersey Shore began. “While I waited to see if the show would get picked up, our conversations turned to potentially getting back together,” he writes. “We were both ready to make this work.”
When Jersey Shore got the green light, Sorrentino claims Lauren, now 38, told him: “We can’t be together while you do the show. If we do, we won’t last.” He decided to go ahead with Jersey Shore and calls it “the best decision” he and Lauren “ever made.”
He knew two of his Jersey Shore castmates prior to filming
Sorrentino admits he met Angelina Pivarnick before filming Jersey Shore and they’d “actually hooked up a couple of times back in the day when we both were in the same club scene.” The father of two claims he referred Pivarnick, 37, to the show, but he felt like she acted differently on camera. Sorrentino writes that he also knew Sammi “Sweetheart” Giancola “a little bit” before the show, too, because they “used to hang out with the same crew.”
A tanning salon employee dealt Sorrentino pills on Jersey Shore season 2
Sorrentino writes that he brought 500 Percocet pills to film season 2 in Miami, sneaking them in via empty fat burner pills, but ran out of his stash. He found a tanning salon owner to replenish his supply — and Sorrentino suspected the salon owner was dipping into the pills, too, due to his “pinned pupils.”
“Despite being mic’d up and filmed twenty-four hours a day, I was able to silently communicate my wishes to the tanning salon owner, and the next thing I knew, I had a regular supply of pain pills delivered to me at the tanning salon,” Sorrentino writes. “After I finished tanning, I would place his cash under the towel and go about my job with a fresh stash of pills hidden in my boxers.”
Production eventually caught on to Sorrentino’s ruse and when they tried to get him to go to a new tanning salon, Sorrentino bolted for the original one, resulting in a chase with production.
Jenni “JWOWW” Farley knew about his pill usage and confronted him about it on camera
Sorrentino confesses he once tipped off Farley, now 37, when he offered her Oxycodone while doing press. During season 2, she confronted Sorrentino on air. “MTV depicted our fight in such a way that the audience couldn’t tell what we were fighting about, but the truth is it was about my addiction and drug use,” Sorrentino writes. “I don’t even think she ever specifically said ‘drug addict,’ as the whole subject was a gray area.” Sorrentino knew Farley “calling me out came from a place of concern,” but admits he “didn’t want to hear it.”
Sorrentino got creative when it came to sneaking pills onto the show
The New Jersey resident writes that he smuggled in and consumed 500 pills over the course of filming Jersey Shore season 3 thanks to “the old diet pill switcheroo.” For season 4 in Italy, he changed things up, putting 125 Roxicets — a narcotic made of oxycodone and acetaminophen — into an Altoids tin and bringing four tins. From there, Sorrentino removed the cushions of his shoes “and cut out enough room in the heel to place two Altoids tins in each shoe,” he writes. “I then replaced the insole and packed the kicks in a large suitcase with 20 other pairs.”
He was going through an involuntary withdrawal when he headbutted the wall in season 4
After consuming too much cocaine during an orgy, Sorrentino claims he “always strategized my drug intake.” But he ran out of pills in Italy and “was in a horrible mental space when Ronnie [Ortiz-Magro] decided it was time to address his issues with me,” he writes, describing himself as “sick and depressed.” He and his costar physically fought and, “I snapped,” Sorrentino shares. “I hit a wall, literally and figuratively.” Sorrentino ended up headbutting a wall “to show Ronnie how ready I was to throw down” — and ended up in a neck brace.
“Girls” served as a code for “pills” on Jersey Shore
“If you heard me on the phone asking someone how many girls were coming to the club, chances are I was talking with one of my boys from home in code,” Sorrentino writes. “‘Girls’ meant pills, and the numbers equated to increments of ten. So, for example, if [my friend] The Unit told me he was bringing five girls to the club that night, I knew I was getting a fifty pack.”
But sometimes, “girls” actually meant real women. Sorrentino reveals MTV never aired “a devil’s threesome in Miami with Vinny [Guadagnino] and a girl we brought home from the club.”
Sorrentino had Percocet pills mailed to him on Dancing with the Stars
While competing on season 11 of , Sorrentino enlisted a drug dealer from New Jersey to send him pills via an overnight FedEx package. The dealer would stuff Roxicet pills in pens: each pen could fit 25 Roxys, as Sorrentino calls them, and the dealer would send 10 pens at a time.
“I needed those pills for DWTS,” Sorrentino writes. “That was one of the hardest shows I’ve ever done. I practiced eight hours a day, popping six Perc thirties every few hours.”
Sorrentino made some famous friends in prison
Sorrentino served eight months behind bars at the Otisville Federal Correctional Institution in Otisville, New York, after being found guilty of tax evasion thanks to his brother’s advice to “catch up with the IRS next year” and not file a tax return in 2010. “That single decision would plague me for years,” Sorrentino writes.
During his stint in prison, Sorrentino met Fyre Festival founder Billy McFarland, who’d been sentenced to six years in prison for pleading guilty to two counts of wire fraud, two counts of bank fraud and making false statements to federal law enforcement. “Billy actually DM’d me and asked if I wanted to work with him on his new venture,” Sorrentino writes, adding that he declined because he didn’t want to be involved with the next Fyre Festival.
Sorrentino also claims he played Scrabble in prison with the one of the men responsible for leaking nude photos of Jennifer Lawrence and got Michael Cohen to give him his position of chicken while the disgraced lawyer, 57, served his three-year prison sentence for telling authorities he helped coordinate hush payments to women on Donald Trump’s behalf. According to Sorrentino, Cohen didn’t eat chicken because “he’d had one as a pet or something as kid.”
He and Lauren conceived a baby on his first night back from prison
After being released from prison in September 2019, Sorrentino and his wife celebrated as two consenting adults do, and the act resulted in a pregnancy. Unfortunately, Lauren suffered a miscarriage and eventually received an endometriosis diagnosis. “No description can properly emote the devastation we now felt,” Sorrentino writes. “It was a sharp, indescribable pain for both of us, having this life taken before it ever had a chance. It was a gut punch I wasn’t expecting, and frankly, one I didn’t think we deserved.”
Reality Check: Making the Best of The Situation — How I Overcame Addiction, Loss, and Prison is out now wherever books are sold.
