ET has your first look at the 'Real Housewives of New Jersey' OG's first season 10 appearance, plus an exclusive chat with the star.
Danielle Staub is back in the Garden State, but things aren’t looking so rosy for her.
ET has your exclusive first look at the Real Housewives of New Jersey OG's first appearance on season 10, which finds her sitting down with the group to, apparently, discuss feeling like an outcast. Danielle left season nine in a rocky place with the women, the season ending with her then-husband, Marty Caffrey, drenched in water after being knocked in the pool by Margaret Josephs and her husband, Joe Benigno, at a party thrown by Jennifer Aydin.
Danielle was absent from a different party Jennifer threw for her husband's plastic surgery practice, featured on the season 10 premiere, and, according to Jennifer, it was on purpose. As she tells Danielle in the sneak peek, "It was a business thing and I didn't want somebody that, you know, has the ability to just… flip the switch so easily."
Danielle goes on to argue that she's "never really flipped switches," and tells Jennifer that she feels like she stabbed her in the back. Jennifer then defends herself, noting that she texted Danielle an apology for leaving her out the next day. Danielle says, no, Jennifer never texted her… but changes her tune when Jennifer goes to pull out her phone to show proof.
"Oh wait, you did text me a very long message," Danielle lets out, before Jennifer can even pull her phone out.
"Liar, liar, pants on fire," Margaret quips in a confessional. "So, which one is it? Did she text you or didn't she text you?"
Watch the scene here
Margaret tells Danielle that she has a habit of "rewriting history," and cautions her to stop "hurting people and damaging other people's lives." That's when Danielle turns the tables on Margaret, throwing out how she got together with her husband while still married to her now-ex-husband, Jan Josephs.
"You're the one who, after four years of having an affair with Joe, you decided to dignify Jan with a divorce!" she blurts out, to which Margaret simply replies, "It wasn’t four years."
"By the way, it doesn’t matter," she then tells Danielle. "I have an ex-husband that adores me, my current husband adores me. That’s a lot more than you can say for yourself."
"It was still cheating!" Danielle shouts back, but Margaret has an insult ready to fire back: "Prostitutes f**k married men, and you've f**ked a lot more married man than I have."
"Wow, I’m leaving because I'm not going to sit here with trash," Danielle cries as she storms out, unleashing a diatribe of slurs at Margaret. "Homewrecker! Piece of s**t! You talk about me like that? You’re a s***ty human being. W***e!"
"I do pride myself on being real," Danielle tells ET. "I'm never overthinking too much and just living my life by my own standards, unapologetically."
Danielle says she feels the other women on the cast find it impossible to "keep it real" and live authentically, which is why she believes there's so much friction between her and the ladies.
"Danielle Staub, in all of its glory, just agitates people!" she says, referring to herself in the third person. "Of course, I'm the only one willing to be honest about things that I’ve done, and growths that I’ve had."
Danielle seems to believe the women have turned a blind eye to what she views as Margaret's indiscretion -- getting together with her now-husband via an extramarital affair -- noting that the original cast threw her lots of shade all those years ago for having such a rich dating history ("Engaged 19 times!").
"All this s**t just went out the window, 'cause she told it like it was a funny story, but she left out the details," Danielle offers, blasting Margaret. "I mean, they fell madly in love and that's it? That wasn't it."
"I despise -- I despise -- cheaters," she continues, doubling down on her disdain for Margaret. "I've been cheated on, [and] I can say, in all honesty, it never -- it's damage that never left me."
As seen in the season 10 trailer, Danielle blames Margaret for the downfall of her marriage to Marty. The pair separated just weeks after they tied the knot. Danielle has since gone on to get engaged to and break up with a different man.
"Marty and I are in a peaceful place, a great place," Danielle says of her relationship with her ex today. "He's my friend and I think there's a lot of regret and remorse because, when I introduced Margaret to Marty, I would have never seen them come to our wedding and try to talk Marty out of marrying me."
Danielle alleges that Margaret and Joe somehow preyed on Marty, and claims they actively worked to turn him against Danielle. She goes so far as to say that Margaret is "obsessed" with her.
"Margaret and Joe called him up once they knew he was upset with me and they just dug in, and they manipulated him, used him, used his anger and his fears," she says. "It caused a separation and an annulment to turn into a divorce when they gave him a divorce attorney, who they knew from their own divorces, just to hurt me and hurt me financially, as well, 'cause then, I had to hire an attorney."
"This is the evil part that I don’t think anyone will ever see fully," she adds. "I'm trying to defend everyone's opinion of me -- it's an undertaking -- and then, to know there's people, like Margaret Josephs and Joe, that would get that involved in destroying us, so that they could have something to talk about amongst the group and bask about? I don't know. I don't know people like that, and I don't want to know people like that. And I think it's vile and disgusting, and I really just think it speaks more about them than it does about me."
After Margaret, Danielle seems to take the most issue with Jennifer and Melissa Gorga. She claims she helped all three women find their place in the group, but once that task was done, she says they threw her away.
"This is the most energy I've poured into them since June," she says of the interview she’s currently giving. "And I've been really happy about that."
While she never names names, Danielle seems to lump Dolores Catania in with Margaret, Melissa and Jennifer. Dolores was not open to Danielle's return to the fold a few years back.
"It took four of them to make one of me," she quips, suggesting that she brings as much to the show as those four women combined. "And the four of them keep telling my story, but it doesn’t make it true. So when one day I tell my story, you can imagine how people will doubt it to even be the truth, because they feel like they've heard it and they just haven't."
"I don't want that kind of energy, I don’t want that toxicity and I don’t want that negativity around me," Danielle continues, suggesting she's on the outs with everyone from RHONJ at this point. "So, there you have it! The ones that are trying to hand me, lynch me and tie me up, are the ones that, really, I helped!"
At this point, Danielle says she has no interest in repairing her relationships with these women, especially Margaret. Viewers will see the foes get into a physical altercation later in the season, which Margaret described to ET as "a day that I think will go down as big as the table flip."
"I never want anything to do with her," she announces. "I don’t find her to be the kind of people I would ever be around, and there’s a lot of people that would agree with that."
"She's just talking loudly and over people; it doesn't mean that she's saying anything that's relevant," she adds, launching into a mini-rant. "It just means she's trying to hide from other things that could be said about her. She wants to speak loudly so she can speak over you when you're trying to make a point about her own life. She'll never deal with her own issues. She's always gonna find someone to mean girl, 'cause that’s her nature and that's who she is. She's been like this all along. And I regret ever helping her in the beginning, I really do, I truly do."
The Real Housewives of New Jersey airs Wednesdays at 8 p.m. ET on Bravo.
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