Mike ‘The Situation’ Sorrentino’s Memoir Bombshells: Jersey Shore Orgies and a Mistake That ‘Plagued’ Him for Years

Viewers were immediately fascinated by the fist-pumping, GTLing and boardwalk antics Jersey Shore cast when the MTV reality show premiered 14 years ago. But behind the scenes, star Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino was mired in a prescription pill addiction. Sorrentino, 41, details the struggle in his new memoir Reality Check: How to Make the Best of a Situation – How I Overcame Addiction, Loss and Incarceration.

“Reality check is my story of hope, loss, love and redemption. About hitting rock bottom but never giving up,” Sorrentino wrote on Instagram. “This is the first time I’ve really been able to share my whole story and not leave anything out. It was important to me to be completely honest about how deep my drug addiction was and to tell all the crazy stories from those years, as well as how hard I worked to find permanent sobriety.”

Mike ‘The Situation’ Sorrentino recalls the night his mom and wife ‘saved’ me from a heroin spiral (Exclusive)

Now eight years sober, Sorrentino pulls back the curtain on what the MTV cameras didn’t show, how much his co-stars knew, and what he really meant when he asked to bring “the girls” to the club on Jersey Shore.

Keep reading for the biggest revelations from his new memoir, out now.

Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino’s memoir ‘Reality Check: Making the Most of the Situation – How I Overcame Addiction, Loss and Prison’.

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He stopped undressing 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.” Unbeknownst to his parents, Sorrentino stripped at the Abyss Club in New Jersey, but his mom, Linda, and dad, Frank, learned of his side hustle when one of Linda’s friends called to say she got a birthday lap dance from her son. It sent the future reality star into “early retirement from the strip life,” he writes.

Sorrentino decided to continue Jersey Shore for reuniting with his now wife Lauren

The reality star met his wife Lauren while attending classes at Kean College in Union, New Jersey. His pill consumption eventually drove them apart, but they continued to keep in touch while talking Jersey Shore started. “While I was waiting to see if the show would be picked up, our conversations turned to a potential reunion,” he writes. “We were both willing 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’re doing the show. If we do, we won’t last.” He decided to continue with Jersey Shore and calls it the “best decision” he and Lauren “ever made.”

Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino and wife Lauren in New York in August.

Santiago Felipe/Getty

He knew two of his own Jersey Shore colleagues before filming

Sorrentino admits that he met Angelina Pivarnick before filming Jersey Shore and they “actually hit it off a few times back in the day when we were both in the same club scene.” The father of two children claims that he instructed Pivarnickova (37) in the series, but he had the impression that she behaved differently in front of the cameras. Sorrentino writes that he also knew Sammi “Sweetheart” Giancola “a little” before the show, as they “hung out with the same crew.”

A tanning salon employee was handing out Sorrentino pills Jersey Shore season 2

Sorrentino writes that he brought 500 Percocet pills to the second-season shoot in Miami, injecting them via empty fat-burning pills, but ran out of his supply. He tracked down a tanning salon owner to replenish his supply – and Sorrentino suspected the salon owner was also taking pills, due to his “protected pupils.”

“Despite being monitored 24 hours a day by microphone and video, I managed to silently communicate my wishes to the owner of the tanning salon, and the next thing I remembered was the regular supply of painkillers delivered to the tanning salon,” writes Sorrentino. “After I finished tanning, I would put his money under the towel and go to work with a fresh supply of pills hidden in my boxers.” Production eventually caught on to Sorrentino’s ruse and when they tried to get him to go to the new tanning salon, Sorrentino ran after the original, resulting in a chase with production.

Jenni “JWOWW” Farley knew about his pill use and confronted him on camera

Sorrentino admits he once tipped off Farley, now 37, when he offered her Oxycodone while she was doing press. During the second season, she confronted Sorrentino on air. “MTV portrayed our fight in such a way that the audience couldn’t tell what we were fighting about, but the truth was that it was about my addiction and drug use,” writes Sorrentino. “I don’t even think she ever specifically said ‘drug addict’ because the whole subject was a gray area.” Sorrentino knew Farley “called me out of concern,” but admits he “didn’t want to hear it.”

Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino and Jenni “JWOWW” Farley on ‘Jersey Shore’ in 2010.

William D. Bird/Everett Collection

Sorrentino was creative when it came to introducing pills into the series

A resident of New Jersey writes that he smuggled and drank 500 pills during filming Jersey Shore season 3 thanks to the “old diet pill switcheroo.” For the fourth season in Italy, he switched things up, putting 125 Roxicet — a narcotic made from oxycodone and acetaminophen — in an Altoid can and bringing four cans. From there, Sorrentino removed the cushions from his shoes “and cut out enough room in the heel to put two Altoid plates in each shoe,” he writes. “Then I replaced the insole and packed the kicks into a big suitcase with 20 other pairs.”

He was going through a forced withdrawal when he hit his head against a wall in Season 4

After consuming too much cocaine during an orgy, Sorrentino claims he was “always strategizing about my drug intake.” But he ran out of pills in Italy and “was in a terrible mental state 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 colleague got into a physical fight and, “I snapped,” Sorrentino shares. “I hit a wall, literally and figuratively.” Sorrentino ended up banging his head against a wall “to show Ronnie how much I was willing to throw myself”—and ended up in a neck brace.

Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino.

MTV/Facebook

“Girls” served as 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 to one of my guys from home in code,” writes Sorrentino. “’Girls’ meant pills, and the numbers equated to increments of ten. So, for example, if [my friend] The unit told me he brought five girls to the club that night, I knew I was going to get a package of fifty.”

But sometimes “girls” actually meant real women. Sorrentino reveals that MTV never aired “the devilish threesome in Miami with Vinny [Guadagnino] and the girl we brought home from the club.”

Sorrentino received Percocet pills in the mail Dancing with the stars

During the season 11 competition DWTS, Sorrentino enlisted a New Jersey drug dealer to send him pills via an overnight FedEx package. The dealer would stuff Roxicet pills into pens: each pen could hold 25 Roxys, as Sorrentino calls them, and the dealer would send 10 pens. “I needed those pills for DWTS”, writes Sorrentino. “It was one of the hardest performances I’ve ever done. I worked out eight hours a day, popping six Perc 30s every few hours.”

Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino and Karina Smirnoff in ‘Dancing with the Stars’.

ABC/ADAM LARKEY

Mike ‘The Situation’ Sorrentino Says Being A Sober Dad Is His ‘Greatest Flexibility’ In Sweet Photo With Son

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 2010 tax return. the decision tormented me for years,” writes Sorrentino. While in prison, Sorrentino met Fyre Festival founder Billy McFarland, who was sentenced to six years in prison after pleading guilty to two counts of wire fraud, two counts of bank fraud and making false statements to federal police. “Billy actually DMed 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 in the next Fyre Festival. Sorrentino also claims he played Scrabble in prison with one of the men responsible for publishing nude photos of Jennifer Lawrence and got Michael Cohen to give him a chicken seat while the disgraced lawyer, 57, served his three-year prison sentence for telling authorities he helped coordinate secret payments to a woman on behalf of Donald Trump. According to Sorrentino, Cohen didn’t eat chicken because he “had it as a pet or something as a kid.”

He and Lauren conceived a child the first night he got back from prison

After being released from prison in September 2019, Sorrentino and his wife celebrated as two consenting adults, the act resulting in a pregnancy. Unfortunately, Lauren suffered a miscarriage and was eventually diagnosed with endometriosis. “No description can adequately describe the devastation we now feel,” writes Sorrentino. “It was a sharp, indescribable pain for both of us, to take this life before it even had a chance. It was a gut punch that I didn’t expect, and honestly, I didn’t think we deserved it.”

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Reality Check: How to Make the Best of a Situation – How I Overcame Addiction, Loss and Incarceration now it’s out everywhere books are sold.

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Source: HIS Education