“We were at each other’s throats and the whole experience was very, very negative. It was a divided show. It was a horrible, horrible time in our lives.”
After feuding since Gorga joined the show since Season 3, they've since made up, all agreeing to bury the hatchet after Giudice returned home from her 11-month prison sentence for bank, mail, wire, and bankruptcy fraud back in December 2015. But this season, there’s been tension building between them again.
In last week’s episode, Teresa confronted Melissa during a cast trip to Oklahoma, stressing that she should control her husband and force him to spend more time with their ailing father.
Despite their bickering, Gorga says she and her sister-in-law are “in a good place” now.
“We are going to disagree,” she says. “We get into arguments on and off camera, and it’s all real stuff. It’s legit what’s going on and we don’t sugar-coat things. I discuss how I feel about it and she discusses how she feels about it. Neither of us are bulls——- it or faking it.”
Still, Melissa does have hesitation and worry that those squabbles could lead to history repeating itself.
“Teresa doesn’t feel that way — I do,” she explained. “I’m the one who is always ahead, I’m a heavy thinker. So I’m the one who’s like, ‘Oh my God, we’re not going back to the dark place, are we?’ I get that way. I get very nervous when we start to argue. And I think I even discuss that during the season.”
“If she starts to go to that dark place, my body stars to shake,” she told PEOPLE. “Because we can’t go there again. If we go there again, it’s over. There’s no way — we can’t come back from that.”
“We’re a real family,” Melissa adds. “There’s so much that’s gone on that we’ve had to go through together, I think it’s actually made us so much stronger than we were before. We’re able to have an argument and then have dinner on Sunday, and we couldn’t do that before.”
Photo Credit: Bravo
