Heavy/NBCUniversal "Real Housewives of New Jersey" cast members.
The “Real Housewives of New Jersey” cast members are filming for season 14, but that doesn’t mean they are all sharing scenes.
The Bravo reality show’s cast, which includes Teresa Giudice, Melissa Gorga, Margaret Josephs, Jennifer Aydin, Dolores Catania, Jackie Goldschneider, Danielle Cabral, and Rachel Fuda, recently gathered in Brooklyn, New York for the Battle for Brooklyn, the annual charity softball game between the RHONJ cast and Maimonides Health employees, per All About the Real Housewives.
Bravo’s cameras were on site for four hours to document the RHONJ stars both on and off the field. But sisters-in-law Gorga and Giudice did not interact at all during the game amid their ongoing family feud, a source told Us Weekly.
Another insider told The Sun that Giudice brought her husband, Louie Ruleas, and daughter Gia to the game, while Gorga and her husband Joe brought their son Joey. The two families arrived on the scene five minutes apart.
An onlooker told the outlet that Giudice and Gorga were “never in the same group” throughout the event, with Giudice spending the bulk of the time in the dugout. “It’s like they did everything they could to avoid each other,” the source said.
Guidice and Gorga’s separation at the game falls in line with past rumors about how the show will work with both of them still on the cast.
In July 2023, a source told The Sun, “Teresa said that she will film with Melissa and she’ll just completely ignore her like she has done in the past.”
The insider added that even though there would be some mandatory group filming events such as cast trips, Giudice planned to stick by her friends in the cast and avoid confronting Gorga at all.
Tension in the Giudice-Gorga family has been going on for years, but it hit a peek in August 2022 when Joe and Melissa decided to skip Giudice’s wedding to Ruelas, In May 2023, Bravo host Andy Cohen told Kelly Ripa’s “Let’s Talk Off-Camera” podcast that both RHONJ stars have been walking around with hurt feeling for more than a decade.
“Teresa let out at the last reunion that she was mad at Melissa for not changing her wedding date because Teresa was pregnant at her wedding and she was a bridesmaid. She didn’t like how she looked,” Cohen noted. “So this is now going back for 15 years… I mean, she’s clearly not over it.”
Some RHONJ Cast Members Reportedly Shot Retakes at the Softball Game
While the feud between Giudice and Gorga was said to still be very real, onlookers at the softball game claimed some of the action along the sidelines appeared to be staged as Bravo’s cameras rolled. AllAboutTRH reported that a producer “was seen controlling every conversation at the game” and “made the RHONJ cast members redo scenes and told them who to approach.”
Sources told The Sun that during the game, many RHONJ scenes, including “heated exchanges,” were staged by producers, and some shots required re-takes.
One onlooker told the outlet that Josephs was “in the middle of all the drama” and that “all of her conversations were filmed, and the producer kept bringing girls over to her.” In addition, Aydin filmed a scene with Cabral and Fuda twice to get it right.
Andy Cohen Said The Real Housewives Drama is Not Staged
There have long been rumors that the Real Housewives shows are staged. According to Newsweek, Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy once claimed that he witnessed staged scenes being shot for “The Real Housewives of Miami” as he watched from his home.
“I could see what they were doing,” Portnoy said on Bethenny Frankel’s “Rewives” podcast in January 2023. “I could see that they were re-doing scenes. Like, something would happen, and they’d be like, do it again. It looked extremely staged from what I saw across the street.”
But in 2015, Cohen told Altitude magazine that the drama on the Bravo reality shows is all very “real.”
“We cast very highly volatile, emotional, driven, opinionated women, and because of that, they go to town!” the Bravo host told the magazine, per BravoTVcom. “You know sometimes it just gets really personal about their family. … [It] works so well because it’s all people who have long histories with each other.”
“Everything is very real and all you would have to do is to meet a housewife to see that they are as they appear,” the Bravo host told Elle Australia in 2020.
But that doesn’t mean some of the scenes don’t require a tweak. In 2020, “Vanderpump Rules “ star Ariana Madix told the “Dating Straight” podcast that sometimes reshoots are necessary to fill out a scene.
“There sometimes has to be inserts of things,” Madix said “Like if someone gets engaged, they have to come in after everything and get a closeup shot. Or things to make it make sense… pickups here and there if something was blurry or if someone’s mic shut off
“Sometimes it really works and it really feels like you and it flows,” Madix added. “And sometimes it’s like, ‘This is so corny. I would never say this. I sound ridiculous.’”
READ NEXT: RHONY Newcomer Reveals Surprising Past With Lisa Vanderpump