Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi BLOCKED by Sammi Sweetheart
Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi is shore about one thing.
More than a decade later, when it comes to that note she and Jersey Shore costar Jenni “JWoww” Farley wrote Sammi “Sweetheart” Giancola about Ronnie Ortiz-Magro cheating on her, she would definitely take a different approach.
“Looking back at it now as a mom of three, 36 years old, I would have told her to her face,” Snooki told E! News in an exclusive interview. “I would have been like, ‘Sam, this is what I heard from Angelina [Pivarnick] what Ron was doing. I just wanted to let you know, like it’s shady.'”
But for the reality star—who shares kids Lorenzo, 11, Giovanna, 9, and Angelo, 4, with husband Jionni LaValle—hindsight is 20/20.
“At the time—only being 21 years old, not wanting to fight with Ron or get involved but wanted my girlfriend to know—we went the note route,” she continued. “So, I would definitely change it if it were today, and I would tell her to her face. We were young and dumb, and the note is infamous. So, I’ll take it.”
As for how Sammi feels?
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“I feel like the note will forever be a part of my life,” she told E! in a separate interview. “It’s, like, in my face every day. It’s on TikTok. It’s on Instagram….I actually think it’s pretty funny.”
While there was plenty of drama on the show, there was some off-camera, too. Like when Snooki revealed in 2022 that Sammi had blocked her on social media—a move she indicated caught her by surprise.
“I always loved her since day one,” Snooki explained. “Obviously, we have little fights here and there like best friends and sisters do, but I never had an issue with her. So when she blocked me, it really hurt my feelings and I cried….And I feel like she realized it was silly.”
Ultimately, they moved on and Sammi is now back on Jersey Shore: Family Vacation after initially choosing to not participate in the spinoff.
And she isn’t the only one making a return. In the upcoming seventh season, fans will see Ronnie reunite with his castmates, also including Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino, Pauly “DJ Pauly D” Delvecchio, Vinny Guadagnino and Deena Cortese.
“I just feel like it’s complete now,” Snooki said, later adding, “This season is literally the first season that it’s all of us in one room.”
And while she noted it was awesome to have everyone together again, she then realized, “Holy crap, it’s a lot of us. And that’s why there’s a lot of drama.”
The new season of Jersey Shore: Family Vacation premieres on MTV Feb. 8 at 8 p.m. EST. To read secrets about the original Jersey Shore, keep scrolling.
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1. The show was originally set to air on VH1 and was more of a competition series, titled America’s Biggest Guido and only featured male guidos. The only JS cast member who was part of that initial pilot was The Situation.
2. When the concept changed, with producers realizing they needed women as well because they “fight,” per casting director Doron Ofir, The Situation was their first housemate, making quite the impression during his casting interview, walking in and saying, “‘Okay, let me just take my shirt off first.’ I was like, ‘What?'” Salsano recalled to Vulture. “I have never in my life met someone that felt more comfortable upon not knowing you. He’s like, ‘Enough said, right?'”
3. Working as a bartender on Long Island, JWoww actually auditioned for another Vh1 reality show at her place of work to support a friend: Paris Hilton’s My New BFF. But a few weeks later, she got a call about on a little show about guidos instead.
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4. For Pauly D, who was working as a DJ in Rhode Island, he was contacted via MySpace. (2009 for ya.) But what sold the casting directors was a certain amenity he had in his home when they filmed a day in the life package as a trial. “What put Pauly D at the instant top of the list was that he owned his own tanning booth at his own house,” Ofir told Vulture. “A tanning booth is like $10,000. Who’s saving up coins and then buying a tanning booth?”
5. Snooki, who had a developed a taste for reality TV stardom after appearing on the MTV show Is She Really Going Out With Him? with one of her exes, showed up “drunk” for her audition after seeing a casting call on Facebook. “Nicole showed up in a miniskirt and she literally did cartwheels and flips,” Ofir remembered. “She was extraordinary. Her application was smudged with fingerprints from her bronzer to the point that I was like, ‘What happened to her application? What spilled on it?'”
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6. While she’s known by her infamous nickname Snooki, the pint-size reality star didn’t actually go by that nickname, she just listed it on the application. “Then I was like, “Oh, s–t.” Now that it’s stuck, I wish I’d put something else,” she admitted to Vulture.
7. Before the show moved from Vh1 to MTV, another guido had been selected to join the show: Joey Fist Pumps, a pretty well-known regular on the Shore. “He was literally called Joey Fist Pumps,” Ofir said. “He was a union contractor, which is one of the reasons he wasn’t able to do the show.” Another reason: MTV wanted a few younger stars. Goodbye, Joey Fist Pumps, hello Ronnie and Vinny!
8. The iconic duck phone, which was found at a local thrift store, was a happy accident, according to Salsano. “Our art director went out and goes, ‘I saw this duck phone. It’s so ridiculous.’ I said, ‘We cannot leave that in the house. It doesn’t make sense.’ Then the show started and I’m like, ‘Oh my God, we left that duck phone in there.’ Now the duck phone is the national symbol of Jersey Shore.”
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9. In season one, the cast really did work at the T-shirt shop, with Vinny telling Vulture, “We did the first season for nothing, zero dollars, except whatever we made at the Shore Store.”
10. Shop owner Danny Merk revealing their salary to Vulture: “They started off at $10 an hour, then it went to $15, and then I think I gave them 20 bucks an hour at the very end.” The hardest worker? Pauly D, with Jenni and Sammi proving talented at the cash register. Meanwhile, the worst employees were the Situation and Snooki.
11. After the monster success of the first season, the cast reportedly got a major pay raise, earning $10,000 per episode, per the New York Daily News. By the series’ end in 2012, they were bringing in $100,000 per ep, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
12. Ever wonder where GTL came from? You can thank production, who found the cast’s daily routine of going to the gym, hitting the tanning salon and doing laundry so tedious and mundane they were afraid they didn’t have a show. “We were writing on a dry-erase board—because we always were like, ‘OK, so-and-so went here, so-and-so went here’—and every day we’d write ‘gym, tanning, laundry,'” Salsano revealed. “Then we got lazy and just started writing ‘GTL.'”
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13. Unlike many reality shows, over 40 cameras are rolling 24/7 on the Jersey Shore cast for the 30-50 days of filming, with Salsano once telling us, “We don’t wait for something to happen, we keep them rolling.”
14. The reality stars having no access to cellphones, TV, pen and paper and magazines, though they were initially allowed one personal call per week. “The only time you’re off camera is when you’re in the bathroom. Even if you’re in the bathroom with somebody else, they say two is a party, so they film it,” Pauly D revealed to Vulture. “We took long showers to get away from cameras. But it does become second nature.”
15. After Angelina’s dramatic exits from the cast, Deena, who had auditioned for the show before it began, was brought in as her replacement in season three. “Well, me and Nicole have been friends for, like, two years now, and, you know, she needed a partner in crime, like, you know, on the show with her,” Deena told EW.
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16. Any guests–whether it was a DTF fan or grenade–were carded before being allowed to enter the Jersey Shore home. “People are literally given a field sobriety test to get into the house,” Salsano explained to Vulture. “We have the same carding system they have at that club—that electronic thing where they run your ID—because we don’t let anybody in the house that’s not 21. Also, if someone is that inebriated, we’d ask people to leave.”
17. Could you imagine Jersey Shore with a new cast of guidos and guidettes? It almost happened, with MTV initially looking at an all-new line-up of housemates for the second season.
18. The gang’s Jersey Shore home is available to rent, but it’ll cost you $3,500 per night to stay in the 6-bedroom and 3-bathroom Seaside Heights landmark. But fair warning: the jacuzzi isn’t actually part of the house, as it’s actually on the roof of the t-shirt shop.
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19. When Jersey Shore first debuted in 2009, many advertisers boycotted the show and pulled their ads, including Domino’s Pizza and Dell, with the show also receiving backlash from the Italian-American organization UNICO for its depiction of guidos.
“It was insane, I did not expect it,” Salsano told THR at the time. “I was like, ‘Why are they so mad?’ If you look at the credits on the show, it’s all Italian kids from the East Coast. This is our heritage; this was us as teens.”
20. While the cast rarely held back on the show, JWoww and the Situation revealed the struggles they kept off-camera during the show’s initial run on an episode of the revival series, Jersey Shore family Vacation. Ahead of the cast’s Italy-set fourth season, JWoww suffered a miscarriage, revealing she was a “f–king mess” during filming because of the medication she was taking to cope. The Situation, meanwhile, explained his erratic season four and season five behavior was due to withdrawals as he was struggling to get sober.
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