No One Was Prepared For The Unrestrained Chaos Of The 'RHONJ' "Prostitution Whore" Table Flip Scene

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No One Was Prepared For The Unrestrained Chaos Of The 'RHONJ' "Prostitution Whore" Table Flip Scene

Welcome to Retro Recaps, where we revisit your favorite old shows and give them the modern recap treatment they always deserved. Last week, we dove into Scary Island. Today, it's RHONJ's "Prostitution Whore" episode. Caution: snark ahead.

When researching my book The Housewives, I talked to a professor who teaches a class about the history of reality television and he told me that the only scene he shows from the Real Housewives franchise is the famous first-season finale of The Real Housewives of New Jersey where Teresa Giudice “flips” a table because she gets so angry with Danielle Staub.

I used the scare quote around flip because it doesn’t really go end over end. She just sort of pushes it (twice) scattering the wineglasses and half-finished chicken parms to the well-worn, wall-to-wall carpeting of the basement party room of a restaurant named Lutello, which somehow has a pillar in the center of its name. The “flip” is more of a shift, sort of like how Sheree Whitfield claims that she didn’t “pull” Kim Zolciak’s wig, she just shifted it.

Even those who don’t watch RHONJ know of this moment, etched in collective memory as the ne plus ultra of Housewives. But what about the greater context of it? What about the rest of the episode, which initially aired on Bravo on June 16, 2009? There’s a whole lot of the episode that no one remembers and particularly some details of that scene that have been swept under the wine-stained carpet. Knowing what we know now, how does this episode hit differently?

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