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Margaret Josephs is accused of getting friends to try to find dirt on the new Housewives joining the RHONJ cast.
A former friend of Michelle Pais, who appeared on season 11 of RHONJ as a friend of the Housewives, claims she was contacted by Margaret Josephs‘ good friend Ryan Ruggerio, who works at CNBC, to get dirt on the luxury real estate agent when she began filming for the show in 2020.
According to the source, she and Michelle Pais were friends before having a falling out in their twenties. Since then, she hasn’t spoken to the real estate agent in 15 years, which is why she was shocked to receive a random text in 2020 about her filing for RHONJ out of the blue.
“I heard some rumbles that [Michelle] will be on the show as a friend of Teresa [Giudice]. Then I get a random text message, a number that I don’t know. It’s a screenshot of my old friend’s Instagram post announcing she will be on the show or something. It was August 10th, 2020. They wrote under the screenshot, “Can you believe this?! lol.’”
The source explains that she didn’t know who the text message came from and questioned who they were and how they got her number.
She never gets a response from the sender and decides to do some digging into the phone number. This is when she learns that the number is attached to Ryan Ruggerio, who works for NBC and seems to be a good friend of Margaret Josephs.
After learning this information, she decides to “call [Ryan] out on it. He tells me, ‘Oh, sorry [that] wasn’t meant for you, wrong number.”
“I am thinking, you think I am going to believe by some chance you accidentally message the ex-best friend of a new [RHONJ] cast member, pretending to talk shit…and it wasn’t meant for me?”
The former friend of Michelle Pais notes that she is still “curious” about how they connected her to Michelle, noting that we “have not been associated with each other since MySpace.”
While she considered contacting Michelle and letting her know to be “careful,” she eventually “decided to just let it be as they were probably halfway through filming at that point.”
Real Housewives of New Jersey isn’t expected to return for season 15 until late 2025 or early 2026.
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