Real Housewives of New Jersey star Teresa Giudice turned herself in to the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, Connecticut, early this morning to begin serving a 15-month sentence for bankruptcy fraud.
Teresa was sentenced to 15 months in prison by a federal judge for her role in the Giudices’ financial and tax fraud cases. Her husband, Joe, was sentenced to 41 months. He’ll begin his sentence after Teresa’s release in consideration of the pair’s minor children.
The Giudices were initially indicted in 2013 on 39 counts of conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud, bank fraud, making false statements on loan applications and bankruptcy fraud. The charges included separate charges for Joe for failure to file federal income tax returns for tax years 2004 through 2008. As part of the plea agreement, Teresa pleaded guilty to four of the counts against her and Joe to five of the counts against him, including failure to file federal income tax returns.
In addition to prison, the Giudices must make restitution.
Judge Esther Salas had originally contemplated sentencing the pair to probation instead of jail time but ultimately sided with prosecutors, saying to the Giudices:
I don’t honestly believe that you understand or respect the law. I need to send a message. In the eyes of the law it doesn’t matter who you are. There are consequences to pay.
Teresa talked about her sentencing when she sat down together with her husband and Bravo’s Andy Cohen on Watch What Happens Live. She said, at the time, that she had not understood that a prison sentence was a real possibility, a charge that was difficult to believe.
While prison might be a new reality for Teresa, housing a celebrity isn’t new for the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury. It’s the same facility that housed Lauryn Hill in 2013. Hill was sentenced to just three months in prison after pleading guilty to charges of tax evasion for failing to file tax returns for the years 2005, 2006 and 2007; like Giudice, the judge took the fact that she was a mother into consideration when determining the length of her sentence. The “Queen of Mean,” Leona Helmsley, also served time in Danbury in the 1990s after being convicted on 33 felony counts of fraud, including mail fraud, tax evasion and filing false tax returns.
