Entertainment

Apparently 'OITNB' Ruins Lives

by Kadeen Griffiths

Well, I pretty much already knew that Orange Is the New Black was a life ruiner. I mean, I lost an entire weekend sitting inside binge-watching Season 2 when it premiered on Netflix and I waste perhaps too much of my thought process on when exactly Season 3 will be coming out. However, Teresa Giudice losing her crisis manager over requesting OITNB's prison for her sentence takes the cake here. As just about everyone already knows at this point, Giudice and husband Joe were sentenced to prison time for fraud charges and Giudice will be serving her sentence first while Joe remains at home with their children. According to E! Online, her legal crisis manager Wendy Feldman has fired her. To be fair, she did it because Giudice's request was done without consulting her, which is a lot more understandable than simply being because she's an OITNB fan.

"Sadly, my time with Teresa and has come to an end," said Feldman to E! "Today's filing regarding Teresa's Bureau of Prisons designation request was not done with my knowledge or input... This is clearly not the first time my advice has not been followed, but this is the time where the stakes are the highest... A designation to a camp is a gift, not a requirement from the BOP and the judge. By making this request, Teresa has jeopardized months of work, months of preparation and in fact may jeopardize where she is ultimately designated or sent to."

Giudice wanted to be assigned to Danbury Federal Prison in Connecticut, the prison that served as the inspiration for Litchfield Correctional Facility in Orange is the New Black, so she could be in a better position to receive visits from her children. For that reason, she submitted a letter to the judge asking him to grant her this request, but she did it against the advice of her crisis manager. The tragic end result is that Feldman and Giudice have gone their separate ways and, worse, Giudice might have actually ruined her chance to go to Danbury at all. There are, after all, many judges who don't take very kindly to celebrity lawbreakers trying to manipulate the system in their favor.

However, I can't honestly say that I fault her for the attempt, whether Feldman approved of it or not. It's not an ideal situation for her to be the first one to have to spend her prison sentence away from her children and celebrities wouldn't be celebrities if they didn't try to make their jail time as easy and comfortable for themselves as possible. It sounds like Giudice was thinking less like a prisoner and more like a despondent mother, which is completely understandable even if it resulted in a rash action that might hurt her more than it helps her. Hopefully, the judge grants Giudice at least a little bit of leniency in this area so she doesn't have to see her children even more infrequently over the next 15 months. And if not, well, there's always the hope that tomorrow will be taco night.

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