In the midseason trailer for The Real Housewives of New Jersey, Jennifer Aydin is taking her husband Bill Aydin to task before the cameras to discuss his decades-old affair. “You were doing your thing without any consideration of me,” she tells Bill in the video you can watch here.
The trailer then cuts to the reality star having a conversation with her frenemy Margaret Josephs. “It’s always me trying for him,” she tells her, tearing up. “I don’t know if I can work through it.”
On the season 12 premiere of the show, Margaret exposed the rumor Bill had an affair a decade ago and Jennifer immediately confirmed during the fight that Bill’s affair was with a pharmaceutical rep. Following the Feb. 1 episode, Jennifer told Page Six that she and Bill’s youngest child, 9-year-old daughter Olivia, learned of her father’s affair through TikTok.
“We had a blogger leak this awful storyline and somebody made a TikTok on it,” she explained. “My sweet little Olivia saw a TikTok that said ‘the big secret.'” The reality star went on to explain that Olivia denied the affair ever happened and defended her parents and after that ordeal, she had to confirm to her daughter that her father, in fact, had cheated.
“I sat her down and I kept my composure because I realized [my kids] will react to however Mommy’s acting,” Jennifer said. “I put on a brave face and said, ‘Listen, Daddy did a bad thing. But that doesn’t mean that he’s a bad person. And when we love people, we forgive them when they make mistakes. And I’ve forgiven him and I’m OK.’ She wasn’t upset because I wasn’t upset.”
As for Margaret, Jennifer has said she has no idea how her reality TV rival found out about Bill’s affair, considering how the New York native never told her castmates — or even her close friends and family — about the incident. “I never told a soul. I didn’t tell my parents, I didn’t tell my cousins, I didn’t tell my sister, I didn’t tell my best friend,” Jennifer said on the show. “I put it in the vault and threw away the key. I pretended it never happened.”
Now, a decade later, Jennifer and Bill have seemed to have move past their most immediate issues and are living amicably. “He supported me in the sense of letting me share our story, which I think is very brave of him,” she explained. “And I told him if we were able to get through it when it happened 10 years ago, we’ll be able to get through it now.”