Mike "The Situation" Sorrentino's backup plan wasn't what you might have imagined.
While promoting his upcoming memoir, Reality Check: Making the Best of The Situation — How I Overcame Addiction, Loss, and Prison, the Jersey Shore star revealed he used to keep a s-- tape in his office in case he was ever low on money.
The 41-year-old admitted the tape served as an "insurance policy" that could provide him funds if he was experiencing financial difficulties, noting he even went as far as consulting his team about possibly releasing the tape to the public for the right price.
"There was one. I think it's been destroyed... the video wasn't released [because] the offers weren't good enough," Sorrentino explained to a news outlet during an interview published on Monday, November 27. "They were a combo of revenue from the sales or streams. It wasn't as big of an upfront payment as I wanted. It wasn't Jersey Shore money, so I wasn't going to put myself out there like that."
The dad-of-two was so serious about selling the footage that he even informed his mom, Linda, and wife, Lauren — who is currently pregnant with the couple's third child and due to give birth in March 2024.
"I was down on my luck, and I wanted to soften the fall, and there was that emergency s-- tape. I had to tell my mother and Lauren, 'I have to do this, it's been here for years.' And we went down that journey of selling it and we decided not to," he recalled.
While Sorrentino was certainly bringing in the big bucks as the star of one of MTV's greatest reality shows, he was also spending an unfathomable amount of his earnings on drugs.
"I mean, when the lawyers told me, 'You spent about half a million on cocaine and oxycodone,' I was like, 'Man, that definitely sounds about right,' because it was true," the New Jersey native confessed of the $500,000 he wasted on substances. "I got to the point in my life I couldn't hide it anymore. I got to the point where I needed to do something different, and the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Once I started to become sober, I really just turned everything over and was doing everything differently."
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"I was into everything," Sorrentino noted of his drug addiction that lead him to rehab in 2015. "I had everything on me at all times in my Louis Vuitton bag. Everything — from a couple hundred Roxicet, which are 30 milligram oxycodone, then I'd have probably 150 Percocets on me, which are 10 milligram oxycodone. Then I would have about 100 Xanax on me, 100 Valium, and if I wasn't traveling on a plane maybe I would have some weed and cocaine as well, 'cause I knew that if I traveled on a plane, not a good idea to try and go through security with cocaine and weed on you."
Sorrentino candidly confessed his "lowest" point was trying heroin "a day or so before" entering rehab eight years ago. He has been sober ever since.
Entertainment Tonight interviewed Sorrentino ahead of his memoir release on Tuesday, December 19.
