Mike ‘The Situation’ Sorrentino has changed his life for the better but it took some hard work, discipline, rehab, and a little time in the slammer to get to this place. The 41-year-old is gearing up to talk all about his life in his new memoir titled, “Reality Check: Making the Best of The Situation.”
Ahead of its release, the Jersey Shore star sat down with Entertainment Tonight’s Rachel Smith who went through excerpts of his book. Smith mentioned a part where Mike talks about his past drug addiction and how he was able to overcome it.
Mike explained how the success of the show had him flooded with cash. Being a young-minded adult who just wanted to have fun, he wasn’t that responsible with it. In fact, he says he spent a whopping $500,000 to fuel his drug habit. “When you think of that number, when you hear that number, that’s a good college fund right there,” he said while looking back on his drug addiction. “I gotta just be accountable and be like, ‘Yeah, that happened.’ I was wild. I was careless. I was reckless, and I fell prey to drug addiction, and in the book, I describe that I did spend about half a million dollars on cocaine and oxycodone.”
Speaking about his troubling times, Mike recalled, “I was into everything. 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,” he told ET. “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.”
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We’ve seen some explosive moments played out on the reality show, but it wasn’t until Mike hit rock bottom that he knew he needed to change… and quickly.
“I was depressed and [with] anxiety and self-doubt,” he said. “I had given up on myself. I just wanted to get out of that space mentally.”
“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,” he says. “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,” ET quotes.
Mike, who was sentenced to eight months in prison in 2018 for tax evasion, credits his wife, Lauren, and his mother, Linda, for saving him.
He’s looking forward to celebrating eight years of sobriety this December and baby No. 3