‘Jersey Shore’ Star Ronnie Ortiz-Magro Reveals What Led Him to Check Into Rehab

This week’s episode of Jersey Shore Family Vacation revealed how Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino spent his last days before heading to prison in January. However, the biggest story on the night was the fallout from Ronnie Ortiz-Magro and Jen Harley’s New Year’s Eve argument at a Las Vegas strip club. After arriving back in New Jersey, Ortiz-Magro decided to go to rehab to get help.

The episode showed the cast following media coverage of the argument. At the time, PEOPLE reported that Harley “lunged” at Ortiz-Magro when he tried to leave a strip club they went to together. She reportedly threw an ashtray at him, cutting his nose and lip.

Everyone has been worried about Ortiz-Magro all season, even urging him to stop seeing Harley, the mother of his daughter Ariana Sky. After seeing online reports of the altercation, they expressed even more concern.

“This guy needs help,” Vinny Guadagnino told the camera. “He’s going off the deep end. His New Year resolution should be ending all toxic things in his life.”

“This girl knows how to press his buttons,” Pauly “DJ Pauly D” DelVecchio said, later calling Harley “his demise.”

Ortiz-Magro had been brushing off everyone’s concerns before, but he finally agreed to do something. He went back to New Jersey to talk with his father about what he could do.

“I’m just tired of the chaos in my life,” Ortiz-Magro told the camera. “I’m turning to my dad because he’s somebody that has been through what I’ve been through, or been through worse situations than I’ve been through, and he turned himself around.”

He continued, “We’re almost the same person in a way. He had rough 20s, rough 30s, and he wasn’t in the best place in his life. So I saw a lot of things that I didn’t want to see growing up, and that’s my biggest fear for Ariana. That she’s going to be 2 years old, 3 years old, and I’m picking her up and I have a black eye. Or I’m doing something stupid to go tit for tat with Jen, and she’s just sitting there watching this, and she’s absorbing this.”

Ortiz-Magro’s father gave him a dose of reality, telling him he could end up in jail or worse.

“I’m embarrassed of things that I’ve done, who I’ve become,” Ortiz-Magro told his father. “It’s not someone that I ever thought I would be. I think that I can catch myself and I think that I have control over myself and I’m not going to react or do something stupid or say something stupid that I regret and it just doesn’t work. I don’t have the answers anymore.”

“You know you’ve got to take care of yourself before you can be a father or anything, even a good friend,” his father insisted. “What good are you to her, if you ain’t got your stuff together? So work on you and you can be a great power of example for your daughter.”

Ortiz-Magro said he understood that the past year “just stripped me down, layer by layer, like an onion, and I’ve got nothing left at this point.”

“I need to figure out why I’m so unhappy, I need to figure out how to get myself to a better place, I need to figure out how to be a better father, a better person, a better friend,” the MTV star said.

Ortiz-Magro concluded that he needs help.

“I just decided I don’t want to live like this anymore. I’m tired of being depressed making really bad decisions. I’m going to my mind right, get some therapy, anger management — just focus on me,” he said.

He added that even though he still loves Harley, he has to “remove myself from a toxic situation” and work to better himself without relying on other people or alcohol.

“I just want to be a better role model for my daughter. I want my daughter to look at me and be proud of me, but I need help,” he said.

Otiz-Magro did go to a wellness center. He checked into the HeadWaters holistic treatment center in West Palm Beach, Florida and left in February.

New episodes of Jersey Shore Family Vacation air Thursdays at 8 p.m. ET on MTV.

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