Victoria Gotti had a wild life, and that's putting it lightly. The daughter of late mob boss John Gotti, Victoria was literally stolen from the hospital by her father because the family couldn't afford to pay the bill.
"I've told this story a million times," Gotti explained in an interview. "About how my father stole me from the hospital since they didn't have money to pay the bill. It sets my father up as a noble criminal, a Robin Hood. I often joke that stealing me from the hospital was the most lucrative heist of Dad's life, but looking back on all of it, all I can think of is, "˜Kid, you were royally screwed.'"
Gotti and her father had a tumultuous relationship, and it's all going to be touched upon in her new movie Victoria Gotti: My Father's Daughter. The 56-year-old reality TV star wrote and produced the Lifetime movie, and even though she got final say on most things, there was one scene that Gotti wanted out. Her first child, Justine, was stillborn at nine months, and Gotti felt it wasn't appropriate to include it in the movie.
"I didn't want [that scene] in there," Gotti confessed. "That was very painful to me. And it's not about having to explain it or not wanting to explain it "” I just felt like it's mine, not yours. You didn't know her."
Gotti has three other children, Carmine Jr., 32, John, 31, and Frankie, 28, but Justine's death is something she chose to keep out of the original script. However, someone caught that it wasn't included during the seven-year production process, and decided to add it in. Despite her original hesitations, Gotti said the way it's portrayed isn't so bad.
"They do it tastefully in the movie," said Gotti."You see birth No. 1 which is bad, and then birth No. 2, No. 3 and No. 4 "” it's done that way so it's like, "˜Oh she has a family now.' So it's not so bad. But that's something I really wanted left out."
One scene that did get cut was the death of Gotti's best friend Roseanne, who died in a car accident when they were teenagers. The girls were not allowed to go out and see their boyfriends, but being teens, they chose to disobey the rules. They would go out and have dinner at the end of town, but one night Roseanne's brother caught them.
He took his sister into his car and drove off. Unfortunately, he had been drinking, and moments later her hit a median, and Roseanne was thrown from the car. She landed in a tree, and one of her legs was severed. Immediately, Gotti knew it was her friend who had died.
"I knew from the shoe," Gotti said, getting emotional. "I remember looking at the shoe in the street on her leg, knowing it was her. And it just destroyed me."
It's surprising that the scene was cut, considering how important Gotti felt it was.
"That was an important scene to me because I felt it was meant to change fate completely," Gotti admitted. "Here we were, two kids, not caring about consequences. ... And then to have one of my closest friends killed right in front of me? I'd never been up close and personal with death. I was in such a state of shock. I didn't even know how to tell my mother and father. I couldn't say I was in the car with who I wasn't supposed to be with. That whole scene was very pivotal to my life."
Writing the script was a hard process for Gotti, and sometimes it got to be too much.
"There were a few really bad parts of my life that when I would write them, I'd have to get away from the script for hours, sometimes days, because reliving them all over again was so painful," she admitted.
But despite the emotional strain, she's happy that people will finally see her life for what it actually is.
"There are so many misconceptions of me," Gotti said. "And this movie, it really clears those up."
"[The misconception] I was raised rich, that I'm a princess "” I love that one," joked Gotti. "We grew up very, very poor. We were very young. We were in downtown Brooklyn. We had nothing but we didn't care. We were loved, my siblings and I. We were a very close-knit family."
Opening yourself up to the world like this can't be easy, especially when so much of your life was already made public to begin with.
[H/T: People]