Lexi Ioannou opened up about her “uncomfortable” relationship with her former stepfather, Tommy Manzo, while appearing on Gia Giudice‘s podcast on Monday.
As she also admitted to being fearful of Tommy, reflected on his devastating divorce from her mother, Dina Manzo, 53, and explained why she now has closure, the 29-year-old Real Housewives of New Jersey alum revealed that Tommy had a “weird obsession” with her and made her “very uncomfortable” during the years he was married to Dina.
“He held onto my things for 10 years and used them as [collateral] because he had this weird obsession with me,” Lexi shared on the May 26 episode of Casual Chaos. “For years, people would tell me he kept my room exactly the same because he thought I was gonna come back. I can’t even begin to understand why he would think I would ever come back there.”
According to Lexi, she felt that Tommy “really loved [her]” because she was the closest thing he had to a child of his own.
“He was never inappropriate, but he definitely was very affectionate, and that was something I was very uncomfortable with because neither of my parents were that way,” she explained. “[It was] kind of like, extra strange … and I was told him to pay him that kind of affection out of respect, therefore I felt like the relationship was very uncomfortable for me.”
While Lexi noted that Tommy was “never around,” she said he made a point to keep her childhood heirlooms after splitting from Dina so he would “have something to hold over me.”
After their split, Tommy was accused of not only hiring an alleged mobster to attack Dina’s now-husband, Dave Cantin, in 2015, but also being connected to a home invasion in which both Dina and Dave were left injured. And at the end of last year, Tommy was sentenced to seven years in prison for the 2015 incident.
“The week before he went away, he called me, and I didn’t pick up because I had a restraining order that the FBI put in place. So he called me and I was like frozen in fear,” Lexi shared. “I know everything he’s done and how he did it, and I think he was probably calling about the things because he knew that that was the only reason that I would consider picking up.”
Looking back, Lexi wished she had picked up.
“Because now I have the perspective of like, ‘I dare you to call me.’ I’m so angry. Truly,” she explained. “And I’ve had to process so much of that anger, mourn that those things were there, and they’re definitely gone now. He kept those things.”
According to Lexi, the last time she spoke to Tommy was “right before” the home invasion. And during that call, after Tommy told her he wanted to meet the man she was dating at the time, she told him he couldn’t until he gave her her things back.
“He was still holding them against me,” she noted.
Although Lexi and Tommy ultimately stopped communicating, they did have a relationship for some time after his divorce from Dina.
“He was begging to have a relationship with me, and he was manipulating me. When I look back, it was pure manipulation, and I felt so torn on what to do, but I knew he wasn’t a good man, and I knew he wasn’t good by my mom,” she revealed. “We had a feeling he’d done some terrible things, but we didn’t have proof of it, and he put me in a very terrible position for a very long time.”
“I lived in fear for so long, and I was silenced by my fear, by upsetting anyone in my family, by angering him, and provoking him to do something. I was in that fear until really recently,” Lexi continued. “Once I sat in the courtroom and I realized that I was the bear, he was the one about to go away for the things he did, my family [was] the ones that were embarrassed by the things that they did. Why should I fear them? They should fear me.”
After opening up about her experience with Tommy and the Manzo family in a blog post and now on Gia’s podcast, Lexi said that her claims may feel “big.” However, when it comes to what she could say, there’s plenty more.
“I could go on for days about what I could say about all these people, and I still don’t. I like to have respect,” she noted.
Looking back on Dina and Tommy’s divorce and the attacks that followed, Lexi said that she and her mom are “still” in shock.
“It’s like, how did this become reality?” she wondered.
Luckily, with Tommy behind bars, Lexi has gotten her closure.
“Sitting and watching that trial, seeing him stand there … I saw everything just so I could kind of understand, ‘This is reality.’ And then I think I kind of just realized, what am I afraid of? It still feels uncomfortable … But why? It’s my truth. It’s my experience,” she declared.
Also on the podcast episode, Lexi admitted to feeling abandoned by her family.
“I’ve been upset, and nobody called me for years. I called them … I was just caught in the crossfire of all of it. Also, the chaos of what happened with Tommy and the obsession, I had to deal with all that on my own,” she stated.
“Nobody in my family ever extended any comfort [to] me, and they all knew the things that were coming to light,” she added.
