Jersey Shore: Why Did Ronnie Ortiz-Magro Leave Family Vacation & What Made Him Return?

Up until Season 6, veteran "Jersey Shore: Family Vacation" cast member Ronnie Ortiz-Magro had not appeared on the show regularly in almost two years. Ortiz-Magro, who has been with the "Jersey Shore" franchise for over a decade, stepped back as a full-time cast member in 2021, citing mental health concerns.

Ortiz-Magro was arrested on domestic violence charges in Los Angeles in 2021 (via Las Cruces Sun News) two years after another arrest for domestic violence against ex-girlfriend Jen Harley. In that case, he was originally charged with felony kidnapping before the charges were reduced to domestic battery and resisting arrest, to which he pleaded no contest. The 2021 arrest resulted in Ortiz-Magro stepping away, at the behest of MTV, from "Family Vacation" to focus on his mental health, but also in the rest of the "Jersey Shore" cast cutting him off. 

Ortiz-Magro, of course, is not the only "Jersey Shore" cast member to have been arrested. Resident "Meatballs" Deena Buckner and Nicole "Snooki" Polizzi have both spent their respective nights in the Seaside Heights drunk tank for public intoxication. Mike "The Situation" Sorrentino served eight months in federal prison for tax evasion in 2019. However, for Ortiz-Magro, this was his second domestic violence arrest, something his fellow castmates couldn't take lightly.

"He would come onto the show and pretend like none of it ever happened and we're like, 'This just isn't okay... this is just too much now.' We don't want ourselves around it, we don't want the kids around it. We didn't condone it," Buckner told Business Insider in October 2023.

The reason that Ronnie Ortiz-Magro returned to "Jersey Shore: Family Vacation" (a year sober, he says) in Season 6 was to make amends with his former roommates. Before he did this, Ortiz-Magro first met with Mike "The Situation" Sorrentino, whom he had been in contact with. 

"There's always check-ins over the past couple of years. He's been absent. He has been addressing his mental health. Things started to go in a positive direction," Sorrentino says of Ortiz-Magro during part two of the "Family Vacation" reunion. "We didn't know that [Sammi "Sweetheart" Giancola] was going to come back, so once she did come back, it was a scramble to try to maneuver this very delicate situation." Giancola, Ortiz-Magro's ex, made her return to "Jersey Shore" in Season 6 for the first time in nearly a decade, only after he departed from the show, having opted out to avoid any potentially toxic situations with her ex.

In the episode of "Family Vacation" titled "Frozen Pizza and Margaritas," Ortiz-Magro attends a family meeting with the rest of the Guidos (sans Sammi), prewritten apology in hand, to address his past behavior, his regrets, and the events that led to his leaving the show. "I take a lot of responsibility for the things that I've done, not only in the last two years but in the past before that. It wasn't the best version of me as a man, as a person, as a friend," he says as part of his apology, which is met with tears from the fam.

Ronnie Ortiz-Magro was among the original "Jersey Shore" cast members to return for MTV's "Family Vacation" revival in 2018. Sammi "Sweetheart" Giancola was the only OG cast member who did not initially return. During the original run of "Jersey Shore," Ortiz-Magro and Giancola's tumultuous, on-again-off-again romantic entanglement (which ended officially in 2014) made for one of the most toxic reality TV couples in the business. Giancola meekly holding her broken glasses after Ortiz-Magro destroyed her belongings in Season 3 is one of the more memorable (and troublesome) moments on "Jersey Shore."

Giancola's return in the second half of "Family Vacation" Season 6 was a complete surprise to the rest of the Guidos after she refused to join the series for the first six seasons. As Ortiz-Magro prepared to apologize to the cast in person, Sorrentino gave Giancola a heads-up so she could avoid him. "I'm so thankful they didn't just surprise me with it," she says during the reunion.

While they avoided an uncomfortable situation then, Giancola says she always knew Ortiz-Magro's return to the show was possible. Based on a recent trailer released by MTV, the two will come face to face in Season 7 of "Jersey Shore: Family Vacation." According to Sammi, their relationship will have to be that of begrudging coworkers. "[The rest of the cast's] relationships with him doesn't affect my relationships with these people anymore," she says during the "Family Vacation" Season 6 reunion. "... We're adults. I can totally handle it."