“And you shall bring to the priest, as your guilt offering to the LORD, a ram without blemish from the flock, or its equivalent, for a guilt offering. The priest shall make atonement on your behalf before the LORD, and you shall be forgiven for any of the things that one may do and incur guilt thereby…Aaron shall cast lots on the two goats, one lot for the LORD and the other lot for Azazel.” – Leviticus 6:6-7, 6:18

“Karma’s a bitch. Clink-clink!” – Teresa Aprea on Teresa Giudice, Real Housewives of New Jersey

The meaning of the word “Azazel” isn’t definitively known to Biblical scholars. Some have interpreted it as the name of an angel who sided with Satan, hence the Marvel Comics supervillain of the same name. Some of have broken up its component parts and gotten “rugged cliff,” the place from which the goat was thrown.

Wherever the goat was going, it was going covered in the sin of the people who sent it. And it wasn’t coming back.

It didn’t take the premiere of The Real Housewives franchise in 2006 to stoke our national interest in the lives of the rich and not-so-famous. Recorded history is full of people who were interested by or jealous of those who had more than them. Charles Dickens made a career out of writing those stories. The Bravo series was just another neat addition atop our sturdy shrine to wealth and excess.

Teresa Giudice in 2011. Photo by Jennifer Marie Puglia via Flickr (http://bit.ly/1qEjLIp)

The packaging was slick and aspirational, the title “Real Housewives” presuming that without much time or effort, you, too could be wearing ballgowns on Thursdays and bemoaning the lack of shoe space in your walk-in closet. Teresa Giudice is the only woman left standing from season one of New Jersey (her friend Dina Manzo was back this season, but left after season two), and the camera has watched her go through the kind of personal development you rarely get to see in someone on screen.

Giudice was known for her hair-trigger temperament, famously flipping a table in anger at her castmate Danielle Staub, who Giudice called a “prostitution whore.” In another scene that seemed more Pretty Woman montage than reality show, Giudice spent $60,000 on furniture just days after declaring bankruptcy with her husband, Joe, back in 2010. They later withdrew their petition for bankruptcy, with Teresa claiming that Joe often kept her in the dark about their business expenses because he thought it would “confuse” her. Joe, an entrepreneur whose businesses have included construction and a pizza place, has said pretty much the same thing: “Alright, whatever, I was taking out false loans…They were handing me the paperwork. Whatever the forms were, she had better credit. So, we used her.”

It was in July 2013 that the Giudices were charged with conspiracy to commit fraud. Initially adamant about their innocence, Teresa and Joe eventually both took plea deals that resulted in jail time: 15 months for Teresa, beginning in January 2015, and 39 months for Joe, after which he may be deported to his native Italy. They have four daughters: Gia, Gabrielle, Milania, and Audriana.

Americans have a strange relationship with reality television. It may be one of the last truly guilty pleasures–we talk about Mad Men and Broad City with our friends and colleagues, but millions of us are watching 19 Kids and Counting, Dancing with the Stars, and The Real Housewives franchise. And “guilty pleasure” isn’t a dismissive term, because even those things we feel guilty about consuming are still shaping us as we watch.

I’m not sure where my love for reality television comes from, but it is very specific and tends toward the dramatic. Chopped is good, but Say Yes to the Dress is even better. If I get to see a person pitch a fit about the ice cream machine not working or the dress not pleasing their cousin’s step-grandmother, I’m a happy customer. It has to do, I think, with this artificial environment we put people in that is at best an emotional pressure cooker, and at worst a smokescreen with layers of gaudy things to keep us, the viewer, separate from him or her, the chef/actor/singer/housewife.

Teresa Giudice did what no one else has had the balls to do in the series of reality television, except maybe Richard Hatch: She let us down. In taking out fraudulent mortgage loans and–and here’s the real problem–getting caught, Teresa blew the social contract that we all sign when we hit “play” on reality TV. We agree that we will buy whatever the people on screen are selling, and they agree that they will keep selling it. We can abide their greed, their questionable parenting, even their bankruptcy–but we cannot abide the truth.

In the wake of her sentencing, Teresa Giudice seemed genuinely confused–as she admitted to Andy Cohen on Watch What Happens Live, she didn’t understand that the plea deal she accepted meant the possibility of jail time. Ever since she accepted the plea deal, Giudice seems genuinely contrite and determined to make make the process work for her. “A lot of the things that [Judge Ester Salas] said yesterday, it hit home and it bothered me,” she told Cohen. “From everything that she said, I’m just going to take it and become a better person.” She’s reading the script she should be reading, and we’re all happy about that. We all hope the best for her, even as we put our sins on her back and send her out into the wilderness.

“This is probably gonna be my last reunion,” Giudice told Cohen on the last installment of New Jersey’s season 6 reunion. She made a really poignant comment about hoping to be seen again “on a cooking show or something,” and maybe she will. The good thing about America and scapegoats is that after long enough, we’re always willing to give them a second chance.