Hot item, but really a cool lady

Some 100 million people saw the promo for The Celebrity Apprentice that NBC aired during the Super Bowl.

Teresa Giudice wasn't one of them.

"I was changing my daughter's diaper," she says. "When I came back in the room, my oldest daughter, Gia, said, 'Mommy, Mommy, you were just on TV!' "

It's a shame she missed it, because out of the 18 motley celebrities in the season that begins Sunday night, she was the featured one.

Staring daggers into the camera, she said, "If you attack me, I'll attack you right back."

That vow was punctuated with the infamous clip from Real Housewives of New Jersey, the one that put her in the Bad Girls Hall of Fame: flipping a fully set table while roaring savagely.

It's a She-Hulk moment that Giudice, 39, may never live down.

"I understand why they'd use that, but I wish they wouldn't," she says. "To tell the truth, I'm not happy I did that, and I'll never do it again."

Informed that NBC is also using bleeped-out Apprentice footage of her hurling a string of f-bombs, Giudice is genuinely shocked, a reaction that is unmistakable even over the phone from her home in northern Jersey.

"That's impossible," she says. "I swear, I really don't curse . . . unless I get really fired up. I don't like to curse."

The point is people think of Giudice as a hot-tempered Italian bully, a sort of Medici of Metuchen.

She says they got her all wrong. And she's got witnesses.

"I only knew her from the show [Real Housewives], and she's pretty intense on there," says Page Feldman, Apprentice's executive producer. "But she actually came across as a lovely, reasonable person.

"As Donald said a few times, 'We're ruining her reputation, she's so nice.' Teresa does have a temper, but you have to push her really hard."

Singer Aubrey O'Day of the group Danity Kane, who ends up working in more challenges with Giudice than anyone else in the cast, also vouches for her gentle nature.

"Everyone had the impression she would behave as she does on Housewives," says O'Day. "But she was anything but wild, crazy, and full of outrageous antics. Teresa was pretty tame, nice, and a great team player."

The roster this season includes Clay Aiken, Arsenio Hall, George Takei, Lou Ferrigno, Cheryl Tiegs, and Debbie Gibson.

Maybe they were expecting fireworks from Giudice because the last of the Housewives to compete, NeNe Leakes of the Atlanta sorority, nearly brought Trump Tower down around her ears.