Real Housewives of New Jersey star's ex speaks out for first time about role in book that led to famous table flip

Former confidential informant Kevin Maher is finally dishing on his involvement in one of the most iconic moments in reality television history: The Real Housewives of New Jersey's infamous season 1 table flip.

"I've never, ever really spoken about my relationship with Danielle Staub," Maher says on "Housewives Gone Bad," the latest episode of Investigation Discovery's new docuseries, Hollywood Demons. But it was Maher's prior relationship with the RHONJ star that set her castmates off in the season 1 finale.

On the 2009 episode "The Last Supper," Staub's costar Teresa Giudice called Staub a "prostitution whore," alleged that she was "engaged 19 times," and flipped the cast's dinner table in a rage. The scandalous moment transformed the fledgling Real Housewives franchise from a novel experiment in reality programming to a ratings juggernaut.

The fracas all stemmed from a series of events recounted in a 1996 book by Charles Kipps called Cop Without a Badge, which tells Maher's story of working for several years as a confidential informant for the FBI, DEA, and other law enforcement agencies. Maher eventually became involved with a woman named Beverly Ann Merrill, whose rap sheet allegedly includes charges of extortion, kidnapping, and drug possession. Merrill eventually changed her name to "Danielle Staub."

The behavior attributed to Staub in Cop Without a Badge made all of her RHONJ costars uneasy, but Staub's repeated denial of all but two of Kipps' claims — that she changed her name and was arrested — enraged Giudice to the point of provoking a physical confrontation.

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The reverberations of the table flip continue to ring throughout the Bravo-verse and the broader television landscape, but Maher himself never appeared on the show. Maher decided to tell his side of the story on "Housewives Gone Wild."

Maher recounted that he was embedded with a Miami-based drug dealer named John in 1986. John one day told Maher, "I want you to meet this girl, Beverly Ann Merrill. She's really interesting, you're going to love her." Maher claimed his first meeting with Merrill led to "super sexual relations," and the pair began dating.

In the docuseries, Maher alleged that the night after they met, Staub revealed she was "facing prison" and started to cry, leading Maher to disclose his status as a confidential informant. "She could have easily gotten up and told all these guys, and I wouldn't have known, and I would have walked right into my own demise," he reflected. "You know what the Colombians would do if they ever found out I was an informant?"