LOS ANGELES, Calif. --

When Mary Jo Eustace came face to face with Tori Spelling – the woman her ex-husband, Dean McDermott, left her for – she told Access Hollywood she was ready for a fight.

“It was bizarre, she wrote in her book that she brought a knife when she met me, and you know, it was odd,” Mary Jo said. “It was one of those moments where you look around, and I was like, ‘A purse that big, what kind of knife was it?’”

The confrontation, in the midst of her divorce from Dean, had reached the tabloids – scaring her son, Jack.

“The thing that was bad about that, is my son saw that in some tabloid and he was petrified that something was going to happen to me, and I had to explain to him that this was just nonsense,” Mary Jo said.

That aside, the meeting with Tori was understandably difficult.

I was kind of on my best behavior,” she said. “But I did… I just I had to say, ‘I just don’t think you’ve behaved very well. This is not good, this is not good.’ And she said, ‘Well, I’m a good person,’ and I said, ‘No, you’re not. You know, this really is affecting people,’ but then I stopped and thought, I’m not here for that.”

In Mary Jo’s book “Divorce Sucks,” she explained that the man in the middle, Dean, encouraged the discussion.

“And then of course he was calling the whole time to see how the meeting was going and you know I say in the book, she said ‘We were soulmates,’ and I got up and left the room on that one,” Mary Jo said.

And it was 12 weeks into Mary Jo’s divorce nightmare that the horror hit a high note.

“I just turned on the TV for some mind-numbing relief to watch the VH1 Awards,” she said, “And the first people down the red carpet were my ex-husband and Tori Spelling making out. And I was like, I looked around the room like, ‘Is this really happening to me?’”

Dean and Mary Jo were married for 13 years, and they were in the process of adopting a daughter when Dean left her, quickly referring to Tori as his “soulmate.” But to Mary Jo, that wasn’t his best quote.

“No, I think the best quote was when they got married, he said ‘This is the best wife I’ve ever married,’” she said.

But Mary Jo, confident, beautiful and the opposite of a bitter divorcee, has moved on in a very positive way – and refuses to put her son in the spotlight on Tori and Dean’s reality series, “Tori & Dean: Home Sweet Hollywood.”

“I’ve kept him off the reality show,” she said. “I talk about that in the book, the producers asked me to be on their reality show. Document my pain and misery and stuff. Of course I said no, but I went in specifically to say I don’t want my son on this show. He will never be on that show.”

Copyright 2009 by NBC Universal, Inc. All rights reserved.
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