Backstage at Dancing With the Stars: The Situation's Rough Week

It's been a really rough week — a double whammy — for Mike "The Situation" Sorrentino, the fourth star to be shown the door on Dancing With The Stars. Sorrentino stormed off the set Monday night after the judges called his Argentine Tango "a terrible mess," upset because they didn't appreciate the dangerous lifts he pulled off with his pro partner, Karina Smirnoff. But he was equally upset that his other hit show, MTV's Jersey Shore, featured him in an extremely unflattering light, slapping his cast mate, Snooki, after he asked her to leave a club, and she refused. 
"I was looking out for her, because she was totally, totally drunk, and I am the one to look out for the group at all times," says Sorrentino. "I am the one to say when it's time to go, when everybody's totally drunk. We don't want to get into any arguments or fights. I remember what happened to Snooki in the first season, when she was by herself.  So I was trying to be like, 'Wake up, girl! You don't want this to happen again.' And it was totally taken out of context and I was so upset that [the producers] went that way with the storyline, to the point where I said, 'I've done so much for this show.' I was like, 'You know what? I'm gonna just cool off.'"
Sorrentino says the whole reason he took the Dancing gig was to rehabilitate his Italian bad boy image. "The only reason I took this show was because of the Jersey Shore perception of me, that I'm one-dimensional, that I'm unintelligent, that I'm a womanizer, that I'm disrespectful. When people judge me, it's like someone shoving a piece of paper in your face and then saying, 'This is the only piece of paper you can read right now.' But there's a whole bunch of pages behind it, and it's not me. When people finally see the book, they'll see this kid is really a nice kid." Just not the world's greatest dancer.
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