As news broke that Teresa and Joe Giudice‘s possessions will go up for auction on Aug. 22, and another episode of the Real Housewives of New Jersey depicted the couple reveling in their lavish lifestyle, the reality star wants to clear the air about her bankruptcy.

What happened?

In a new blog on Bravo’s Web site, Giudice writes that she and her husband invested in “real estate deals gone bad in a bad economy,” adding that, “we didn’t spend millions of dollars on gold toilets or private planes. We bought buildings, fixed them up. The economy crash trickled down to everyone.”
“We worked so hard for so many years and it was heartbreaking to file [for bankruptcy], and not something we took lightly,” she writes.

And they’re not giving up. “[We] got new jobs, and are working hard once again,” she blogs.
One new job: Giudice wrote a best-selling cookbook, Skinny Italian. Now, though, some of the couple’s income, including profits from the book, are coming under scrutiny after their bankruptcy trustee alleged the Giudices mislead the court about their assets when they filed for bankruptcy in Oct. 2009.
“If you’ve ever been unfortunate enough to be involved in a legal situation, you know it’s a lot of back and forth between both sides,” Giudice writes. “Right now, our bankruptcy trustee is trying to get an auction going, and our lawyer is objecting it. Every day, there are new tactics used, stories circulated, and details “leaked” to the press, but it’s all part of the legal wrangling.”

And even as her husband Joe is coming under fire for that 10th anniversary celebration, in which he bought her a diamond and flew her around in a private helicopter on TV, Giudice isn’t letting it get to her.

“All I can do is rise above it, keep my head high, and know that at the end of the day, I have my family, my health, and I’m in God’s hands,” she writes. “Nothing else matters, certainly not a lamp.”