Reality TV star Jenni Farley, known as JWoww, spent roughly three hours testifying in court in Bangor on Monday about her attempts to sell a Maine camp after her divorce.
Farley sued her ex-husband’s father, Roger Mathews Jr., in U.S. District Court of Maine in Bangor for allegedly interfering with a contract and breaching his fiduciary duty as the trustee of the Mathews Family Round Pond Revocable Trust.
Farley, a New Jersey resident, rose to fame in the late 2000s as a member of the MTV reality show “Jersey Shore.” She married Roger Mathews III in 2015, and the couple built a camp on Round Pond in Steuben before divorcing in 2019.
Farley on Monday described her attempts to sell the camp, which could only be sold to family because of the trust. She said she spent close to $1 million to build the camp on the Mathews family land before the divorce. The property was supposed to be for the couple and their children, as well as a later retirement.
After the divorce, Farley and her kids didn’t want to be at the house and she said she decided to move her belongings out of the property in November 2020.
Mathews had his belongings in the garage, his attorney Jonathan Liberman said. Farley said she didn’t know he was using the garage and that he wasn’t supposed to have items in it.
During that move, Mathews showed up at the house and threatened to call police to have Farley removed from the property, which was hers, she testified.
At one point Mathews told her to “get your truck and your UHaul off my property,” Farley testified.
In 2024 Jennifer Mathews, a lineal descendant of the Mathews family, and her husband, Joshua Goston, wanted to buy the house. They reached out to Farley to start the process.
When Mathews learned about the sale, he threatened to sue and make sure the family was never comfortable if they moved in, Goston said in his testimony.
The couple expected things to be awkward with Mathews when he learned about the sale but they weren’t prepared for threats, Goston said. One issue they expected was that they would want full use of their garage, which Mathews was using for storage, Goston said.
If the couple bought the house, it would have been back in the Mathews family instead of with Farley, Goston said. They assumed Mathews would be happy about that.
As the sale started moving forward, Jennifer Mathews and Goston realized that Jennifer Mathews was not a beneficiary of the trust at that time. They came up with a plan to transfer the property to Jennifer Mathews’ father, who is a beneficiary, and her father would later transfer it to Jennifer Mathews when he gave up his beneficiary to the trust, Goston said.
Shortly before the couple was going to move in, they learned Mathews blocked a driveway with felled birch trees and a tractor, and blocked the other driveway with his pick-up truck, both Farley and Mathews’ lawyers agreed.
At that point the stress was too much and the couple wanted to back out of the sale, Goston said.
“This was supposed to be a dream for us and it’s turning into a nightmare really quick,” Goston said.
Mathews was supposed to have a meeting with the couple when they were scheduled to move in, but once he blocked the driveway that fell apart, Goston said.
“That was the final decision for us right there,” Goston said. “[Mathews] was following through on his threats.”
The couple didn’t expect it to be such a big issue, and Goston said they wouldn’t have given Farley 80% of their savings to make the initial payment for the house. A payment of $20,000 was made to Farley, with the total cost of the house with interest expected to be about $540,000.
“We were excited to move in, had we had the opportunity,” Goston said.
The trial will continue Tuesday.
