Jamie-Lynn Sigler currently lives in Texas with her second husband, Connor Dykstra, and their two sons, Beau, 12, and Jack, eight. They moved there from California in 2021. The move gave Jamie-Lynn, who has multiple sclerosis (MS), more privacy. She recently told US Weekly that she feels more comfortable using a cane in Texas than she did in Los Angeles because she doesn’t have the constant feeling like someone is watching her. That must feel so freeing.
Jamie-Lynn also just released a memoir! And So It Is: A Memoir of Acceptance and Hope came out on May 5. It includes details from her time on The Sopranos, her struggles with an eating disorder, her MS diagnosis, motherhood, and more. She also talks about her first marriage to AJ Discala, which ended in divorce in 2005. After they broke up, Jamie-Lynn hired a forensic accountant to help her separate her finances from Discala’s. The accountant discovered that Discala had stolen six figures worth of money from her. Page Six has a good recap of Jamie-Lynn’s story:
Jamie-Lynn Sigler claims her ex-husband, AJ Discala, stole hundreds of thousands of dollars she made from the “Sopranos” during their marriage in the early aughts.
The actress admits in her new memoir that when the couple, who were married from 2003-2005, first split, she “hadn’t disentangled” financially from the former finance executive
“I didn’t even know how much money I had or what I was worth,” Sigler writes in “And So It Is,” which came out Tuesday.
According to Sigler, a family friend and accountant took a look at the pair’s finances and allegedly found that hundreds of thousands of dollars was missing.
“The forensic accountant broke down what he believed had been happening,” Sigler writes in the book. “I would be paid a certain amount per episode for ‘The Sopranos,’ and that would go into my corporation account. The next day, a portion of that money would be moved to our joint account for living expenses.”
The “Mob Town” actress claims that a week later, “a much smaller but still sizable amount of that money from our joint account would be moved to a different account that I didn’t have access to or know about.“
Sigler says she still has no idea what happened to the money, but doesn’t care about it anymore.
“That money is a chapter I want closed forever,” she writes.
Years later, Sigler was thinking about the situation when she was offered a “Sopranos”-themed Super Bowl commercial. The check was for the same amount Discala had allegedly stolen.
In her memoir, the Broadway star called her marriage to Discala a “mistake.”
“I was only 20, trying to figure out who I was,” she notes. “He seemed to me then a lifeline, but I know now he was a big mistake. Untangling those contradictions has taken me years.”
Sigler also writes that Disacala “had an air of confidence about him,” but despite being “incredibly charismatic,” he would allegedly refer to her as his “bitch wife” when he was drunk.
Discala is currently serving time in prison after being convicted on two counts of securities and wire fraud conspiracy in 2018. He was sentenced to 138 months following a multi-million dollar market manipulation scheme.
Ugh. Discala is such a scumbag. You sometimes hear stories like Jamie-Lynn’s, but because their partners were so loving and charming, they didn’t find out until much later and much more financial damage had been done. I’m glad she figured it out sooner rather than later, but I hate that it happened to her. She and I are very different because I would have gone scorched Earth to get my money back. At the time, she was only four years into her MS diagnosis, though, so I can understand why she’d prioritize her health and just want to move on.
It sounds like Discala was an overall nightmare to be around, and that everyone in her life knew it, too. Jamie-Lynn wrote about how her Sopranos co-workers knew that Discala was bad news. James Gandolfini didn’t come to her wedding, which confused her at the time. She also shared a story about how she got a very awkward welcome back to set when she returned from her honeymoon, and that it was clear that no one was happy for her. Good riddance. I wish that Discala had gone to jail for what he did to Jamie-Lynn, but at least his crimes caught up to him eventually.
Photos credit: JPI Studios/Avalon, Anthony Dixon/Avalon, MediaPunch/Backgrid, Joe Sutter/PacificCoastNews/Avalon, Getty Images
Surprised to see he was in prison, just assumed was going to read that he was part of trump’s administration.!
I’ve always liked her acting. It sucks this happened to her.
Married into the Lenny Dykstra family, that has to be interesting. Or horrifying. Lenny is a trip.
I think she’s a better woman than I am for being able to move on from the money stolen by the first husband. I get that she’s happily married now, has two kids and has a terrific health struggle ahead of her (and I wish her the best). It must be some satisfaction that he’s in prison for other crimes. Especially at 20 (or any age really) a man can really sweep you off your feet with their charisma, attention, good looks, charm, etc. I’m glad it’s all done with and she can live her best life now.
It’s awful what this guy did to her, I’m just glad she got away from him.
What a POS. I’ve heard from people who worked on the show that Gandolfini thought of Jamie-Lynn and Robert Iler as family members, so he must have really hated DiScala to not go to that wedding. I’ve always liked Jamie-Lynn and I am curious to read her book!