Island Park's Joanne DiGesu finds love overseas on TLC's '90 Day Fiancé: The Other Way'

From Island Park to Ireland, Joanne DiGesu has been keeping secret a trans-Atlantic marriage in the current sixth season of TLC’s reality TV series "90 Day Fiancé: The Other Way.” While the franchise’s flagship, "90 Day Fiancé,” follows Americans bringing their international loves to the United States on a "K-1 Nonimmigrant Visa for a Fianc(é)e,” this iteration is about the opposite, with enamored Americans wanting to live abroad.

DiGesu, who turns 44 this weekend, revealed to her mother in a recent episode that she and Sean Heffernan, 38, of Drogheda, County Louth, outside Dublin, had married two years earlier. This past Monday’s episode found DiGesu visiting Heffernan with her sons Joey, 19, and Jesse, almost 13, and her best friend, Nicole — finally revealing the nuptials to them and to Sean’s 8-year-old daughter, Bella Rose.

How'd that go over? Since the couple takes center stage in next Monday’s episode, "There's Something About JoJo,” it probably wasn’t "Oh, that’s nice. Pass the salt.”

"When you get married and have these big weddings, it's to make everybody else happy, and we just wanted something for us,” DiGesu tells Newsday by phone of her and Heffernan's Irish civil ceremony. "We knew a big wedding was going to happen [eventually] and we didn't feel the need to tell anyone” that they had, in essence, eloped. Pressed, she doesn’t explain the precise reason for secrecy. And then, she concedes, "As time went on, it's, like, ‘How do we just bring that up to them now out of the blue?’ ”

Would she not want to know if one of her sons gets married? "I mean, I would want to know,” she says, "but I would also want to respect why maybe they didn't want to tell me. I don't think I would take it as an insult. But maybe,” she reasons, "that's simply because Sean and I didn't mean to insult anyone.”

Her older son on-screen Monday told the camera, "I'm annoyed with her because she does say ... 'Don’t be afraid to tell me anything.’ And then she keeps it a secret for two years that they're married.” Then in a preview of the next episode she drops another bombshell: She wants them all to live in Ireland.

Complicating that may be her ex-husband, Joseph Zito, who lives on Long Island and remains close to his sons. Heffernan has full custody of the precociously witty Bella, DiGesu says, tailoring his job as a personal trainer around her schedule. He had split up with Bella's mother when the girl was an infant.

DiGesu, born in Queens, had moved with her family to Island Park when she was 14. She attended West Hempstead High School and graduated from Molloy College [now University], in Rockville Centre, with a degree in criminal justice, she says.

As well, "I have been a practicing witch for over 15 years now,” she says, "and not many people understand that lifestyle. Sean totally supports me in that. He supports me as a mom and as a woman. And as you've seen this far, we have fun together and we balance each other out and come together as a team.”