She was born in Long Island, New York in 1978. In 2002 at the age of 24 she was crowned with the title Miss Long Island, however when contest organizers discovered that she had posed for Playboy (under the name “Jill Nikki” in their Fall 2001 College Girls Special Edition), she had to give up her crown and she was ineligible to compete in the Miss New York pageant. In 2003 she participated on Fox’s short lived reality television program Married by America, where she reached the finals. She was credited on the show as “Jill Marie Nicoline”.