KATE GOSSELIN: HOW SHE FOOLED THE WORLD - THE RISE AND FALL OF A REALITY TV QUEEN

by Robert Hoffman

  After she and Jon “danced around each other all afternoon, stealing glances and quickly turning away,” she says that Jon was the one who walked over to her because he noticed Kate holding a baby bundled up in a soft pink blanket. Jon said, “Are you going to let anyone else have a turn holding that baby?”

  Kate said that that was the moment that she knew she wanted to know more about this “cute, friendly, Asian guy who, like me, seemed to melt at the sight of a ten-pound package of sleepy promise.”

  That sounds simply beautiful, doesn’t it? But in an early draft of Multiple Blessings, Kate described that very same moment at the picnic differently.

  Kate said that she was “spurred on” by her eager matchmaking friends so she “devised a complicated plan to go talk to someone who knew someone else who just might know him and be able to introduce the two of us.” Kate added that she wasn’t usually wasn’t so bold and that this was out of character for her but she was excited that it worked.

  So let’s recap. On her website version, Kate said that she arranged for a friend to introduce her and Jon. In Multiple Blessings, she said that she wasn’t interested in finding a date and that Jon had nonchalantly walked over to her while she was holding a baby. And in the version that didn’t make it into her book, she said she devised a complicated plan to enlist a couple of someones to introduce them. It is all clear as mud, and leads to some obvious questions.

  Where the heck did the baby come from? Was it a prop in her “complicated plan” to meet Jon? It certainly wouldn’t be surprising to learn that she was exploiting a baby for her personal gain even back then. Talk about foreshadowing. And was it really the “baby” moment that made her want to know more about the “cute, friendly Asian guy,” or was it the moment her friend told her that Jon’s father was a big doctor in Wyomissing?

  In the first line of Chapter 1 of Multiple Blessings, from one of Kate’s earlier drafts, she says that it’s strange how the moment when you meet someone special is forever engraved in your memory.

  What’s more strange is that this very special moment that was “forever engraved” in Kate’s memory changed throughout three different drafts of the same story. As you will soon see, nothing is ever what it seems with Kate Gosselin.

  It’s hard to know if Kate ever really wanted love from Jon, or if she was just looking for someone with money to fill the role of a father in her master plan. At any rate, Katie and Jonny started dating.

  Jon didn’t want to get married right away. Not to Kate or anyone else. He wanted to enjoy his youth. Back then Jon was a very good-looking guy. I was surprised when he showed me his pictures from high school and all of the very attractive girls who were interested in him. My first experience in seeing Jon was watching him getting beaten down by Kate on Jon & Kate Plus Ei8ht during the divorce episodes. I had always just assumed he was a nerdy guy with no other options. Well, I saw evidence of many better options, but Kate pressured him enough that he finally went along on her journey.

  Jon and Kate got married on June 12, 1999, at a friend’s home in Wyomissing. Kate said it was “A perfect garden wedding with equally perfect weather,” and that “It was truly a beautiful thing!”

  Kate did pretty well for herself in marrying Jon because his father was extremely generous. He paid for their wedding, bought them their first house in Wyomissing, and quietly supported them financially, giving them a large check each month. He gave them a lot of support and a lot of money, and Kate LOVED that about him.

  OK. The self-proclaimed planner found herself a husband, check.

  What was next on the list?

  THE ACTION PLAN

  “I’m the plan maker and you’re the plan follower.”

  – Kate Gosselin

  By the time Kate and Jon married, Kate had become fascinated and completely obsessed with something that was going on in Carlisle, Iowa. A woman named Bobbi McCaughey had given birth in 1997 to septuplets – seven babies at one time. Kate initially thought of her as a “freak show,” until she started reading about her…and reading some more.

  Kate read every word written about this miraculous story – a woman giving birth to seven babies at one time – but she could only focus on two things: the massive amount of media attention Bobbi McCaughey was receiving, and the money and gifts being heaped upon her by her adoring public.

  This was it. Kate found her new life’s mission. She wanted what Bobbi McCaughey was getting, and a whole lot more. Just for having a bunch of babies, Bobbi McCaughey was showered with a huge assortment of gifts, including seven years of free cable TV, college scholarships for all of her children, ten years of portrait photos, a lifetime supply of Pampers diapers, a 15-passenger van, and … a new and very large house.

  In addition to those gifts, she also received free meals, babysitting, housecleaning, laundry service and personal transportation. Her community turned out in full force to volunteer their services in doing anything and everything the family needed. Local banks opened up accounts for the donations that were already pouring in. President Clinton even phoned to congratulate Bobbi and told her, “You know, when those kids all go off to school, you will be the best-organized manager in the U.S.”

  And there it was! That last thing was what sparked the idea that led to Kate creating her “Supermom” persona. It was going to be her “brand.” Her master plan was to have two sets of Higher Order Multiples and build an empire bigger than Martha Stewart’s because, in addition to all of Martha’s skills, Kate would also be a “Supermom.” She would be everything Martha Stewart was, only with a house full of babies to take care of as well. Every mother in America would look up to her; mothers of the world would adore her!!

  With her idea fully formed, Kate just needed to figure out how she was going to conceive Higher Order Multiples naturally. The first major problem Kate encountered in achieving her master plan of having multiples was a sticky one. She didn’t have a fertility problem, having already become pregnant by accident a few years earlier. But that certainly wasn’t going to stop Kate Gosselin though. She was a nurse, and she did her research and concocted a good story that she told Jon, and later the world.

  She said that she had wanted to have children as soon as they got married but Jon wasn’t ready. She had a nagging feeling since she was a child that she would have a difficult time getting pregnant so she got herself tested right away and found out that she had PCOS, which is Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome. So according to Kate, they decided to check out fertility doctors “just in case” in would take a long time to get pregnant.

  Of course it didn’t take long. On only their second cycle of treatment, they were pregnant with twins and Kate was “ecstatic!!!!!!!!”

  First of all, the notion that Kate had a “nagging feeling” that she wouldn’t be able to become pregnant from as far back as when she was a child sounds preposterous. It is not something a child would even think about, much less be worried about. Kate would also have us believe that, as a young and healthy

  23-year-old girl, she had a hunch and nagging thoughts that she would not be able to get pregnant. (This subject was later used to promote her first television special.) It all sounds very unique, indeed. Unique and suspicious.

  When leading into the subject of getting pregnant in Multiple Blessings, Kate writes, “We were young, healthy and ambitious, and it wasn’t long before baby fever set in.”

  She certainly picked a strange choice of words. Healthy? Why would she mention being healthy unless she wanted to add drama by trying to convince people that she really did have PCOS, but she just didn’t know it? And what is the connection between being ambitious and having “baby fever?” Ambition generally relates to having a desire for success or achievement; it is not usually a term used in connection with wanting to have a baby. In looking at how things turned out, however, maybe “ambitious” was the correct word after all.

  The next sentences in the book also sound suspicious. Kate said that she always longed to be
a mom, she still had the perennial dark question of “What if I can’t?” accompanied her dream.

  Kate was 25 when she had her twins. So according to Kate, even as a teenager dreaming of becoming a mother, she had “the perennial dark question, what if I can’t?” It seems she conveniently forgot about that “accidental” pregnancy from when she was younger.

  But those pesky details didn’t matter. All that mattered was that Kate had her public reason to seek infertility treatment: Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS). Oddly enough though, she never exhibited one single symptom of PCOS. According to WebMD, the most common symptoms of PCOS are:

  Acne.

  Weight gain and trouble losing weight.

  Extra hair on the face and body. Often women get thicker and darker facial hair and more hair on the chest, belly, and back.

  Thinning hair on the scalp.

  Irregular periods. Often women with PCOS have fewer than nine periods a year. Some women have no periods. Others have very heavy bleeding.

  Fertility problems. Many women who have PCOS have trouble getting pregnant (infertility).

  Depression.

  I’ve done two years’ worth of research on PCOS and have spoken to many, many women who suffer from the disease. There are no absolutes and generalizations that apply to every woman with PCOS.

  Ten out of ten mothers I spoke to said that the thought that they might not be able to get pregnant had never even occurred to them beforehand. One said, “That’s something that would come after several failed attempts at getting pregnant.”

  PCOS seems to run in families, so your chances of having it are higher if other women in your family have PCOS, irregular periods, or diabetes. PCOS can be passed down from either your mother’s side or your father’s side. PCOS did not run in Kate’s family, as the Kreider clan was full of children.

  Kate had none of the symptoms of PCOS, but she stuck with her story. At the time, there was no reason for anybody to even think twice about it, much less be suspicious of her intentions. But her PCOS claim was hugely important because it gave Kate her reason to seek infertility treatments.

  (Writer’s note: I asked Jon several times over the years about Kate having PCOS, and he swore she does indeed have it and displayed at least one symptom. With so much evidence to the contrary, I don’t believe that Kate does or ever did have PCOS.)

  Kate didn’t want to waste another minute and started shopping for infertility doctors right away. The standard in the industry for someone as young as Kate is to try to get pregnant on your own for at least a year before turning to infertility treatments. This made Kate furious that she would have to wait.

  Her persistence paid off and she finally found a doctor who would begin treating her, undiagnosed, after only six months of marriage – given Kate’s lie to her that she and Jon had been trying to conceive for over a year – and Kate began her journey into the world of infertility. It’s not uncommon for an infertility doctor to treat a woman without first diagnosing her problem, especially if she’s as convincing as Kate was. The business of infertility is extremely competitive among doctors, and the way to get more business is to have more success stories. I spent a lot of time on online chat boards talking to women about this subject, and I heard many stories of doctors treating patients without diagnosing them. They would take their patients at their word. It’s a business.

  And after all, who in their right mind would ever make up something like having PCOS and put themselves through the costly and painful process of infertility treatment if it weren’t really necessary?

  That’s a rhetorical question. Who, indeed?

  Even though Kate was young and healthy, really healthy, and even without actually having PCOS and with taking infertility medication, she still failed to become pregnant the first time around.

  The second cycle was a good one, and Kate became pregnant – with twins. Most people going through a similar situation would be thrilled at that news. Kate was disappointed, though, and angry again. “Just twins?” she said in a dejected voice.

  Kate said that they had prayed for twins because Jon was as “baby crazy” as she was that they decided that they would fight over just one baby. She also said that she and Jon joked about that since they were dating.

  Cara and Mady Gosselin were born that October.

  Although Kate says that she was thrilled, the reality was that she was upset because she was hoping for at least triplets. Higher Order Multiples was her ultimate goal.

  Kate had done the research and knew that having twins wasn’t going to get her the attention she desired. Even women not taking infertility drugs can have twins. Twins are no big deal.

  In 2000, when Kate’s twin daughters were born, there were more twins walking around than you could shake a home pregnancy stick at. These are the statistics about multiples that Kate had tucked away in a file:

  The number of births in twin deliveries rose 6 percent for 1999-2000 to 110,670 births - the largest single year rise in several decades.

  The number of Triplet Births climbed to 6919, a rise of 13 percent.

  Births in quadruplet deliveries increased from 510 to 627 between 1999 and 2000.

  The number of quintuplet and other higher order multiples was unchanged at 79.

  Since 1980 twin births have risen 62 percent and other higher order multiples births have jumped 470 percent.

  This was not good news for Kate, and she knew it. Now she was stuck with “just” twins, like more than 100,000 other parents that year alone.

  She did her best to make the most of her situation though. She tried to market her girls from the time they were babies. At less than one year old, she paraded Mady and Cara Gosselin down Main Street USA (Wyomissing Boulevard, actually) in a decorated “float” during the annual Fourth of July parade and celebration in her new hometown of Wyomissing, PA. Kate, their controlling and masterminding mother, had already put a label on them. They weren’t Mady and Cara Gosselin. They were “The Gosselin Twins!” and “Little Miss Americas!”

  The Gosselin name at that time meant as much as the Hoffman name in this area, which was absolutely nothing. So the idea of Kate making a spectacle of herself and her family was laughable to the affluent neighbors she passed by in the parade. But Kate held her daughters up and put them on display. Here they are world … “The Gosselin Twins!” The locals didn’t know what to make of Kate Gosselin, even then.

  Kate had headshots taken of the girls, contacted modeling agencies and tried to get them commercial jobs and anything else on television, but there were no takers. “There just was nothing special about a set of twins,” she was told by a local photographer she had contacted.

  Even though Kate did not get the Higher Order Multiples she wanted, she would not give up on her plan. These are Kate’s words from Jon and Kate’s earliest website:

  The girls turned one and I started thinking about more children….After all, the girls had been pure fun and I wanted to do it again! But, Jon wasn’t convinced. I prayed for a long time that God would change his mind. It took a long time and a rough experience for both of us for that to happen…In May 2003, we had the opportunity to adopt a newborn in kind of a rare circumstance. Things were moving really fast and we prayed about it and felt that this was not meant to be. Jon and I came to a joint decision that we were not ready to take on such a responsibility at the time. We felt God leading us that way. Jon was amazed that I so willingly “turned down a baby”. It hurt so badly, but I knew we were doing the right thing. I mourned for the better part of a month and it was then that Jon agreed to let us return to try and have another baby. He saw just how badly I wanted to be a mommy again.

  This was “not meant to be” because Kate did not want just one more baby. There was more masterminding to be done.

  JUST ONE MORE

  “We were so thrilled we decided to try for just one more,

  And ended up with six.”

  – Kate Gosselin

  This cha
pter took me more than two years to research and write. I had read the wild speculation about Kate intentionally trying to become pregnant with multiples by an “anonymous blogger” and on several of the “anti-Kate” blogs when I first began my job reporting on the Gosselins, so I started looking for a big story for US Weekly. I had no evidence at the time, and US Weekly would never have printed this anyway.

  As it turned out, I did find evidence that told a story, and it pointed to Kate’s biggest lie of all. You hear it so lovingly spoken in the intro to Jon & Kate Plus Ei8ht. “We wanted Just one more and got six.”

  The truth is, Kate never wanted “Just one more” baby. In fact, “she’s disappointed in only having eight.”

  In studying Kate Gosselin’s entire body of work – her television shows, print and television interviews, her books, etc. – along with having first-person information about her and having personally watched her in action nearly every day for two years, it is quite clear that she is most definitely not a good actress. Kate delivers the same scripted talking points, over and over, almost verbatim.

  But even after all that time watching Kate and listening to her, I was not prepared at all to find out everything I did about Kate’s capacity to deceive, and about how far she would go to achieve her grand plan. What I discovered is that Kate Gosselin deliberately and intentionally got pregnant with two sets of multiples in order to seek fame and fortune.

  In the early days of the Gosselin mania, Kate Gosselin repeated, over and over – in interviews, in her books and on her television shows – that she wanted “JUST ONE MORE” baby. “Just” one more. It was always those exact same words, over and over again. “Just one more.” But logic, common sense and evidence make Kate’s claim that she wanted “just one more” baby difficult to believe.