As most of you may know, I was on MTV's hit series 16 and Pregnant. I was part of season 2-B. I like to consider our season as the “forgotten step child” because most people don't remember the season. Being on TV was a cool, once in a lifetime experience. Unfortunately, once the show aired I had no desire for it to ever play again.
They depicted my family and I completely wrong, and the worst part? My voice overs were pretty much all lies! I would say 90% of the stuff they MADE me say was a lie. It took 5 hours to record voice overs because I fought every little bit of it. All they would say was “We can't change it now because everything is already timed with the episode.” That made sense to me, but they should have run it by me before making everything official.
One of the things I had to lie about was my dad being active duty. He has been retired from the Army ever since I was 10 or 11 years old. He does still work over seas, but as a security contractor. He now works for a very important, and top secret company. Another thing I had to say was “I've never been outside of our tiny town”. That is a complete lie. Think about it, a military family, never moving, living an hour and a half away from the closest Army base. Yeah, right. Those were the two main ones that bothered me.
A week before we flew out to film the reunion, Nathan and I had a big fight and broke up. He ended up not coming with me to New York. That p!ssed off MTV so they completely redid my entire show, to make him look horrible. Sure, he did say some mean things, but he didn't intend for them to come out that way. When he said something like, “If it weren't for the baby, I wouldn't be here” he meant that if I wouldn't have gotten pregnant he would have moved to Texas with his friend in search of work (which was brought up later in the show). Yes, he was still immature and partied, but not nearly as often as they made it seem.
Oh! The part where I was at the Halloween Party and it showed me texting Nathan, that was also a lie. I was either texting my mom or checking my Facebook because I was bored, I didn't text him at all the night. One way I know they made it up, I spell everything out when texting and I don't use the term “wtf”. He was at home that whole night, and I knew he wasn't coming to the party. He told me days before that he was going to hang out at home and I was fine with it.
When they came out to film the catch up show, we knew that we had to watch what we said because they're good at twisting our words. We were much happier with that segment.
Needless to say, I will NEVER work with MTV again.
Before she became a notorious reality TV star, Farrah Abraham was a lot “like Lindsay Lohan in Mean Girls,” her half-sister, Ashley Danielson remembers. “Popular, but not mean or cruel.” A Barbizon model and boy-crazy cheerleader at Thomas Jefferson High School in Council Bluffs, Iowa, she was “very quiet and reserved,” says former best friend and classmate Tyler Cooksey. “Nothing like you see now.”
Farrah and her sister were raised in an upper-middle class, two-parent household - unlike many of the other MTV moms. “We went on a lot of big family vacations - road trips, Disneyland, etc.,” Ashley tells us. “We had a lot of fun growing up and were very blessed. We always had our family supporting us in the audience at school plays, recitals, contests, science fairs, etc.” But Farrah's childhood story is no fairy tale.
Her mother, Debra Danielson, met future husband Michael Abraham in 1987. Debra - just 31 at the time - was fresh off of a divorce and struggling to raise six month-old Ashley on her own. Debra, who worked in software sales, and Michael, a manager for AT&T, hit it off and married about a year-and-a-half later. And so began a long, often strange relationship, that even today, Ashley admits she doesn't really understand.
“I think we both knew their relationship was a wreck and they are two people that really had no business getting married to each other in the first place,” she says. “My mom was a good mom when we were growing up. She wasn't perfect but she tried.” Debra ran a tight ship at home. Farrah and her sister were kept on a rigid schedule of extracurricular activities that included dance classes, piano lessons, and various sports. The girls were also given strict curfews, expected to complete a list of chores - and taught the value of a dollar from an early age. At 15, Farrah began her first non-modeling job in the bakery of the local Hy-Vee grocery store. “We have both always been hard-working and had jobs, sometimes two at a time, as soon as we could,” Ashley says.
That work ethic, Tyler believes, could be one reason for Farrah's sometimes icy demeanor on television. “Her parents raised her differently than most people are used to,” he says. “Money is a big thing to the Abrahams. They don't see each other as 'Mom and Dad' or 'daughter' all the time; they see each other as beneficiaries and business partners.”
For years, Farrah privately struggled with identity and self esteem issues. “I remember that I always felt like I wasn't loved enough,” she confessed in a 2012 memoir. “[My parents] were always working, or out of town, or fighting. I remember always having to be patient, to wait my turn for their attention, but it seemed like it was never my turn.”
Ashley says she remained “very close” with Farrah - “until the point when she met [boyfriend Derek Underwood].” Their relationship, she insists, “was toxic. I didn't meet him for a long time, close to a year I think. And I didn't see Farrah that entire time either. Derek [who eventually became the father of Farrah's daughter, Sophia] was controlling, to say the least. So when people say Farrah treated Derek poorly, I tell them no. It was most definitely the other way around.”
Daniel Alvarez, who became close to Farrah when they dated in the summer of 2011, says Farrah often talked about her relationship with Derek, often sharing shocking details of their fights.
“They had a terrible relationship from what she told me,” he says. “The stuff she would tell me about their relationship was insane. Very high drama. They had a lot of fights, cheating back and forth. They hated each other and then loved each other. It wasn't normal. It was to another level and was a very bad situation from what she told me.”
Tyler, who also knew Derek well, remembers their relationship differently. “[Farrah] treated him a lot like she treated her parents,” he says. “She was a little disrespectful at times to him. Sometimes rude. He would ignore it and pretend she wasn't doing that, just like her parents do.”
Debra and Michael discouraged their daughter's relationship with Derek, right up until he was tragically killed in a December 2008 car wreck. Though they were often dealing with their own relationship problems - a cycle of breakups and make-ups that lasted for years - they wanted Farrah to focus on school.
Debra, a deeply religious woman, was also concerned about who her girls were hopping into bed with. “It was beat into my head - wait until marriage,” Ashley says. “Be careful who you pick as a husband/boyfriend. The Bible says premarital sex is a sin, etc.” Unfortunately, Farrah didn't get the message. She and Derek were sleeping together just one month into the relationship. Their first time was at Farrah's house on the night of Derek's junior prom. “When we woke up a few hours later, my first thought was that I wasn't a virgin anymore,” she wrote in her 2012 memoir. “I felt like I now had a huge secret to keep. I was relieved [that my parents] weren't more suspicious…I was convinced anyone could read my face and know that I had had sex.”
Meanwhile, Tyler says that when she wasn't with Derek, he and Farrah were partying - right under Debra's nose! Farrah would frequently head to all night teen drinking parties, or sneak her boyfriend into their house for a late-night romp.
“Debra was kind of possessive,” he remembers. “She wanted to keep Farrah as sheltered as possible. [Michael] is laid-back, cool, collected, and rarely got angry. But when he got angry, it was bad. As kids we were really mischievous. We loved to push people's buttons. She would talk back to him or deliberately not do what he asked.”
In her book, Farrah recounts the night in 2008 when Michael flew into a fit of rage and struck Derek after walking in on them having sex. As part of her punishment, Farrah was pr
omptly shipped off to her grandparents' house for three weeks.
Not long after, Farrah confided to Tyler at cheer camp that she had missed her period. “We were very…social, if you know what I mean,” he says. “Getting pregnant was always a risk but we didn't want to think about it.” When a trip to Planned Parenthood confirmed Farrah's worst suspicions, Tyler says he broke down in tears. “It changed my life. Life became completely different. We acted more mature. We dressed more grown-up. All the partying stopped. Before, we would drink, smoke, and do anything bad that we could.”
Farrah kept the news from her parents until she could no longer hide her baby bump. “They were pretty pissed off, to put it lightly!” Ashley remembers. “But they soon got over it and accepted it.” Despite her pregnancy, Farrah continued modeling, working and going to school. She even managed to keep her place on the cheerleading squad.
Farrah kept her decision to appear on MTV secret from even her closest friends. “She never told me she was doing it,” Tyler says. “One day I went over to her house to hang out and there were cameras following me. For the next nine months of my life I wore a microphone and had cameras on me at all times. They were in my house. They were at school. They were everywhere, and I wasn't even pregnant!”
At school, he remembers, “People kept asking Farrah if she was on the news or something!” But by then, the rumor had begun to circulate that Farrah was pregnant. When the cameras arrived, it added more fuel to the rumor's fire, says Tyler. Once Farrah confirmed that she was, indeed, pregnant, things got too hard for her at school. In December 2008, she left high school and went to a local college to finish up her high school degree. During this time, she was also dodging Derek's constant calls. He was desperate to know if the rumors that she was pregnant with his baby were true.
Two months before she gave birth to her daughter Sophia, on December 28, 2008, Derek was tragically killed in a car accident. Just after 1:00 AM, Derek lost control of his car, wrapping it around a utility pole and killing himself and his friend, Zachary Mendoza. Although alcohol was later determined not to be the cause of the crash, Zach's grief-stricken mother, Jackie, was still arrested in May 2009, after it was discovered that she had purchased a bottle of Skyy Vodka for the boys just hours before the crash.
Farrah begged producers to keep Derek's death out of her episode of 16 and Pregnant, and even told them she was not attending his wake (although she ended up making a brief appearance). Debra, meanwhile, was looking for other ways to make the best of Farrah's situation. Two weeks before Sophia's birth, she insisted they host a baby shower for underprivileged moms-to-be. MTV cameras filmed the event, held at a homeless shelter in Omaha, but it was never broadcast.
REPORT: AMBER PORTWOOD TRIED TO HANG HERSELF!
Amber's early years were marred by bouts of depression, cutting and pill popping - mostly brought on by her hot-tempered father's battle with booze.
"When she was 15, before she met Gary, Amber was in such psychological pain from the turmoil in her family that she tried to hang herself from the shower curtain rod in her bathroom," biographer Rozzie Franco told The National Enquirer in 2011. "She actually wrapped a towel around her neck and tied it to the curtain rod, but it would not hold her weight.”
In a bombshell interview with Franco - for a book about Amber's life that never ended up getting published - the troubled star called her father Shawn “an alcoholic” and admitted he was “verbally abusive” during her childhood in Anderson, Indiana. Samantha Hall, Amber's former sister-in-law shared a similar story that year with HollywoodLife.com: “Amber's dad treated (her) mom the same way Amber treats Gary - like, 'Shut up bitch!”
The Portwood clan - at times too poor to afford basic telephone service - planted roots in Anderson (pop. 56,125) long before Amber became the area's most notorious resident. Her grandfather Frank, an Army veteran, owned several local businesses including the popular Art's Varsity Pizza. Shawn left town briefly in the mid-1980s and headed to Florida, where he met then 20 year-old Tonya Webb. They married in Orlando on May 3, 1987, and soon after, their first child, Shawn Jr. was born in Atlanta. When Amber arrived on May 14, 1990, the family decided to head back to Indiana. But, sadly, their troubles and struggles continued.
On December 20, 1995, when Amber was just five, Tonya gave birth to the couple's third child, a daughter named Candace. Less than a month later, the baby tragically died from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). Amber has admitted she never quite got over the loss. “I remember it like I just watched a movie yesterday,” she revealed during the Teen Mom season three reunion special. “I remember a stretcher coming in. I remember my mom screaming. I remember her on the edge of the bed. I remember my dad's reaction.”
Tonya, too, has haunting memories of her family's saddest night. She had just gotten off work and returned home, where her husband was looking after the kids. After checking on the newborn, she instantly knew something was seriously wrong. "I picked her up and just realized that she wasn't breathing,” the still-grieving mom revealed to Dr. Drew Pinsky as MTV cameras rolled. “She hemorrhaged from the nose. Immediately, I just checked out."
In the months that followed, Tonya struggled to lift herself out of depression, while Amber put on a brave face for her young classmates at Greenbriar Elementary School. The little girl, who loved Barbie dolls and wearing dresses, made friends easily, childhood friends say. "Amber has always had a fun-loving personality and so many friends she always stuck up for and was always loyal to," one told RadarOnline in 2010. "She talked to everyone and never thought she was better than anyone else." But that soon changed.
By the time she enrolled at North Side Middle School, Amber had become aggressive and frequently acted out. At 13, she started experimenting with drugs. "We would always have pills around,” Amber told Franco. “Everybody could get pills from everywhere. We would ditch school, stay around the house and take pills. It was my way of escaping and not thinking about my real life."
With their father in and out of the hospital for liver problems related to alcohol abuse - [he eventually developed cirrhosis] - both Amber and her brother began regular sessions with a therapist. In 2005, Tonya had an extramarital affair and decided to finally leave the family home, according to Franco. Shawn joined the Army and headed to basic training, while Amber, just 15, began dating Gary, one of his best friends. Despite their age difference - he is four years her senior - Amber finally believed she had found true love. They dated for two and a half years (and often neglected to practice safe sex) until the inevitable happened: Amber got pregnant. At the time, Shawn was deployed in Iraq and didn't find out until months later that his sister was not only pregnant, but had also decided to share her story on MTV.
“It wasn't really a big shock when I found out I was pregnant,” Amber told Anderson's Herald Bulletin in 2009, adding that she had always believed she would marry Gary and have his children. In fact, Amber seemed completely unfazed to have a baby on board, telling the newspaper, “It was just the perfect situation. It just happened a little sooner than we expected.”
At 18, Amber was the oldest girl chosen to appear during season one of 16 and Pregnant. She may also have been the saddest. "She told me, 'I was stuck in a dead-end situation at school with no desire to study, a dying father and a mother who chose her boyfriend over me,'" Franco said. MTV cameras captured her dropping out of Anderson High School but made no mention of the fact that Amber had recently been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. (She would later also be diagnosed with dissociative disorder, which caused her to “black out.”) producers left out many of the details of Amber's early life and her father's struggle with alcohol. (Her mother also had problems with booze, causing her to be arrested on Christmas Eve, 2007 for driving while intoxicated.)
On the day she was sentenced to five years in prison for her crimes, Amber told the judge she wished she had never agreed to do the show.
MACI WAS A CHEERLEADER, SOFTBALL STAR
Maci Deshane
Bookout is a second-generation teen mother. Her older brother Matthew was born just weeks after mom, Sharon Galbraith, graduated from Hixon High School near Chattanooga, Tennessee. Against tremendous odds, Sharon - who married Maci's dad, Billy “Gene” Bookout that same year - managed to juggle two kids and college, eventually earning a Bachelor's degree. She quickly became Maci's biggest inspiration.
“I think Maci, in her mind, thought that she could do it, because we did,” Sharon revealed during the Teen Mom Farewell Special in 2012. The Bookout kids, just three years apart in age, were both popular with their classmates and involved in various sports. Maci was a cheerleader in middle school, rode dirt bikes and competed in beauty pageants. But softball was her true passion. She continued to play right up until becoming pregnant at age 16.
By the time MTV cameras set up shop at the family's Tennessee home in September 2008, Maci was already well into her eighth month of pregnancy. “At first, it was extremely awkward having people constantly hanging around the house,” she told students during a 2012 speaking engagement at Slippery Rock University. “In the beginning, I didn't understand what the big deal was because I'm just Maci. I never thought I was that interesting.”
Audiences disagreed. Her episode of 16 and Pregnant - and future installments of Teen Mom - were chock full of drama between the pretty strawberry blonde and her always complaining ex-boyfriend, Ryan Edwards. One of the most popular guys at Ooltewah High School, Maci considered Ryan to be quite a catch and many of her classmate were green with envy. “Ryan...was THAT guy in high school,” classmate Melissa Powell wrote on her personal blog. “He was absolutely beautiful, I remember that clearly. I'm pretty sure he drove a huge, lifted truck. He played football. He was friends with the 'popular' people. Maybe he was the popular one.”
Teen Mom Confidential: Secrets & Scandals From MTV's Most Controversial Shows Page 4