Like most girls at O.H.S., Maci was infatuated with Ryan from the start. “He was so cute, and I just wanted to look at him all the time,” she confessed to the Slippery Rock students. “He had a really pretty truck and, you know…the things that are just so important in your partner when you're 16.”
It took Maci just three short months to be overcome with passion and move their relationship into the bedroom. “I was the one who talked him into having sex with me,” she said. “Apparently, since I was a virgin, he was scared of me. I thought there was something wrong with me. But, you know, I finally talked him into it.”
What Maci forgot to talk about was birth control, and soon she began her journey into unplanned parenthood. “If you think of how cool it's going to be that I get to get married, and move out and have a family…[I] just look at the bright side,” Maci revealed in the casting tape she filmed for 16 and Pregnant in 2008.
Unfortunately, Ryan, wasn't exactly ready to settle down so quickly. “Back then, I felt like it was just another relationship, nothing really serious,” Ryan revealed during the 2012 Farewell Special.
Two months had already passed by the time Maci discovered she was pregnant. She had taken a test after throwing up while taking a shower one morning, and it had come back positive. After telling her brother, Matt, Maci then had to decide how to break the news to her mother. She finally decided to tell her in a text message. “I stared at that text message for about 15 minutes before finally hitting send!” she revealed during a 2011 speaking engagement. Sharon and Gene were devastated. “That was the first time I had ever seen my dad cry,” Maci said during the Teen Mom Farewell Special. “The day I told him I was pregnant.”
Despite apparent strains in their relationship early on, Maci became engaged to Ryan on her 17th birthday. They often talked on camera about tying the knot, although both later revealed that they never believed the wedding would actually take place.
CATELYNN CARED FOR HER ALCOHOLIC MOTHER
“Catelynn had a tough childhood, but we did the best we could,” her grandmother, Judith Mitti told Star magazine in 2010. “There was some disfunctionality. I'm not gonna say that there wasn't. But [her mother] had a rough way to go.” Growing up in Marine City, Michigan - 63 miles from Detroit - Catelynn would often assume the role of parent, nursing her booze-loving mom after long nights at the bar. “I would put pillows underneath her head while she was passed out on the table,” the wise-beyond-her-years teen told RadarOnline in 2012. “I pretty much saw my mom drunk almost every day. I had to grow up really fast.”
The oldest of three children, Catelynn was born to 19-year-old April Lee Stotts and 22-year-old David Lowell on March 12, 1992. David, an auto plant factory worker, began pursuing April when she was just 17 and still in high school. She soon dropped out and the couple moved in together. Within a year, April had followed in Judith's footsteps and become a mom at age 19. As the young couple struggled to make ends meet, April's battle with the bottle began to tear them apart. According to her current husband, Darl “Butch” Baltierra, April started drinking regularly at age 14.
“Catelynn had a good life when she was a little girl and April and I were still together,” David insisted in an October 2010 interview with Star magazine. “But there was a lot of partying going on back then, and when I reached a point where I'd had enough, April wasn't ready to stop.”
David said he'd had enough by 1994, and packed his bags when Catelynn was just two years old. “There'd be drunks all over our house, and I was afraid for our daughter,” he said. “I tried to get custody of her but it's near impossible for a father to get custody in Michigan.” So he moved to Florida, remarried and had more children, while April continued to struggle with her addiction. April and Catelynn moved frequently, and during her early years, Catelynn lived in several different states, including Ohio and Texas.
As Catelynn began grade school, April became pregnant again with her second daughter, Sarah. (She later had a son, Nicholas, with a third man.) Despite their distance, David says he never forgot about his little girl. In 2001, he took April to court, claiming that she was neglecting their daughter, but the court dismissed his claim. Six years later, he arranged for Catelynn to move in with his parents. Her grandmother, Deborah, assumed the role of legal guardian.
Catelynn thrived in Florida but she eventually moved back to Michigan to be with her mother and attend middle school. Enter Tyler Baltierra: another troubled teen from a broken home, whom she first met in seventh grade music class. Almost instantly, the pair became inseparable. “I have loved her since the moment I saw her,” Tyler wrote on his website. “Her punk rocker hair and attitude matched perfectly for my edgy, hyper personality. I asked her why she fell in love with me and [she told me, and] I quote 'you could always make me laugh.'”
They've been together ever since - except for a few short breakups -and maintained their relationship even after Tyler failed the ninth grade and had to transfer to an alternative high school. In 2008, Catelynn introduced Butch to her mother. A year later, they married and the teens became step-siblings. Despite their unique family dynamic, Catelynn and Tyler remained inseparable. So it was no surprise when Catelynn became pregnant during her junior year at Algonac High School.
Today, the couple continue to defend their decision to place their daughter, Carly, up for adoption. “We were so young, and we didn't have anything. I didn't have a job, a car or any money to raise a baby. I didn't have the things a child needs and deserves,” Catelynn told Bethany Christian Service's Lifeline magazine in 2012. “And I didn't have mental stability. I was so young. I definitely wanted Carly to be raised in a Christian family. I wanted her to be in a different environment and not around the stuff I had seen growing up.”
Catelynn has said her relationship with April became so bad at one point that she was forced to move in with Tyler and his mother, Kim. But through the most difficult of times, her father remained one of her greatest sources of love and support. Throughout the pregnancy, he offered advice and guidance to his daughter and her boyfriend (who he didn't actually meet until 2011 during an episode of Teen Mom.)
“It was only him, Kim and my grandparents that supported us,” Catelynn said in a 2011 interview. “Even though [MTV] didn't show it, my dad was really supportive when I was pregnant. He would tell me that I was doing the right thing and all that kind of stuff.”
WHAT ABOUT TYLER?
Like Catelynn, Tyler knew all too well how addiction could wreak havoc on a family. His father, Butch, had been in and out of jail for most of Tyler's life. His mother, Kim, raised Tyler and his sister, Amber, single-handedly, before finally leaving Butch when Tyler was just four.
Still, Butch insists he tried to spend as much time with his children as possible. “Tyler was a riot,” he remembers. “He is a Batman freak [so] we bought him a Batman suit for Halloween. He was about four, I think. When he put that mask on and that suit, he really thought he was Batman. He would hit the walls, slam the screen open. I said 'Tyler, stop.' And he says, 'I am not Tyler. I'm Batman.'”
To keep the bill collectors at bay, Kim often juggled multiple jobs, leaving little time to spend with her young children. Tyler acted out; often getting into fights at school, disrespecting authority and even earning his first suspension in the second grade.
“If he was bad and got kicked out of school for a couple of days I would take him to work with me,” Butch says. “I owned a fence company and I would work 12, 14, 16 hours a day. And I would make him come work for me. I would pay him, but he didn't know he was getting paid. He would be so tired. He hated it. He rebelled a lot. He reminds me of me when I was a kid. Lookin' for attention, I assume.”
Butch holds himself partly responsible for Tyler's childhood aggression and antics. “I would think [it stems] from my absence,” he tells us. “I am a parent. You know, when your kids act up, you blame yourself. I wasn't there to man him up. His mother did a damn good job. But she was kind of naive. My daug
hter got raped when she was eight or nine years-old. I was in prison. So she blamed it on me. [Kim] had a boyfriend that raped my daughter.”
The family was forced to move numerous times as money troubles mounted and Tyler continued to yearn for stability. “Before school even started, I was kicked out of all my day cares, and babysitters could not control my erratic behavior,” Tyler admitted in an online posting. “My constant need for attention led me to act out as a child.”
At age eight, Tyler watched as his father was tackled by police and thrown to the ground while being arrested. “All I could do was watch and cry as they took him away from me…again,” he recounted. “I chased the cop car down the street until finally collapsing to my knees, and hyperventilated with tears streaming down my cheeks. Amber picked me up and we cried in the middle of the street, watching the cop car disappear in the distance for what seemed like eternity. That's when my life turned around for the worst.”
CATELYNN & TYLER’S SECRET DRUG ARREST – REVEALED!
Their secret is out!
Catelynn and Tyler were arrested for “Controlled Substance Use of Marijuana” just six days after the birth of their daughter Carly. The bust - which went down on May 25, 2009 - occurred while the young couple was still filming scenes for Catelynn's episode of 16 and Pregnant. But it was never mentioned on the air or in the media - until now!
According to court records, the young stoners were arrested by the Marine City Police Department, fingerprinted and read their rights. Two months later, both pled guilty to the charge and each paid $253.00 in fines.
“As far as I know, they don't do any other drugs,” Tyler's father, Butch Baltierra tells us. “But he does drink. He does party and he does smoke a lot of marijuana.”
Of course, none of this partying ever made it onto TV, Butch says, because the producers and editors worked hard to hide anything that could be considered negative from the viewers.
Farrah Abraham was sobbing uncontrollably in the living room of her Hollywood, Florida apartment. Tissue in hand, the 19 year-old single mom recounted for neighbor Alethea Montante - who she had known for just a few short months - the heartbreaking story of how her only true love died two years earlier in a horrific car wreck. Then... “Ok, we're good!” a voice boomed from the background. “Awesome,” Farrah responded, flashing a smile. “Let's go shopping!”
Farrah - a self-described “actress, author, commercial model, culinary professional, entrepreneur, professional speaker, and philanthropist” - has also become a master at the art of manipulation, Alethea believes: “As soon as the cameras turned off, she would wipe her tears and be totally fine. She would just fake cry for the cameras.”
Alethea and others who know Farrah privately describe her as a bossy diva, who would often pawn off daughter Sophia on friends. “How you see her act on camera isn't even close to how bad she is in person,” says Daniel Alvarez, who dated the aspiring model during the summer of 2011 and appeared on the fourth season of Teen Mom. “I don't watch a lot of TV, especially not reality shows. But I wish I had watched a few episodes of Teen Mom before I started dating her so I could have had a heads-up on how she really was! I think sometimes she might bring it out more and embellish some of her stories for the cameras, but for the most part that's her personality. They don't make her act like that.”
Alethea, a stay-at-home mom at the time, befriended her new next-door neighbor shortly after Farrah relocated from Iowa to attend The Art Institute of Ft. Lauderdale in 2011. “I was outside one day and her dad, Michael, introduced himself to me,” she remembers. “He was telling me that he was worried about her living in Florida alone, so I invited him inside my house and we chatted for a while. I told him that if Farrah ever needed anything she could come over and knock on my door.”
But it wasn't Farrah that eventually turned up on her front step. Within days, Alethea says, she was approached by MTV producers and asked if she would be willing to appear on camera. “I didn't even really know her, but being around celebrities doesn't really faze me, so I said OK,” she recalls. “That night I did some research and read some stuff about her online that was pretty negative, about how she acts on the show and stuff. But when I met her, she was totally opposite of what I had read. She was actually really sweet. “
After just three days at the Hollywood Station apartment complex, Farrah asked if Alethea could look after Sophia for a few hours while she partied with some other neighbors at the pool. “I agreed, because she was young and I knew she would want to meet people and have some fun,“ she says. Little did Alethea know then that she would eventually end up watching Sophia around-the-clock, sometimes for days at a time. “On Teen Mom, they showed three different people watching Sophia, including me, but after a little while it had gotten to the point that I was watching Sophia all the time,” she says. “Sophia would be with me all day. She was like my second child. Farrah would drop her off in the morning and not pick her up until nighttime - or sometimes the next day. I felt for her, because she was alone and young so I watched Sophia for her.”
Daniel, who met the teen mom on a blind date, says he was horrified to watch as Farrah treated her daughter like a mere prop in her quest for fame. “When the cameras are there she's all about Sophia, but off camera she would dump her off to this lady that lived in her building with no heads up or anything,” he confirms. Making matters worse, Sophia often needed bathing “because she stunk and was dirty,” Alethea says. “But Farrah was a young mom so I gave her the benefit of the doubt. I would do everything for that little girl. I would bathe her, take her to the doctor, feed her. She was always with me.” And when Alethea wasn't babysitting, she was busy dodging requests from producers to appear on camera. “It became like a job for me because they were there so often,” she remembers. “Bright and early they would be there to film, even if I didn't have my makeup on yet.”
Several friends and neighbors have told us that Farrah was a terror for her production team, reducing one crewmember to tears and prompting another to walk off the job. “She would make them wait, and talk to them so horribly,” Alethea says. “Sometimes she would make them cry because she was so mean. One of the production people actually quit because she couldn't take Farrah anymore. She actually quit her job on the show because she didn't want to work with her anymore.”
Daniel says the crew following him was constantly changing: “She would tell me she fired them, but in reality it was them not wanting to work with her anymore.“ Things got so bad during the filming of his third date with Farrah, that Daniel claims one of the show's executive producers had to be called down from New York to take over for a producer who had gotten into a huge fight with the demanding star. “Farrah couldn't get along with the other producer,” he said. “I saw a lot of [production/camera] people come and go and that was only in a six week period!”
Alethea was also appalled at how Farrah treated the people who tailed her for up to eight hours a day. “She didn't like me talking to the crew,” she said. “She called them 'workers.' She told me, 'They work for me, I don't work for them!' She would get so mad when Michael and I would talk and MTV would film us. She would say to the production crew, 'Is this Michael's show or my show?'”
____________________
“[Farrah] didn't like me talking to the crew. She called them 'workers.' She told me 'They work for me. I don't work for them.'”
- ALETHEA MONTANTE
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“If she was trying to talk to me about something, they would interject and ask her to elaborate or something, and she would just chew them out,” said Daniel. “I get that it's kind of a pain, but that's what you sign up for by going on the show.”
Farrah's treatment of the show's crewmembers mirrored the way she treated people in public, her former friends say. “Every time I was out with her she would either be making fun of someone or being mean to people,” said Alethea. “She actually told me one time, 'You need to stay fit because I don'
t like fat friends!'”
John Hidalgo, another resident of the Hollywood Station apartments, says Farrah frequently spoke of “screwing people over” and recalls one time she decided to “get revenge” on a neighbor named Adam, who she briefly dated during the fourth season of Teen Mom. “After they broke up, she got a condom and filled it with mayonnaise and put it on his doorknob,” he says. “She was always doing weird things like that, to prove that she was better than people.”
Farrah Abraham with Daniel Alvarez and his parents in 2011.
MTV often overlooked Farrah's treatment of those around her, and, in many cases, was forced to smooth things over with members of the general public. Daniel remembers one visit to a grocery store when Farrah encountered a cashier who struggled with her English.
“Farrah started yelling at her…telling her she shouldn't be a cashier and should be mopping the floor. I was so embarrassed that I started to walk out of the store. I couldn't believe some of the things she'd say to people,” he says.
Still, many of Farrah's former friends admit that she could also be fun to hang out with. “In the beginning, we would have a lot of fun and just do normal couple things, like go to the beach, go out to eat or hang out by the pool. I was trying to show her that things aren't always bad, and not everyone is out to use her like she thought,” Daniel says. “She had a lot of good qualities too. She's very ambitious and driven. She's dedicated to making money, even if she has to step on someone to do it, she will. I went into the relationship not knowing anything about Farrah or her show. I met a person that I was attracted to both physically and emotionally, and was trying to give her a chance, just like I would anybody else.”
Teen Mom Confidential: Secrets & Scandals From MTV's Most Controversial Shows Page 5