Teen Mom Confidential: Secrets & Scandals From MTV's Most Controversial Shows

by Majeski, Ashley

  Dawn believes the absence of a consistent father figure in Leah's life may have enticed her to marry at such a young age. “All her life all she wanted was a relationship with her daddy,” Dawn says. “She yearned for that. It was a constant letdown for her. I think that's what her thing is, with relationships and men. For some people, it just affects them for the rest of their lives.”

  Dawn, a dental office associate, remarried just two months after her divorce was finalized and admits Leah was reluctant to accept her new stepdad, Lee Spears. “For the longest time they didn't get along because she thought he was trying to replace her daddy,” she says. “They did [start getting along] later on, but she gave him a rough road. Her stepdad raised her from kindergarten on.”

  As a teen, Leah thrived. A popular cheerleader at Herbert Hoover High School, she got good grades and never had a problem making friends. She started dating Robbie Kidd around age 13 - a relationship that lasted three years. When the romance fizzled out in early 2009, Leah, a sophomore, hooked up with Corey, a senior at nearby Clay County High School. Leah previously dated one of Corey's good friends, her own best friend, Amy LaDawn Nichols, tells us: “After her and that guy split up, she went out with Corey and that's how they ended up together.”

  One month into their relationship, Leah attended her school's prom - without Corey. He didn't want to attend, but stopped by Leah's house to take pictures before. Later that night, they met up for an unprotected romp in the back of Corey's truck. That's when they have speculated the twins were conceived.

  Dawn admits that she knew her daughter was sexually active and did her best to promote birth control. “I had her on the [Depo-Provera] shots,” she says. “She missed a month in between getting shots, and that's when she got pregnant.”

  The day Leah got the news, Dawn was on a business trip about an hour from home. The couple drove to her hotel to break the news. “I always told my children that I don't care what it is, don't hide anything from me,” Dawn remembers. “You can come and tell me everything. We've always had a really close relationship.”

  Though shocked by Leah's announcement, Dawn says she immediately pledged to support her daughter while others - most notably, Gary - did not. “My dad didn't like the idea at all,” Leah told Entertainment Weekly in 2010. “He's not really around, but he called me said some pretty harsh things. Things that really hurt. But he's not around so he can't really say much. And my stepdad didn't talk to me for a little while. It was really upsetting to know that I hurt him. I was five months pregnant when we started talking again.”

  Then came an even bigger bombshell. Dawn says her heart “just dropped” when she learned that Leah was expecting twins. “The nurse looked over and said, 'Honey, I hate to be the bearer of bad news to a 16-year-old girl that's pregnant with twins,'” Dawn remembers. “That's what she said to us.” Leah was plagued with health problems during her pregnancy. At 15 weeks, she was put on mandatory bed rest. Her mother moved a bed into the living room of her house, where Leah slept, ate and completed her classwork.

  Bumps On The Road To The Altar

  Corey and Leah remained together during her pregnancy, but split just weeks after their girls' December 2009 birth. They got back together six months later. Soon, they had moved in together and began talking about getting married. Weddings make for great television, and that fact wasn't lost on the production team that had been trailing Leah for months.

  “I don't think MTV made them get married, but I definitely think that they pressured them to do it,” Amy says. “They really wanted it on the show.” According to Amy, the network offered to help the struggling young parents pay for many wedding-related expenses. “I don't think they would have rushed it like they did had it not been for Teen Mom 2,” she says.

  As the big day drew near, some close to Leah began to worry things were moving too fast for the teen. Amy, in fact, admits she was skeptical the relationship would last from the start. “They had a lot going against them - like where they were living and how his family tried to interfere,” she says.

  Even before they tied the knot, it became clear that the relationship was not as warm and fuzzy as it appeared on TV. Multiple sources have confirmed that after Corey and Leah moved into together, fights and name-calling became frequent. Leah was devastated to discover that her husband-to-be preferred watching adult movies to having sex with her. Soon, the couple's fights turned physically violent, Amy says.

  Still, Leah was determined to make things work for the girls and decided to move forward with the wedding - even though she had secretly been texting back and forth with her ex. A week before the big day, Dawn hosted a bachelorette party that lasted well into the night. “I went over to her house after her party died down,” Robbie told OK! magazine. “Her friends were still there. Leah and I went into her sister Victoria's room. We talked a little and then we slept together.” Robbie told the magazine he left Dawn's house at around 2:30 AM, unhappy that Leah still planned to go through with the wedding. Meanwhile, Dawn says she had no idea of what had happened that night - although Corey would later accuse her of knowingly keeping the secret from him.

  “Corey said 'You knew about Leah and Robbie [sleeping together] at Leah's bridal shower,'” Dawn recalled of a showdown that was cut from the Teen Mom 2 reunion special. “I said, 'No I did not until later on.' And he said, 'Yes you did.' Even if I had known, if my daughter came and trusted me, I'm not going to cause trouble for her. I didn't agree with what Leah did, but just like I told her, 'If you fall on your face, I'll be there to pick you up.'

  “I was being truthful when I told Corey that I did not know about it, but he just called me a liar, but he has a right to believe whatever he want,” Dawn says. “I don't care, people can think what they want about me. But, I don't sit around and tell my daughter that it's OK to go out and mess around with other men.”

  Amy, who didn't condone Leah's infidelity, does offer her best guess at what went down: “She ended up straying on him before the wedding because he didn't make her feel loved or needed and at the time I think she just got caught up in the moment. At the time, she was just emotionally broken. She wanted a family life and I know she loved Corey, but I don't think their relationship was anywhere near where it needed to be to get married.”

  Leah later admitted that she knew she was making a mistake by marrying Corey. "I do think we rushed into the marriage quickly,” she confessed during a Teen Mom 2 after show special. “We just wanted the family, like husband and wife, and the kids. Both of us knew that we shouldn't have got married, because we were both doing things that we shouldn't have been doing at the time."

  On their wedding day, Amy - who served as one of Leah's bridesmaids - says the newlyweds were basically at the mercy of the show's producers.

  “We didn't have to reenact anything that day, but we had to do a lot of stuff that they wanted us to,” she recalls. “They wanted to film everything that we did. They had a lot to do with how everything was planned that day. They pretty much planned it how they wanted it.”

  Made-For-TV Divorce

  The couple's six-month marriage was riddled with fights, according to multiple sources. Corey's disinterest in sex and preoccupation with porn eventually sparked a major, blowout, Amy says. The incident, she explains, took place after a disagreement about the lack of intimacy in their relationship. Leah spent several nights at her mother's house and returned home to find a huge stash of XXX movies on the living room TV. “[Corey] threw a remote through the wall and put his hands around [Leah's] neck because she caught him watching porn after not having sex with her,” Amy remembers.

  Short tempers were not uncommon in the relationship, Amy says. And she believes there were several times when Corey became violent with his bride-to-be. “I had seen bruises on her neck before that,” she says. “She had tried to play it off as a hickey or whatever, but we all knew that wasn't the case.”

  According to Amy, the final straw came when Corey allegedly
hit Leah in the face with an envelope, leaving a gash under her eye. “She was playing with Aleeah while he was on the phone,” she remembers. “They were making noise and he told her to shut up. After that, Leah went to stay at her mom's and Dawn was basically like, 'That's it. That's enough.'”

  Both Amy and Dawn say the couple spent their brief marriage being constantly hovered over by Corey's family. “His mom [Donna] would always tell her how to raise the kids, how to keep her house and how to run her marriage,” Amy says. “Leah got along really well with Corey's dad, Jeff, but it was her and Donna that didn't get along.”

  And, of course, there were money problems. Leah was eager to move out of their beat-up house, but Corey wanted to use the couple's dwindling cash supply to buy a new truck and a four-wheeler. When Leah found out that Corey was about to use a large chunk of the money that they had earned from the show on new “toys,” she was enraged.

  “I think their failure to communicate properly about what they wanted to do about the money from the show, how the money was going to be spent, that helped lead to the divorce,” Amy says.

  “Leah's on the show because of her girls. She wanted to use that money to buy a home. Because of the show, they had the financial resources to better their living situation, and Leah felt like all Corey wanted to do was get a four-wheeler so he could go out muddin' and get a nice jacked-up truck. She felt like his priorities just weren't right.”

  Eventually, Corey began turning his attention to other women - including single teen mother Amber Scaggs. The pair hooked up months before Leah officially filed for divorce, Amy says. “Amber had moved from Texas to West Virginia because she has family [there]. I remember in March before Leah filed for divorce, Corey had gone out to Buffalo Wild Wings without Leah. I called Corey because we assumed he was there with Leah but he wasn't. That's when we found out they weren't together and that's the night I guess he met Amber.

  “Leah had gotten into his email account, which linked to his Facebook, so every time he'd get a Facebook message from Amber, Leah would see it,” Amy explained.

  Producers were forced to edit the story so it looked as if the hookup took place after the divorce. “Corey was cheating just as much (as Leah),” Dawn says. “He wouldn't admit it on camera, so they couldn't present it on the show. They were both cheating. Leah knew about it, but he wouldn't let them film it.”

  Camera crews did their best to capture the relationship as it crumbled. And what they couldn't get the first time, was carefully recreated, Amy says: “Originally Corey promised if she reenacted the scene where she talks about sleeping with Robbie, and admitted her mistake to the world that he would stay with her. So she agreed and they went back and staged all that. It didn't happen the way it was portrayed on the show. Leah told him face-to- face that she cheated; he didn't hear it through the grapevine like it was shown on the show. That was done just to get the attention of the viewers but all it did was make Leah look absolutely horrible.”

  Desperate to keep her marriage intact, Leah agreed to let the producers restage the scene where she admitted to cheating. Corey, however, refused to admit his own indiscretions. “[MTV] was like, 'Unless he admits it on camera, we can't put it on the show,” Dawn says. “He let [Leah] take the blame when in reality he was just as bad. Leah told me, 'I may be the one that has to go down for this, but I'm going to tell the truth!'”

  “In reality, Leah wouldn't have had to say anything publically,” Amy says. “She had hoped that they could work it out. She really did try all kinds of things to get him to stay married, counseling and stuff, but he didn't want any of it, which we had figured out later was because he was already seeing Amber. He had flown Amber out and she was staying at her mom's house. Legally they were separated but still married at the time.”

  Leah's decision to publically admit her infidelities opened her up to public condemnation by many fans of the show. “After season 2 [aired], she had a lot of emotional problems,” Amy says. “She was on depression and anxiety meds. Not only did the divorce affect her negatively, but [doing] the show and reliving it, and the way it all played out, did. As you know they get a lot of footage but you barely see any of it so she had no clue that they were going to edit it in the way that they did.

  “The night that it was shown, Leah was absolutely distraught, and pissed off,” Amy remembers. “She called MTV and they kept telling them they were sorry, they didn't know, but they told her that she can defend herself publically, but Leah didn't want to do that to Corey.”

  The backlash from fans, along with the constant exposure of her life, has made Leah sometimes regret the decision she made at 18 to go on Teen Mom 2.

  “She has told me that she kind of wishes she had never done it,” Amy says. “But at the same time she's thankful that she did get it because it has helped tremendously with Ali's medical bills, and it's helped her become a financially stable young woman. But, I don't think she's happy with the way it's all turned out. She never expected it all to end up like this.”

  Deep inside, Amber Portwood knew that prison time was the only thing that could save her life. By the time she appeared in front of Madison County Indiana Judge David Happe on June 5, 2012, the troubled MTV mom had already made up her mind to abandon a court-ordered rehab program and surrender to five years in the big house.

  “In my situation, I felt in the program there were a lot of eyes on me,” she told ABC News days later. “And it was very uncomfortable. I was not using my anti-psych medication even. I was very depressed, all alone, all bitter at everybody. I felt like that wasn't the life I wanted to live, I felt like I'd rather do my time, and get it over with, and make the best out of the situation that's been handed to me.”

  Amber, just 22, had been sucked into a downward spiral fueled by anger, loneliness and drug addiction. She escaped serious slammer time in November 2010 after kicking, shoving, slapping and punching Gary Shirley - the father of her then one-year-old daughter, Leah. But the high school dropout - who struggles with bipolar disorder - was busted again in December 2011 when probation officers discovered a large stash of prescription pills in her home. “She said she was taking the drugs for a medical condition,” County Prosecutor Rodney Cummings told The Indianapolis Star. “But the physician treating her did not support that.”

  Amber spent a month in the clink before reaching a plea deal that included participation in the drug rehab program. She was making every effort to stay clean, her brother Shawn told OK! magazine. Doctors even refused to give her over-the-counter painkillers after an emergency gallbladder operation in the spring of 2012. But somehow, Amber found a supply of Suboxone. The drug - which is often prescribed to treat opiate addition - began to deepen her depression. “She started using right after her surgery and then she realized she couldn't stop,” Shawn said. Unable to find work and facing her demons amid the glare of a bright media spotlight, a despondent Amber consumed 30 pills in just three days in what she later admitted was a second attempt to end her life.

  “The depression took over and I would just take four or five at a time beneath my tongue and nod out,” she said. “I felt the same way I felt a couple of years back, when I, you know, tried to commit suicide.”

  Despite the relapse, Amber would likely have been given additional opportunities to get back on track and avoid being thrown into a population of murderers, rapists and other hardened criminals. “But she just said she couldn't do it and she wanted out of the program,” Cummings said. “I don't know that she realized she would actually go to prison... I don't think she's been realistic about the whole thing all along. Whatever celebrity comes along with [being on MTV], I think she thought it was going to prevent her from being held accountable. That just has not been accurate.”

  Amber could have avoided prison time by completing the rehab program. If she keeps her nose clean, Amber could be eligible for parole in late 2014 - when her daughter, Leah, is six. In the meantime, Amber told ABC News that she plans to “try to bet
ter myself for when I get out. I'll be off the drugs. I'll have an education to get me a job. I am not just going to sit. I am going to do substance abuse classes. I am going to get my G.E.D.”

  Amber - who signed over full custody of her daughter to Gary in August 2011 - has long blamed MTV and the Teen Mom franchise for her problems.

  After spending 24 hours in the slammer for attacking Gary in 2010, she told Life & Style magazine. “I wouldn't have been in jail because nobody would have known about it.” Amber also lamented to TMZ cameras: “I might get attention, but it's not the right attention. I don't want to be known as 'Amber from Teen Mom.'”

  At a December 2011 court hearing, Amber told the judge that she felt “pressured” and “exploited” through her work with MTV. “I want to quit [the show], and I will,” she said.

  Liz Gateley, an original producer on both Teen Mom and 16 and Pregnant insists the show does everything it can to provide support for its young stars. “We put lots of things in place when we were at MTV to give them access to professional help when they needed it,” she says. “But also just to be there and talk to us when they needed to talk to us. My feeling always in those situations and it goes back to every show I have ever done, it comes down to family. How you were raised and the support you had. I don't know that whether we had cameras or not on Amber, that any of that wouldn't have happened in her life.”

  _______________

  AMBER’S DOING GREAT!

  Amber is making great strides in prison, her brother Shawn reported in a personal blog post: “She has had a lot of negative press in the past, which portrayed her as a very hateful individual. And she was for a while. She did not know how to control her anger or even shut up when she needed to. But now I am happy to say that I absolutely believe that it is all behind her now.”