The Secret World of
Jon and Kate
The Stupidest Story in the History of the Universe and the People Who Covered It
Al
Walentis
Commentary
by Polly Kahl
Xyla Press
Published by Xyla Press at Smashwords.
© Copyright 2010 by Al Walentis.
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For Janice
A sum of money is a leading
character in this tale about people, just as a sum of honey might
properly be a leading character in a tale about bees.
Kurt
Vonnegut
AIl is ephemeraI — fame and the famous as well.
Marcus Aurelius
Gosselin Summer
Gosselin Babylon
Getting Real With the Gosselins,
Prelude
This is a story about a story about bullshit.
It’s a story about how a doughy, ill-tempered nurse and her milquetoast, underachieving spouse turned the unimaginable task of raising six infant babies into the hottest reality show on television.
It’s a story about how a husband and wife deteriorated from doting parents into mortal enemies, their ugly break-up played out under the glare of the international media spotlight.
It’s a story about a crazy life.
Be grateful it’s not your life.
It’s the story of Jon and Kate Gosselin.
It’s the story about how Jon got busted exiting a local nightclub with a young schoolteacher and how what in ordinary circumstances would be an inconsequential indiscretion launched a domino effect that made Jon and Kate the most gossiped-about — and recognizable — celebrities this side of Brad and Angelina.
It’s the story about how Jon’s public image sank further and further into the toilet, transforming him from “a really cool guy” into a pathetic punchline, his face pasted atop a jackass made from cardboard on “The Jay Leno Show.”
It’s the story of greed, opportunism, revenge, treachery, debauchery, and deception.
It’s the story of the people who got rich off Jon and Kate’s public misery — the users, the enablers, the agents, the lawyers, the security detail, the journalists.
Everyone, it seemed, who fell into the orbit of Planet Gosselin left corrupted.
All except one.
This is a story told by the folks who pounded the Gosselin beat, the reporters and the paparazzi, from the days since the first bimbo eruption in April 2009 through the family’s sad Christmas holiday eight months later.
This is the story of anti-journalism at its most cutthroat and irresponsible: Hearsay unverified; rumor and innuendo treated as gospel. It didn’t matter whether what was printed one day got contradicted the next. If somebody said something, no matter how untrustworthy, that was enough to land it in print.
This is the story about how Jon himself became a leading source for the supermarket press.
Even the reputable New York magazine couldn’t get its act straight. In an article about J-Goss headlined “The Prince of Celebrity Nobodies,” the magazine said the family lived in affluent Berks County. In reality, the county seat, Reading, is the sixth-poorest city in the nation.
I covered the Jon and Kate circus for Us Weekly during the summer of 2009, observing the insanity that devoured the rural Pennsylvania communities near Jon and Kate’s homestead just outside Wernersville, Pennsylvania.
Before that, I worked at a local newspaper during the birth of the Gosselin sextuplets and witnessed Kate’s selfish tantrums firsthand after a local blogger dared challenge her mooching.
The first section of this book is a behind-the-scenes account of the media tumult surrounding this unlikely celebrity duo, events I witnessed firsthand during those crazy months. The second part, centering on Jon’s tragicomic unraveling, relies on the recollections of insiders with whom we maintained close contact throughout the autumn and interviews with others who shared their experiences. (One caveat: Among the celebrity magazines, Jon was considered “a big fat liar,” even as they printed his nonsense, so readers must gauge for themselves if what Jon said rings true and what is self-serving baloney.) The final section contains the perspective of Polly Kahl, M.A., who had an inside track on this story long before I did, and who sketches a fascinating psychological profile of Jon and Kate and what it would take to bring this dysfunctional couple back to normalcy.
This is not intended to be the definitive account of the Jon and Kate saga. Far from it. This book is both anecdotal and analytical, focusing on events in Pennsylvania, not Jon’s jaunts to the French Riviera for smoke breaks and tan-offs with a hot-shot fashion designer. Kate Major is a lesser player, too, only because Jon’s dalliance with her didn’t consume him, nor spread deep into Berks County, as much as his flings with Hailey Glassman and Stephanie Santoro did.
For narrative consistency, I have used the pronoun “we” throughout, both to report on things I observed personally and for information I deem to be trustworthy gathered from interviews with others.
Throughout, I use “pap” as the shorthand for paparazzi, rather than “paps,” because...just because. Take it up with the Italian dictionary vocabulary police.
As for that blurb on the back cover about this book “Soon To Be a Major Motion Picture,” well, Jon said it, so it has to be true. (Just kidding...any producers reading this, please make sure you call us!)
This is the story of that crazy Gosselin summer and beyond. This book contains information reported nowhere else. Among the cast of characters, some names are used, but the names of others who contributed inside information are withheld at their request.
This is a story about the stupidest story in the history of the universe.
Being Jon Gosselin
A beaten man, Jon Gosselin tramped up the steps to his apartment. Jon called it his apartment, but it was nothing more than the upper level of the three-bay garage a few steps to the right of the family’s $1.35-million home in rural Lower Heidelberg Township, Pennsylvania. He had a kitchenette, one bedroom, a living room with a couch where he could crash. The barn, down a gravel path where the obstetrician who lived there before them stabled his horses, looked absolutely more spacious.
How Kate loved thinking that Jon lived in exile, a hermit, inside what she viewed as the servants’ quarters, and how Jon hated how she gloated. She plied him with a $5-a-day allowance, even when the television money poured like golden rain, his leash so tight he gagged for five years. The family had only moved to the 23-acre manor, built in 1998, last November, but already the marriage had shattered. Still, it was better to crash miserably in the servants' quarters, Jon thought, than to wage war in front of the kids.
Jon and Kate Gosselin were parents of eight little ones. Everybody knew that. AIl of America knew that. Cara Nicole and Madelyn Kate, the twin girls, were eight; the sextuplets, Alexis Faith, Hannah Joy, Aaden Jonathan, Collin Thomas, Leah Hope, and Joel Kevin, had not yet turned five. Those eight adorable “goslings,” aIl conceived through intrauterine insemination and fertility treatments, launched the family to TV superstardom and the cult of celebrity. And, most important, money. “Jon and Kate Plus 8” was in its fifth season on The Learning Channel, and the tribe was hauling in upwards of $22,500 per episode. Better than toiling at a desk job as an IT drone in Harrisburg, Jon thought.
What nobody outside the fenced compound knew then was how violently their fairy-tale relationship had crashed and burned last autumn, after Kate returned from the coast after a book tour The couple had renewed their vows in Hawaii, Jon and Kate, their children as God’s witnesses, just last August, an eternity now. Another TLC charade, for the cameras.
Tonight Jon slumped alone, sad, sulking, hanging out in living quarters an eighth the size of Kate’s domain. Down the way from his apartment he could taste her luxury...five vast bedrooms, five full baths, that lustrous sunroom...the bitch had it aIl, more real estate than even a family of 10 would ever need. Yet here moped Jon, sleeping where the nannies and washerwomen should sleep, his cell phone his best and only friend.
Jon’s buddies said they missed the old Jon, the spry, chipper, always-smiling Jon, the friend who vanished once Kate sunk her fangs into him and chewed off his manhood. Now he was a national joke, an emasculated, kowtowed dupe, mocked by Kate for even daring to breathe — breathe! — during one episode on TLC. Sure, that was part of the shtick that made him a reality star, but reality bites, and Jon was sick of it. He was playing Richard Burton’s George — no, a weaker, spineless George — to Liz Taylor’s Martha from “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” But at least George had the stones to uncage his shotgun and terrify the hideous shrew after the humiliation melted his soul.
It was bitter cold outside, that February night. Jon didn’t care. He didn’t care what Kate thought. He didn’t care what the press thought. And he sure as shit didn’t care what TLC thought.
What was it that Ernest Hemingway said? “A man can be destroyed but not defeated.” Or was that the other way around? Jon didn’t remember. He didn’t read much Hemingway.
The weekend was coming, and Jonathan K. Gosselin, age 31, heartsick and depressed, was determined to become Jon-Boy again.
Let the psychodrama begin.
He Loves the Nightlife
It’s not possible to pinpoint the exact moment when Jon wiggled free from Kate’s clutches and emerged the liberated male. But the cold, dark Friday evening of February 6 marked the first public sighting of him cutting loose in years.
Jon headed west that day in his white Nissan Nismo, a nearly three-hour drive to his mother’s home in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania. He loved his mom, Pamela, and he wanted to help her recover from a broken leg. Somehow, that Friday evening, he wound up uninvited — the word quoted later in the tabloids was “crashed” — at a party tossed by two Juniata College seniors. There he posed, bleary-eyed, for cell phone shots with babes from the girls’ volleyball team, his puffy jowls puffier than normal.
The photos quickly landed on Internet social-networking sites, but they were hardly the smoking gun that could prove infidelity. Jon Gosselin? Adulterer? The media would never buy that. Besides, Kate would tear him two new ones if he dared. Jon could still play the denial card. Celebrities love attention, after aIl, and they often politely pose with pretty women, especially when they were six sheets to the wind.
Of course, the tabloids got wind. The stories erupted the first week in March. Suddenly, this sheepish TV dad, who sat meekly on the TV couch while Kate pummeled him into submission, now was coming across in print like a modern-day Caligula.
The students in that college town thought a celebrity drinking buddy was “so cool,” as they happily described Jon’s sotted shenanigans to the tabs in sordid detail: how his lips frothed as he competed in a sloppy game of “beer pong” with the volleyball babes; how he stumbled from saloon to saloon, eye candy dangling from each arm; how he even let the booze do his talking by blurting to senior Chloe Pott that he just might divorce Kate, you never know.
“He was obliterated,” Pott said, “Juniata girls were flirting with him and he was loving it and having a great time.”
"He was dirty dancing with several of them,” one waitress told The Star, “making out, kissing them on their necks and mouths. I thought it was rather surprising for a father with his wife and so many kids at home to be acting like this. He was aIl over one girl, a long-haired blonde who's nearly 6 feet taIl. He left with several of the girls, including her."
Other tattletales claimed Jon’s mom, broken leg and aIl, joined him on his skirt-chasing soirees, and that Jon participated in orgies with eager, nubile cuties. (It sounded like the hip boots should come out around now, but after what happened later, one cannot be certain.) Barflies placed Jon the following weekend, Valentine’s Day, getting shit-faced at Shortie’s, a taproom in Kutztown, not fine-dining with his wife in quiet candlelight elegance.
In what may be the first bald-faced lie among the hundreds upon hundreds that emerged from the Jon & Kate meltdown, Jon’s camp issued this statement:
“It is certainly hurtful for people to spread rumors and lies about us. It certainly makes me reluctant to live my life like the average person would. This has made it very clear that the simplest innocent gesture — such as taking a picture with a fan, can be taken out of context.
“As you can see on the show, I am not perfect, but I am a part of a loving family and couple.”
There is evidence the Juniata weekend did mark an epiphany of sorts for Jon; he would experience several more over the coming months. Women fell aIl over the plump, affable celebrity dad...hot women, horny women, women 10 years his junior, women who made him feel needed and proud.
That weekend in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, 144 miles from Wernersville, lifted Jon from his cocoon, rejuvenated his adolescent id. Insulated by the demands of his TV show and his harpy wife, Jon never imagined the extent of his fame and glamour.
Ain’t this cool, he thought. Ain’t it cool!
Before the world knew this marriage was kaput
From Kelly Dinardo’s blog, February 16, 2009:
I interviewed Jon and Kate Gosselin for a Valentine's Day story called 8 Love Tips from Jon & Kate. While on the phone with the couple, Kate yelled at Jon for interrupting her, said he wasn't very good at communicating and generally treated him like he was a misbehaving child. After his initial attempts at answering my questions garnered such a response, Jon kept quiet.
The publicist, who was also on the phone, recognized the interview was spiraling out of control and suggested Kate tell me about renewing their vows in Hawaii.
Kate lost it.
She yelled into the phone, "I'm so sick of talking about Hawaii. It was really nice, but it's over and we just keep re-hashing it." Dead. Silence.
I asked a few more questions, trying to coax something, anything out of them. They juggle so much, there must be something they do to keep their marriage afloat.
Kate said, "Marriage is a lot of work and anyone who says it's not is lying." OK, but what do you do to work on it? How do you work on it?
Finally, Kate snapped, "This is stupid. I don't know why you're doing this story. We're not romantic or lovey. We're not that couple."
She's right, I thought. Dead. Story.
Jon and Kate plus seven
The first time Jonathan K. and Katie I. Gosselin made headlines as prospective parents came on April 4, 2004, just weeks before delivery. The Reading Eagle, the local daily newspaper, knew about the pregnancy, but held off on any coverage. Kate insisted on an embargo. It was understandable. Multiple births are risky business. Kate didn’t want to endure public heartbreak if something went terribly wrong. Plus, as everyone knows now, but few knew then, Kate was an utter control freak. In exchange for the paper sitting on the story, Kate promised reporter Yvonne M. Wenger exclusive access once the Gosselin six arrived.
The Eagle editors happily acquiesced. After the Gosselins became media stars, they essentially told the paper to go eat shit.
Wenger’s article, headlined “And babies make — 10,” revealed a tidbit long forgotten in Gosselin lore. Kate initially was pregnant with septuplets, seven budding embryos. The article began:
“Kate I. and Jonathan K. Gosselin of Wyomissing set six tiny outfits side by side and told their 3-year-old twin daughters that soon each outfit would be filled with a baby.
“Usually the couple hold up six fingers to show the girls, Madelyn and Cara, how many babies will join the family. But the clothing demonstration made Madelyn’s eyes widen. ‘She finally got it,’ her mother said. ‘Although the girls now realize it, their parents still are having a hard time visualizing what it will mean to have sextuplets.’ Kate describes hearing the news that she was pregnant and how she began shaking as the doctor began counting the number of fetuses ‘five...six..seven.’
" ‘The doctor kept counting,’ Kate said. ‘I started crying at five. And at six, I was shaking.’ Jonathan said, ‘I was on the floor.’ ‘You were not on the floor,’ Kate said, laughing. The couple, who will be married five years in June, used fertility drugs to conceive, the same as they had with the twins. They wanted a third child, but doctors found seven heartbeats.
“‘Everyone was pretty flabbergasted,’ Kate said. After about five weeks, the couple learned that they had lost one baby, whose undeveloped body was absorbed back into Kate’s womb. ‘I’ll never forget,’ Kate said. The doctor, whose identity the Gosselins did not reveal, gave the couple a choice of aborting some of the fetuses because the pregnancy is risky. ‘We don’t choose reduction,’ she said emphatically. ‘I don’t agree with abortion at all.’”
‘God is the creator and taker of life,’ Jonathan said.
That’s all mushy and gushy, but people still asked more sinister questions.
Was any doctor complicit in putting Kate through such a risky pregnancy in violation of accepted medical practice?
And the $64,000 thousand dollar question — strike that, the $200 million question, since that’s the number tossed around as TLC’s take from the show — was Kate actually eager to give birth to multiples all along, the more the merrier, so she could make money off the children and ditch her dead-end job as a nurse at Reading Hospital, where persons who worked with her said she was roundly despised?
Certainly if a doctor had implanted Kate with seven embryos, that would be dubious medical practice at best. But Kate did not use in-vitro fertilization, the implanting of embryos, but an alternative known as intrauterine insemination, or IUI.
Here’s how Kate herself explained it in a Q&A on the family site:
“Yes, we used IUI, which is very different from IVF. IUI is intrauterine insemination where you take meds, are monitored via ultrasound and then your husband’s contribution is placed via catheter. There are no eggs removed or put back as with IVF. So, we were truly unaware that there were 7 possible babies in there on the day that our procedure was done or I can assure you, we would not have gone through with it!! (We were told that there were 3 with a possibility of 4 which was, by my doctor, considered excellent to proceed.”
No problem there. And IUI does not by itself increase the likelihood of multiples...unless the woman was taking fertility drugs. Then, all bets are off.
Here’s how it was explained on the website called In Gender:
“The major risk of IUI today is that of multiple pregnancy. Since the patient is being super-ovulated, more than one egg may get fertilized, resulting in twins or even triplets or quadruplets. Because the doctor cannot precisely control how many follicles will grow or rupture, the risk of a multiple pregnancy is actually even more after IUI rather than IVF. In fact, most of the infamous cases of high-order multiple births (such as sextuplets and octuplets) have occurred after IUI. If you grow too many follicles, you may choose to cancel the cycle. Some clinics can also offer you the option of saving the cycle by converting it to IVF. This can be a cost-effective option, since it allows you to make good use of the eggs you have grown.”
By law, any contact between Kate and her doctors are privileged communications, so any observations by third parties would be pure speculation. But Jon himself, whether you can believe him or not, and usually you cannot, told confidants the abnormal litter was part of Kate’s grand plan. Jon said he never wanted to have the sextuplets in the first place, not six. He wanted another child, maybe two. He tried to talk Kate out of it, but she wouldn’t listen, certainly not to her kept boy. She had everything planned already, how she wanted to do a TV show about a large family, Jon thought.
Kate had a plan. And, damn, didn’t it work.
Jon, the octopus
Everybody knows Kate was full of herself. But Jon?
His reputation didn’t sink into the sewer until July 2009, but witnesses claim they saw a blowhard even before the sextuplets were born.
One Shillington woman said she was working part-time as a bartender at a private club in Wyomissing, Jon’s hometown, right after the first Reading Eagle article was published and Kate was in bed rest.
Jon bounded around at the party, bragging about how he was going to be the father of six babies and how he and Kate would "raise them without any help." The bartender found him extremely annoying, a jackass on two legs. What did you do to make this happen, she thought. Put some sperm in a cup?
Jon wandered over to the bar and bragged, "Other families have had sextuplets, but we're going to be the first ones to raise them on our own."
That did it.
"How many hands do you have?” she roared. “Eight? If you don't have eight hands how are you going to handle eight kids."
Jon slid away, beer in hand. He did not talk to her again for the rest of the day.
The community lends a hand
The swag began pouring in. Kate and the kids had not even returned home from the hospital.
The Reading Eagle reported that Kim Shrom of nearby Spring Township recruited an army of some 100 helpers to renovate the Gosselins’ Wyomissing home, train volunteers as nannies, provide maid service, and assist in ways that would only be limited by Kate’s imagination.
The family would require a serious commitment from those devoted souls, and the Gosselins would need at least one helper at all times, Shrom told the paper.
"They will be volunteers, but this will be very much a real job," Shrom said. “The number of people volunteering and making donations has been overwhelming.
"I believe God has moved them to donate these things."
Kate liked what she heard.
The volunteers included local residents, parishioners of Calvary Bible Fellowship in Lower Heidelberg Township, and several Wyomissing school teachers who pitched in over the summer.
Once the work was complete, the Gosselins showed their gratitude by quitting the church and joining another.
Meanwhile, the Giant supermarket where Kate enjoyed shopping donated $5,000 in gift cards. Outside the downtown Wernersville ice-cream stand last July, a woman from nearby Mohnton told us she was behind Kate in line at the Giant shortly after the tups’ birth.
“She was the most horrible person,” the woman told us. “She had coupons for everything. If the cashier questioned a coupon, somebody had to run around and check on it while we waited. And she didn't pay with cash. Never. She used gift certificates that people gave her.”
And, of course, Kate never had to carry her groceries far. Giant reserved a special spot right out in front, with a sign saying “Gosselin Goslings.”
"The space will be there for them as long as they need it," gleamed Denny Hopkins, Giant’s vice president of advertising and public relations. "We are thrilled to be able to help them."
The Mohnton woman said Kate relished the perk: “If anybody parked in it, Kate would call the manager and they had to move the car."
The plot thickens
Despite Kate’s televised grumblings over the years about how the pests with the press mangled her private life, how she made a big to-do over turning the celebrity magazine covers backward while shopping with her kids at Target, the private Kate was much more crafty from the git-go.
One insider said, “I've sat at the table with them, when Kate would say, ‘Why don't you call the photographers and say we're going to be going here for dinner?’ They put on this act, Jon and Kate, like our whole life is so exposed, that we just want to live our life and raise our kids. That's a load of crap.
“I can tell you, definitely, that's the way they operate. When it comes down to the nitty-gritty and they can get more money out of it, that's the way they operate.”
Then there was the list. A handwritten list we learned about, itemizing how the couple might pay the bills pimping their sextuplets, drafted long before the Gosselin eight were a glimmer on TLC’s ratings radar.
A book deal, a kiddie clothing line...
Kate had it all figured out. She just needed to be sure that others didn’t know she had it all figured out.
Those damn bloggers
You had to hand it to Katezilla. When someone dissed her, she knew how to strike back. Hard.
Dana Hoffman got the backhand treatment a few days before the tups dropped.
Dana was a blogger at the Reading Eagle, Jon and Kate’s hometown newspaper. Dana was a mother of three herself, and she grew incredibly annoyed witnessing Kate’s scrounging for charity on a global scale. Through mere coincidence, we were working at the paper alongside Dana at the time, supervising the paper’s blog network, and we enjoyed the opportunity to witness the wrath of Kate firsthand.
On May 6, 2005, Dana filed this dispatch:
“I don't even know where to begin about the Gosselin family.
“I've frankly had enough. In the front-page story in today's Reading Eagle, the mother Kate used, to quote the story, ‘a flurry of adjectives to describe the past year — exhausting, strange, surreal, challenging and scary.’
"Not one of those words even comes close to being positive. Then, almost as if she realized that just a second too late, she added, ‘Did I say exciting?’
“Later on, she does say, ‘Look at those beautiful faces, how can't you keep going? They're awesome.’
“So I guess it isn't all torture.
“This family has had an endless outpouring of volunteer hours, money and donations both monetary and of necessary items. But still they ask for more.
“Training additional volunteers to help is apparently too much work so they are looking for a $25,000 donation to extend the use of a part-time nurse.
“And by saying you are ‘praying’ for something doesn't make it any more holy than it is ... looking for free handouts to be able to manage a life that YOU created. And for that matter, don't seem to be too happy about.
“The babies eat donated food and sleep in donated cribs. They stay dry in donated diapers.
“The Gosselins seem content to allow everyone else, and even have come to expect everyone else, to pick up the tab for what they knew would be a very high-cost lifestyle choice. The father, Jonathan, didn't even have a job for much of the past year.
“The Gosselins used fertility drugs to have their twin daughters, now 4. They again used the drugs to conceive the sextuplets. They had a choice. This wasn’t a natural act, something they could not have controlled.
“By saying they didn’t want to reduce the number of children, saying it goes against their beliefs, how do they justify using fertility drugs to achieve such a number in the first place? How is using fertility drugs considered God's will?
“And yet the donations kept pouring in. They received a mind-numbing amount of support yet she says she is "praying for just one more year" of help.
“I have three children, by choice. To support those three children and have a lifestyle we can be happy about, my husband and I work full-time and he has freelancing on the side which equates to more than a part-time job. The Gosselins are planning to move to Harrisburg to be closer to Jonathan's job. What about the house they are now in?
“The one that was renovated by volunteers, using donated money, that made their house livable for 10 people?
“Maybe they should stop worrying so much about where the next handout is coming from, and instead concentrate on their healthy, hopefully happy, children, and be tremendously thankful for what they have received and continue to receive.”
A few more blog entries followed, including this one on August 9:
“According to a post on their website dated yesterday, the Gosselins finally have their van. And they bought it themselves!
“I am wondering if they felt a sense of pride after buying it, or disappointment that their prayers for a van to miraculously appear in front of their remodeled home weren't answered.
“As it turns out, someone pointed out to me that on their 'wish list' they still list a 15-passenger van. Last time I did the math (and who knows, something else could have happened since then. They say the Lord works in mysterious ways ...) there were 10 of them.
“Ohhh ... the other five seats may be for the nanny, the nurse, the cook and whoever else they may need to raise their children with/for them.”
Kate had read enough. She telephoned William Flippin, the publisher of the newspaper, and essentially said that Dana Hoffman was taking food out of the mouths of her babies. Instead of telling Kate to buzz off, Flippin ordered the bloggers — every one in the paper’s stable — to lay off Berks County’s new first family.
Thus, an embargo went into effect. No more blogging about what cheesy bunco artists these Gosselins were.
But the entries already posted did not come down. Nor the comments. Hundreds of them, linked from various anti-Gosselin sites that made Dana’s blog entries among the best-read stories at the Reading Eagle website for years to come. These gems remain:
“Kate is an entitled little twit who had probably had her hand out since the day she was born. She is nasty to her doormat husband and her poor kids will one day be in therapy to deal with the aftereffects of being raised by a NARCISSISTIC MOTHER.”
“She is toxic, mean, and a ‘taker.’ And do not bring up how "No one could do what she's doing" — she has 8 kids. People have and have had more than that (some unfortunately with disabilities, even) and done just fine without handouts. People rise to the occasion when it's necessary.”
“Were any of us handed that situation (after knowing full-well the chances of such a thing after the medical procedure they had done...oh and the fact that she's a NURSE and could figure this stuff out), we too would just put on our Big Girl Panties and deal. I'm tired of Jon and Hate and feel sorry for the kids!!”
“I just read the laughable story in the paper. It seems like the only one of them with any sense is the husband. He managed to find a job that keeps him away from this kook for 12 hours each day. Something tells me he'll be putting in for overtime on a regular basis.”
“You're a mother of eight Kate and you need a professional nurse to tell you that your children have a diaper rash or a fever??? That's part of the deal Kate. You have to be hands on with children and pay attention to the signs that they give you. Didn't God tell you that when he told you you should have eight children? He must have left that part out. God's funny sometimes.”
“I guess now you're going to have to do what the rest of us do - LEARN HOW TO BE A GOOD PARENT AND TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR YOUR ACTIONS. You're vacation is almost over. Now stop whining and do your job as a parent.”
“If you find that this course of action doesn't suit you, then please respond to this post and contact me and I will give you the $25,000. I can't take hearing about this anymore.”
Jon took a hit, too:
“Jonathan, as a West Reading resident who attended Wyomissing and as a former patient of your dentist father, I say this: You and your wife get a job and quit whining!!! My father drove a fork lift for a living and we never got any handouts. Get a clue and a life please and spare us all!!”
Misspellings be damned:
“Never in my life has a subject made me so angrey!!
“Having eight children was their choice. Was two not enough?! "Its me with eight children which is not fair" Not fair!!! I'll tell you whats not fair, there are poeple out there living with alone with illness and disabilites, thats not fair. There are poeple out there who really need help and they do not get it, thats not fair. I workes for years as a private health care provider and I have seen these things close up. This women does not need hand outs. This woman does not need a nurse. This woman needs to stop asking everyone else to help raise her kids and start being a mother and doing the job herself.She wanted to use fertility drugs, she wanted to have 8 babies, shes needs to take responsibility for her decisions.
“What child does not have diaper rash or gets a fever? I have a baby and those are common things that go along with the game. Maybe instead of asking the state for hand outs, she should go back to church and ask her God for help to become a more responsible parent”
There are hundreds more. They live on in the eternity that is cyberspace.
Beggars can be choosers
The SixGosselins.com legendary website, jaw-dropping in its audacity, was pulled offline last autumn. Code even was inserted to block cached pages from the Internet Archives.
Luckily, some bloggers preserved the essence of the “Prayer List,” a perpetual-motion mooching machine.
A sample:
How can I donate?
A. Monetary donations can be made payable to:
Gosselin Sextuplet Fund
(address redacted).
Wyomissing PA 19610
If you feel led to contribute to the tuition for pre-school, please add pre-school to the memo line.
6-9 months and 9-12 month winter one piece outfits for boys and girls
15 passenger van
Gift cards to WalMart or Target for our very basic needs. (paper-towels, laundry detergent, fabric softener, Playtex bottle liner drop-ins)
6 New Infant Cars Seats
New Cribs
Clothing in good condition for infants 3 months and up
Diapers and formula
Baby swings
2 Collapsable Strollers for 3 babies each
Regarding that 15-passenger van, a source close to Jon claims a friend of the family donated a mere 14-passenger van. Kate hated it, of course. She never once thanked him and "traded it in because she hated the color burgundy."
When the sextuplets were six months old, family members, friends and neighbors received a letter containing the Gosselins’ account number with the electric company, in case anyone wanted to spring for the utility bill.
But that “Prayer List” is nothing next to the swag the family sucked in once the TLC trucks rolled into town and “Jon & Kate” episodes got built around the family’s newest handout. A family source said that while she was pregnant with the sextuplets, Kate grew “obsessed” with how many goodies the famed McCaughey septuplets received in 1997.
A rundown of Jon and Kate’s haul, plus estimated costs:
Free beds
Front-loader washing machines
New furniture
Free solar panels for "Going Green" episode
Clothes from Gymboree and Gap
Mady & Cara birthday at American Girl Place (2 dolls and birthday package for 2 adults & 2 kids): $710
Trip to Florida Keys for Jon's 30th birthday
Tickets to Dutch Wonderland amusement park: $309.50
1/2 an organic cow from Natural Acres Farm: $1,395.00
Tickets to Philadelphia Zoo: $104.00
Tickets to WaIt Disney World: $654.00 per day
Utah house rental (estimate: $5,000), ski lift tickets $72 for six days), ski school lessons ($140 per child)
Upright piano, which they got rid of when they moved into their $1.1 million home : $5,550-$6,350
Violin: $100-$300
Old house recarpeted
Crayola Factory Tour: $90.00
Teeth Whitening (for Jon & Kate): $1,310 (average price for 2 adults)
Hair plugs (Jon): $5,200 (average cost)
Sesame Street Place tickets: $509.50
Day with Thomas the Tank Engine: $180.00
Beach trip to North Carolina, house rental, Jeep tour
Sight & Sound Christian theatre tickets: $236.00
SkyBox at Phillies game
LegoLand tickets: $550.00
San Diego Zoo tickets: $278.00
Grand Wailea Resort (Hawaii) for 2008 vow renewaI: Suites range from $725-$1,080 per night.
2 purebred German Shepherd puppies: $1,000-$3,000 per dog
Please Touch Museum tickets: $150.00
Giants grocery store: $5,000 in gift cards and a year's supply of diapers.
"Thank you to all our wonderful, dependable and dedicated volunteers. If it wasn't for all of you who knows where we would be.
Wait! There’s more!
Thank you to Willow Street Pictures for the most beautiful photographs ever taken of our family, thanks Darren.
6 Infant Cars Seats and 2 Toddler Car Seats - Thank you Graco
1 Year supply of diapers, $5K in groceries, Parking space - Thank you Giant Foods
6 High Chairs, 6 Bouncers, 2 Prototype triplet strollers - Thank you Chicco
6 Cribs that turn into beds and layette clothing - Thank you Delta Manufacturing
1 Year supply of baby food, custom engraved spoons, bibs, onesies and $5K Gerber certificates to be used at Giant Foods - Thank you Gerber
Clothing - Thank you Carter's
6 month supply of Huggies diapers for each baby - Thank you Kimberly Clark
Free photo's and detergent - Thank you Sam's Club
Hershey's Chocolate Baby Announcements - Thank you Carson Industries
Desitin - Thank you Pfizer
Clothing - Thank you Ann Geddes Clothing
Clothing and toys - Thank you Boscov's
We would like to sincerely thank all of you for your prayers, support and donations. "
(As of this writing the Gosselin site is back up, although Google took notice that accessing it can infect your computer with malware. It’s clunky to navigate; not all the kinks work. But if you have a Mac, you should be OK.)
“Aunt Julie,” the sister of Jodi Kreider, shared her own distaste on a blog post, since pulled, from June 2008:
“There was a huge outpouring of generosity from their community. Family and friends stepped up and gave money, offered time, tried to help in every way imaginable. Disbelief set in a few months later. We found out (by their own admission) that all along, they had a rather large sum of money in their savings account. Let's just say it was more than I made in a year working full time when I came out of nursing school.
“They had been giving everyone this story of being financially destitute, when all along, a very wealthy family member was supporting them, and they were sitting on a large sum of money. When they were questioned, their response was along the lines that they shouldn't have to use their own money to support their family. It was society's obligation. ‘We have 8 kids!!’
“I actually hadn't even thought about any of that until I heard the story they were telling at the churches. The story wasn't even entirely true; I know that from my own experience. I tried to understand why they would tell such a story and lead people to believe that was still the way they were living. Had they run that story over in their minds so much that they began to believe it? I also knew there were college funds set up for the kids. Were they lying about that too?
“To top it all off, I knew that part of their contract with the network included being paid for every ‘appearance’. Let's just say for about 3-4 ‘appearances’, they could make as much as the average person makes in a year. Did they let anyone at the churches know that? So I picture kind, generous people, sitting in a church, listening to tales of financial hardship, led to believe it's still this way, offering plates being passed and people (who really can't afford it) digging deep into their pockets, giving money to a family who probably makes well more than twice as much money as they do— for just the show. I'm not even including the freebies and all of the money they get from product endorsements and appearances. I find that disturbing!
“Why mislead good people? Speak at the churches, collect your money from the network, promote your show, but don't be dishonest. Don't tell people your kids don't have a college fund, and don't continue to tell tales of being financially destitute. I can hear it now, ‘Who am I to say no?’ It's my opinion that it's their obligation to tell the truth and stop collecting love offerings.”
Jon and Kate put it another way on their website:
“We ask others to please pray for us as we go through terrible financial and family hardships. It is hard to let people into our personal lives but we are praying that people could walk in our shoes for one day and understand that God has given us these children and we are responsible to raise them the best we can. Please pray that Kate and I can do this with help of all our awesome volunteers that God has provided us. Amen.”
Something Wiki this way comes
Team Gosselin may have been able to put a muzzle on Dana Hoffman, but her blog posts remained, safe from outside manipulation. Not so at Answers.com, a.k.a. WikiAnswers, where the volunteer supervisor for the Jon and Kate section noticed some strange edits. (WikiAnswers works much like Wikipedia, where contributors can amend entries, with some degree of trustworthiness assumed.)
You can see why Kate apologists might mobilize their forces when these types of exchanges land online:
Question: “Why is Kate Gosselin estranged from her parents?”
Answer: “Many people know exactly why Kate is estranged from her parents. Her dad had the members of his church pull together to help Jon and Kate when she had the sextuplets. They donated clothes and cribs, among other things. Kate rejected the cribs as she only wanted NEW, MATCHING ones, not gently used. Also, she told her dad she only wanted CASH. Kenton Kreider could not go back to his church members and tell them his daughter refused their overwhelming generosity and would accept only cash. So, Kate cut her mom and dad out of the sextuplets' lives. They are estranged. So, when Kate says on the show, ‘They don't know how to help us,’ what she means is that she did not get the cold, hard cash she insisted on. Jon and Kate's PR people can spin it anyway they like, but the reality is that Kate cut her parents out of her lives because of money. Kate, a self proclaimed ‘devout Christian’ should know the "money is the root of all evil."
The strange edits started turning up on Answers.com in 2008, before the paparazzi and tabloid hoopla, suggesting this was an inside job to manipulate the propaganda.
“There was a group of contributors that were clearly trying to control information, hide answers, and fix things,” the Answers supervisor noted. “It was all very odd, and as I started to scratch the surface. I discovered the Gosselin blog world, and learned that things were not as they seemed.”
Some of the edits were comically blatant, such as turning the first answer for “What are opinions of Kate Gosselin’s parents” from “The whole family is screwed up” into “They’re nice people. Who cares?” In fact, “They’re nice people. Who cares?” became a standard swap whenever someone said wrote something nasty about Berks County’s first family.
As the contributors figured out they couldn't remove the answers entirely, they started to try to hide the material from search engines by editing questions, such as changing a question about Jon and Kate into "Is George W. Bush the worst president in history?"
My baby she wrote me a letter
When Kate didn’t have friends, neighbors or church volunteers caring for the litter, jumping to attention whenever Kate snapped her fingers, mommy dearest enjoyed the services of a full-time nurse to aid in maternal duties.
And who paid for that? Not Kate, that’s for sure. The nurse was salaried by the state of Pennsylvania for one solid year. Many parents raising their kids on their own knew that Kate thought her shit was ice cream. But why should taxpayers have to pay to clean up the Gosselin brood’s shit, instead of Kate?
One fed-up lady from Ruscombmanor Township wrote a letter to the editor that the Reading Eagle published in May 2006, after Kate filed an appeal challenging the end of her state-supported nursing service:
“How can Kate Gosselin dare to say that it is unfair to expect her to take care of her own children. What is unfair is that for the past year my tax dollars have gone to pay for a nurse to help her care for her children.
“The Gosselins have had more than enough taxpayer help. It is past time for them to take care of their own family.
“Gosselin is a registered nurse and should be better able to care for her children than most mothers who aren’t fortunate enough to have her knowledge. This is just another case of people not taking responsibility for themselves. It is up to the Gosselins to provide for their family, and since they chose to have eight children, they should have given some thought beforehand to how they could provide for them, not the already overburdened taxpayer.”
"‘She's fine-tuned and I trust her,’ Kate Gosselin blubbered about her departing nurse, Angie Krall.
"She's as good as a parent in this home."
No one disputed that final point.
Who’s the boss?
Jon’s supervisor at Style Craft Corp., a custom cabinetry business in Lancaster County, was David Rothermel. But Jon’s real boss, as Rothermel saw it, was cold-hearted Kate.
“She used to give him only $5 to spend,” Rothermel blabbed, “and if he was out and needed more money, she would give him hell."
Once during her pregnancy, Rothermel remembered Kate storming into Jon’s office, blowing her stack because Jon’s father failed to deliver her lunch.
The bad blood between Jon and Rothermel ran deep. During Jon and Kate’s speaking engagements, they would single out Rothermel as the man who “did not want to insure [Jon] … they let him go.” Their contention was that Jon’s employment was terminated because Rothermel was too cheap to pay for health care for the sextuplets.
As with many words that drip from the Gosselins’ mouths, their version of events is not backed by solid evidence.
Jon filed a claim for unemployment benefits after his dismissal, and investigators determined he improperly worked a side job on company time. Rothermel said Jon was fired for abusing company resources by working the phones and scouring the Internet on a ”quest” for freebies, all the while boasting that he would never have to work again.
In a sense, he may have been right.
Jon Gosselin suffered for your sins
These were postings by Jon from way back when, eventually scrubbed online, but available for your enjoyment through the magic of Internet archiving, reprinted here with Internet shorthand, typos and all.
Jon talked about how the taxman cometh when one receives donated labor, kvetched about the woes of owning a big bad house, offered friendly advice to the parents of the Harris sextuplets, and displayed a prescient foreknowledge of how the nouveau riche can’t adequately manage their finances.
What Triplet Connection doesn't want you to see
Wellcome to Pulled On TC. These are posts that have been pulled from TC for your enjoyment. What is pulled is never gone...
The only way it really works is if the labor and material are donated to you by a nonprofit company. (ie. church, fire company, anyone with a tax id #) Then anyone who donates can write off the donation. I am not an accountant but trust me this is something I have learned in the last year. Normal people are not accustomed to instant fame and fortune. Yes it is nice to be in the spotlight for alittle while, but let me tell you something if you want privacy ever again FORGET IT!!!! Everyone knows where you live and that scares me.
Daddyof8
TWIN GIRLS 10/08/2000
SEXTUPLETS BBB GGG 05/10/2004
Don't get me wrong. I loved the house. But as a father of 8 kids 4 year old twins GG and 10 month old sextuplets BBB GGG it is a big change in the monthly bills from 2000 sq. ft to 5200 sq.ft. I wonder what the utilities are a month. Here they went from mortgage free (community donated $ to pay off mortgage) to a reaccessment of $2 million house. Maybe 5200 sq. ft is too much. If it were me I would be worried about paying my new bills. Also we were on a tv show that supposedly donated all the building materials then why did I get a 1099-misc income form for $59000 from NBC. Interesting? I pray and hope ABC doesn't do the samething to the Harrises. Otherwise I am happy for them. I know how much work it is and I know what it is like to lose your income. After we found our we were having six kids my employer told me that he couldn't afford our insurance and he fired me. I tried to fight in court but in PA "fire at will" is legal. So I was unemployed for 8 months. You might ask "I thought insurance isn't based upon qunatity of kids?" It depends on the policy. But employers might think of down the road problems. These kids could all be high risk. So all in all CONGRADULATIONS HARRIS FAMILY!!!!!!! Just be careful. Take it day by day or moment by moment. GOD will take care of you!!!
Daddyof8
Jonathan Gosselin
Who do you think owns 20/20 and primetime? Lookup the major Cable networks Timewerner and Comcast. I am telling you it is a racket. We all watch. Those people should get a percentage of the ratings now that would be something. They don't see a penny of the ratings for the show. It is a way bigger headache then most of us think. And if they complained about anything they would be ungreatful, RIGHT?
EXACTLY - what say do they have? It is like winning the lottery no one teaches who how to manange that large amount of money. That is why those people end up poorer than what they started out at. You can have all the fancy gadgets in the world but you are still going to have to raise those kids. GOD has taught us to rely on him and him only. No matter what we are human and humans are not as reliable as you think. God will NEVER let you down. "Ask and you shall receive." -"Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find;
knock, and it shall be opened unto you: For every one that
asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him
that knocketh it shall be opened...If ye then, being evil,
know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much
more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things
to them that ask him?"
Matthew -8, 11, KJV
"And all things, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer,
believing, ye shall receive."
Matthew 21:22, KJV
Daddyof8
Once upon a time, Jon kept it in his pants