KATE GOSSELIN: HOW SHE FOOLED THE WORLD - THE RISE AND FALL OF A REALITY TV QUEEN (25 page)

So, you are reading all this, and you may be thinking right about now that, surely, Kate does “give back” though, right? Well I am happy to report that Kate is not completely greedy and cold-hearted after all. Here’s the proof – in her own paraphrased words from her journal – that Kate really does, or at least did at one point, “give back.”

June 2007

Kate was excited about their second yard sale of the season because they had so much to sell. She couldn’t believe the full garage of stuff considering that they just had a yard sale two months ago!!!! They sold six cribs for $300 and six car seats and a lot of other stuff for a profit of $760. Kate was proud to be giving God His ten percent of the proceeds.

We don’t know whether God eventually ever did see His share of those
yard sale profits, but we’ll give Kate the benefit of the doubt here. So let’s see, 10 percent of $760-something is, hold on, carry the …, um, is $76-something. So in 2007, Discovery paid Kate $109,186.90 in show salary alone, plus bonuses, plus they filled her home with free merchandise as far as the eye could see, and she gave God $76. Not bad for God.

In December of 2008, Kate Gosselin, accompanied by her children, a camera crew, Steve Neild, babysitters, and Discovery’s own public relations expert, Laurie Goldberg, traveled to Memphis to film the episode of
Jon & Kate plus Ei8ht
called “Giving Back”.

The stated purpose of the show was a good one. It was to bring awareness to the needs of families with children suffering from cancer. They decided to go to St. Jude Hospital because, as Kate said during the show, it was the closest one to her house in Pennsylvania. (There are actually several children’s pediatric cancer research hospitals in Pennsylvania, but I digress.) But no matter, the point was they were going out of the goodness of their hearts to help sick children.

In the episode, there were a couple of cute scenes where the family first went to a local Kmart to buy presents for the children at St. Jude, and then they returned to their hotel to wrap them. But then, inexplicably, and completely out of character for Kate Gosselin, they broke into a warm and tender,
1-minute and 41-second scene where Kate read her kids a book before bedtime, while they were all cuddled around her on the bed. It was a warm and touching scene straight out of a Disney movie. It was certainly a scene that the Gosselin children didn’t experience with Kate at home.

In this heartwarming scene, Kate said, “We’re gonna read the
Tales of Despereaux
. It’s an adorable story about a little mouse that’s a movie, and we have the book, and I’m slowly but surely reading it to them.” The camera pulled in close on Kate as she read the book aloud
,
and the kids all had Despereaux mouse stuffed dolls, which were prominently displayed.

When she finished the story, Kate
said, “They liked it. It’s a cute little story. He’s a cute little guy, and of course, it helped that they each had a little Despereaux, and they are hysterical to hear them say, where’s my Despereaux? It’s a neat little story.”

The kids were shown carrying their Despereaux dolls throughout the entire episode.

When Kate and the crew arrived at the hospital to see the sick children, they pulled in wagons filled with Kate’s book,
Multiple Blessings
;
Jon & Kate Plus Ei8ht
DVDs; and, you guessed it, a big stack of
The Tale of Despereaux
coloring books to hand out to all. Inside the hospital, they showed a close-up of a Despereaux doll while one of the girls sat coloring at a table. Kate made a point of mentioning the “Despereaux coloring/sticker books, which are adorable.”

After visiting with many sick children and talking to their families, and handing out the books and DVD sets, Kate ended the episode by telling the viewing audience,
“This was
strictly
a trip to raise awareness for this wonderful cause.”

And we viewers ate it up and believed every word of it, and felt warm and fuzzy thinking that it was such a generous thing for Kate to do. I know I felt like that. I had tears in my eyes thinking about the suffering those families were dealing with on a daily basis with their sick children.

But then, my Kate Gosselin
/TLC bullshit sensor went off, and my once-photographic memory flashed back to one of the Gosselin/Discovery contract amendments I had read a few months before. And I got a terrible, queasy feeling in my stomach.

So I dug through my Gosselin archives
and found an amendment to the Talent Agreement for the Gosselin family for Jon & Kate + 8 dated October 22, 2008. The amendment gave permission for the Gosselin family to participate in a third-party promotion for, yes, “The Tales of Despereaux”. The promotion coincided with Universal Pictures’ theatrical release of the movie.

Wording
from Paragraph 13,
Third Party Promotional Uses of Name and Likeness,
stated that the family granted the Company permission to create custom marketing spots, which incorporated footage from the show and featured one or more family members, to be used for a tie-in with the Program and was intended to be telecast somewhere around December 15, 2008. The Amendment stated that the family was to be paid $10,000 for its participation in connection with the Despereaux marketing spots.

There is no way to sugarcoat this. The “Giving Back” episode of
Jon & Kate Plus Ei8ht
, which Kate made a point of telling us was “strictly a trip to raise awareness for this wonderful cause,” had nothing to do with Kate or the Gosselin family giving anything back to anyone. There was nothing altruistic about it on Kate’s part. It was a business arrangement and an elaborate lie, plain and simple; nothing more than a paid commercial for a movie
.
For her part in the deception, Kate was paid an additional $10,000, on top of the $22,500, plus expenses, that she was already getting paid just to film the episode. It is not out of bounds to wonder if Kate would have even agreed to go on this trip to “give back” if she had not been paid to do so. I hope the episode at least did some good in bringing attention to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

So in light of the St. Jude “Giving Back” episode, and Kate’s less than charitable behavior with the yard sales and consignment shop visits, how could Discovery/TLC possibly expect anyone to buy into their new, 2011, second season promotion of
Kate Plus Ei8ht
, where they visited a food bank, curiously enough, also in Tennessee, and hinted at changes in the show’s format that season, where they were going to be doing more on Kate “giving back?”

Ron Bonacci, Food City vice president of marketing, said “Gosselin’s visit is part of an initiative she plans to spell out in an upcoming season of the show, where she will go to different parts of the country volunteering her time for charities.”

Kate said the kids were on spring break from school and the visit to the food bank was the
“beginning of the Gosselin give back.”
She said the kids had experienced so many things through the show that it was “time we take the chance to help others.” These are excerpts from Kate’s interview at the Second Harvest Food Bank in Tennessee.

“Um, to be very honest, we’ve had a few days where we’ve you know, learned about
things that we didn’t know about, you know, food banks and feeding people at homeless shelters
, and so today we’re here collecting food, and just, you know, here to greet people and the kids are lining up downstairs and they’re taking their turns collecting the food and putting it in the boxes behind us, and they are having a great time, like, we make a game of it, and it’s really exciting to see, um, you know, the Gosselin family being able to pull together, to help, um, different communities and we’re really glad to be here.

“… beyond that, it’s helping, giving back and being aware,
I am guilty of hearing that food banks are collecting food and you kind of, let it go in one ear and out the other
, and, um, we’re here, um, not to show, you know, oh look what the Gosselins did, you know, good deeds on TV, that’s not our aim, our aim is to bring awareness, and to help other people to think, oh, food bank, people need food, there are kids who don’t have breakfast, lunch or dinner, and so we need to give.

“Well, I told the kids this is our first, you know, we, we did a St. Jude’s episode and a whole learning experience, um, uh, for St. Jude’s a few years ago, here in Tennessee actually, and it’s funny that we’re back here again, but the thing is, I said to the kids, this is oooonly the beginning for us, so, um, it’s gonna be the beginning of the Gosselin give back, I mean, it’s, it was interesting and very exciting for me to see that they can form an assembly line and truly help, I mean, it wasn’t like, you know, we were, you know, changing anything to, to make them able to help, they’re downstairs collecting food and, and they did the, the serving food and the, um, assembly line for the kids backpacks, so they’re able to make a difference and um,
I told em, this is only the beginning.”

By this time, Kate’s public image, as well as her show’s ratings, were taking a beating, and she was most certainly not TLC’s star anymore. So Discovery went into full damage-control mode, trying desperately to rehab Kate’s tarnished image.

The last few seasons of
Jon & Kate Plus Ei8ht
, and then her new show,
Kate Plus Ei8ht
, had turned into nothing but damage control. Their couch interview sessions were always about answering the public criticism that they read online every day. They will deny that, of course, but it was obvious to anyone who had been following the Gosselin saga online. Without fail, they always seemed to address, either on the interview couch or with Kate giving a television interview somewhere else, the rumors and criticism that they were receiving in the public. It’s tacky, and once people caught on a little bit more, it became blatantly obvious. When people began saying Kate doesn’t do her own grocery shopping, TLC would film Kate at the supermarket with all eight kids to prove them wrong, etc.

It’s funny how Kate now equates her show, not to the kids living their normal lives at home and the camera crew filming, but to “um, the traveling the world and seeing the sights.” She doesn’t even realize
that that’s a big reason people stopped watching; because the show was no longer about a normal family struggling to raise eight children. It had turned into the escapades of a rich, spoiled brat of a woman, being chauffeured first-class around the globe, staying at four-star hotels and resorts, living the high life – during a recession – all at the expense of her eight children. The public just couldn’t relate anymore.

Undaunted in my search to find some sign of Kate’s charitable, giving
nature; I pressed on looking for evidence. In December of 2011, right after Christmas, I was looking through some of the personal belongings Kate had discarded, and I came across some paperwork from her children’s school – you know, the very expensive private school that gave her kids an almost free ride on the huge tuition bill. The paperwork included applications and invitations for events where she or family members could have become involved in school activities with or for her kids, and things she could have done to help raise funds for her children’s school.

But even the school was not worthy of Kate Gosselin’s charity. She simply threw these things in the garbage with the rest of the “junk mail.” These are some of the things I found in Kate’s trash:

THE EXCELLENCE FUND

Kid’s school holiday fundraiser.

Opened and thrown in the trash, complete with pledge card and envelope.

RUN FOR FITNESS APPLICATION

Opened and thrown in the trash, application form untouched.

The Run for Fitness was a chance for Kate to be with Cara for a school RUNNING event on September 30, 2011 at the school. It was a ½ mile run. Kate tells us all the time via Twitter that Cara is a runner and they run together. What could be more perfect than the two of them running together to help their own school raise money?

GRANDPARENT’S DAY

“Dear Lower School Families,

Grandparent/Grandfriend’s Day was one of the most successful lower school events last year. This special day provides grandparents the opportunity to spend some time with their grandchild(ren) at school. This year G Day has been set for Tuesday, November 22, 2011.”

Opened and thrown in the trash, complete with the invitation to send to the kids’ grandparents.

FLOWER POWER FUNDRAISING

Order and Payment collection envelope, and order form and product catalog, with the Gosselin kids’ names on them, thrown in the trash without any writing on them. Never used.

So scratch involvement with the school off the give-back list.

But wait! It turns out Kate did give something back to you, the viewers, for all your years of support and your contributions to her show’s ratings. When a fan tweeted her in September of 2011 after her last
People
magazine cover hit the newsstands, she responded: