KATE GOSSELIN: HOW SHE FOOLED THE WORLD - THE RISE AND FALL OF A REALITY TV QUEEN (5 page)

The number of births in twin deliveries rose 6 percent for 1999-2000 to 110,670 births - the largest single year rise in several decades.

The number of Triplet Births climbed to 6919, a rise of 13 percent.

Births in quadruplet deliveries increased from 510 to 627 between 1999 and 2000.

The number of quintuplet and other higher order multiples was unchanged at 79.

Since 1980 twin births have risen 62 percent and other higher order multiples births have jumped 470 percent.

This was not good news for Kate, and she knew it. Now she was stuck with “just” twins, like more than 100,000 other parents that year alone.

She did her best to make the most of her situation though. She tried to market her girls from the time they were babies. At less than one year old,
she paraded Mady and Cara Gosselin down Main Street USA (Wyomissing Boulevard, actually) in a decorated “float” during the annual Fourth of July parade and celebration in her new hometown of Wyomissing, PA. Kate, their controlling and masterminding mother, had already put a label on them. They weren’t Mady and Cara Gosselin. They were “The Gosselin Twins!” and “Little Miss Americas!”

The Gosselin name at that time meant as much as the Hoffman name in this area, which was absolutely nothing. So the idea of Kate making a spectacle of herself and her family was laughable to the affluent neighbors she passed by in the parade. But Kate held her daughters up and put them on display. Here they are world … “The Gosselin Twins!” The locals didn’t know what to make of Kate Gosselin, even then.

Kate had headshots taken of the girls, contacted modeling agencies and tried to get them commercial jobs and anything else on television, but there were no takers. “There just was nothing special about a set of twins,” she was told by a local photographer she had contacted.

Even though Kate did not get the Higher Order Multiples she wanted, she would not give up on her plan. These are Kate’s words from Jon and Kate’s earliest website
:

The girls turned one and I started thinking about more children….After all, the girls had been pure fun and I wanted to do it again! But, Jon wasn’t convinced. I prayed for a long time that God would change his mind. It took a long time and a rough experience for both of us for that to happen…In May 2003, we had the opportunity to adopt a newborn in kind of a rare circumstance. Things were moving really fast and we prayed about it and felt that this was not meant to be. Jon and I came to a joint decision that we were not ready to take on such a responsibility at the time. We felt God leading us that way. Jon was amazed that I so willingly “turned down a baby”. It hurt so badly, but I knew we were doing the right thing. I mourned for the better part of a month and it was then that Jon agreed to let us return to try and have another baby. He saw just how badly I wanted to be a mommy again.

This was “not meant to be” because Kate did not want just one more baby. There was more masterminding to be done.

“We were so thrilled we decided to try for just one more,

And ended up with six.”

– Kate Gosselin

This chapter took me more than two years to research and write. I had read the wild speculation about Kate intentionally trying to become pregnant with multiples by an “anonymous blogger” and on several of the “anti-Kate” blogs when I first began my job reporting on the Gosselins,
so I started looking for a big story for
U
S
Weekly
. I had no evidence at the time, and
U
S
Weekly
would never have printed this anyway.

As it turned out, I did find evidence that told a story, and it pointed to Kate’s
biggest lie of all. You hear it so lovingly spoken in the intro to
Jon & Kate Plus Ei8ht
. “We wanted
Just one
more and got six.”

The truth is, Kate never wanted “Just one more” baby. In fact, “she’s disappointed in only having eight.”

In studying Kate Gosselin’s entire body of work – her television shows, print and television interviews, her books, etc. – along with having first-person information about her and having personally watched her in action nearly every day for two years, it is quite clear that she is most definitely not a good actress. Kate delivers the same scripted talking points, over and over, almost verbatim.

But even after all that time watching Kate and listening to her, I was not prepared at all to find out everything I did a
bout Kate’s capacity to deceive, and about how far she would go to achieve her grand plan. What I discovered is that Kate Gosselin deliberately and intentionally got pregnant with two sets of multiples in order to seek fame and fortune.

In the early days of the Gosselin mania, Kate Gosselin repeated, over and over – in interviews, in her books and on her television shows – that she wanted “JUST ONE MORE” baby. “Just” one more. It was always those exact same words, over and over again. “Just one more.” But logic, common sense and evidence make Kate’s claim that she wanted “just one more” baby difficult to believe.

Ask yourself if this makes sense. If you were a young woman, as Kate was at the time, and you easily got pregnant with twins the first time around using Intrauterine Insemination (IUI), and you really, really only wanted JUST ONE MORE baby, why would you go against your doctor’s recommendation to switch to In Vitro Fertilization (IVF)? Why would you go out and find a different doctor who had no problem with giving you IUI again, even though you KNEW the risk of having multiples was much, much greater using this method?

Being so young and having already had twins via IUI, the logical thing to do, if Kate truly wanted JUST ONE MORE baby, would have been to follow her first infertility doctor’s recommendation to use IVF with a single embryo transfer. There would have been no real chance of twins, triplets, or even worse – Higher Order Multiples. If successful, Kate would have gotten JUST ONE MORE baby.

Kate wasn’t a naive, 17-year-old girl who was ignorant about fertility issues. She was a registered labor and delivery nurse with plenty of experience. She was also, by her own admission, a type A planner, scheduler and list maker – and masterminder. Kate knew exactly what she was doing. She didn’t take her first doctor’s advice, because JUST ONE MORE baby was exactly what Kate Gosselin did
NOT
want. So she left that doctor behind. That doctor was no longer on board with Kate’s plan, and Kate wanted nothing more to do with her.

Someone who worked with Kate’s first infertility doctor said that “Kate Gosselin was told by Doctor X to use IVF, and that made her angry. ‘Who is she to tell me what I can and can’t do with my body,’ Kate demanded.”

I’ve met with that person, and a second individual from that doctor’s office, several times in the course of writing this book. In wanting to protect their careers and their own families, they have chosen to remain anonymous.

In Kate’s early drafts of
Multiple Blessings
, she gives the names of her infertility doctors. Strangely, they were omitted from the final version of the book. There is a very logical reason for that: Kate didn’t want people asking questions.

But that’s jumping ahead. Let’s go back to the beginning where this story gets a whole lot worse.

ON THE JOB TRAINING

Kate asked a lot of strange “what-iffy” kind of questions while working briefly as a nurse. “She seemed to have an agenda, but at the time, we had no idea what she was up to,” a former co-worker of Kate’s told me. “Looking back, it makes a lot more sense now. The questions she was asking had nothing to do with her job at the time. She talked about the McCaughey septuplets a lot and how dangerous it must have been for the mother.” “Kate was also very interested in the many different fertility medications that were out there, and what each one did, even though we weren’t a fertility clinic. It just seemed strange. She already knew everything there was to know about infertility by the sound of her, but she seemed to be looking for reinforcement and first-hand stories.”

So, how did Kate end up with six babies when she wanted
just one more
? Here is the answer: she found a doctor who didn’t ask questions, and she manipulated the entire infertility process to get the results she wanted. In
Multiple Blessings
, Kate tells us that Jon “finally” agreed to do fertility treatments again so Kate dove for the phone and made an appointment with a new fertility doctor closer to home, in Wyomissing, PA. She told us that she drove an hour each way with the first fertility doctor and of course it was a very successful experience, but she felt that the convenience of seeing a doctor closer to home made much more sense now, because she had two two-year-olds at home.

That paragraph is loaded with “Kate speak” and deception. Kate Gosselin is a creature of habit, almost obsessive-compulsively, and she had great success with her first infertility doctor in Allentown, PA, who gave her perfectly healthy twin girls. So the thought of Kate not going back to this same doctor because it was an inconvenient drive is so over-the-top false that my head spun when I read it.

Remember, I followed Kate seven days a week for close to two years. I know her habits. She’s as hard to figure out as a third-grader. Kate drove an hour each way to get her hair styled in Harrisburg. She drove almost an hour each way to go to Whole Foods for a bag of groceries. She drove an hour each way to go shopping at the Park City Mall in Lancaster (all while her now EIGHT busy kids were at home with strangers), so the idea that she wouldn’t drive an hour to see her infertility specialist, the most important person in the world to someone who was trying to get pregnant, and who gave Kate her beautiful twins, is absolutely, positively, preposterous. Period. Nothing could be further from the truth. Kate Gosselin would never do that in a million years.

Kate’s second infertility doctor, from Wyomi
ssing, PA, whose practice is less than one mile from my front door, was there when Kate originally went searching for doctors. Why then did Kate pass on him and drive all the way to Allentown in the first place? That’s an easy one. She did so because she thought the Allentown doctor was a more respected and reputable doctor.

Kate did the research. The reason Kate settled on her Wyomissing doctor the second time around was because the Allentown specialist rejected Kate when she returned and wanted that doctor to do IUI again. Her first doctor instructed Kate that it would be irresponsible for her to use IUI again, given her still young age and the fact that she had gotten pregnant so easily the first time around – with twins. She wanted Kate to do IVF with a single embryo transfer to start, and informed her that if this didn’t work, she would agree to IUI. Kate became irate and left the office – for good.

Kate had masterminded her entire plan, and IVF and the thought of having just one more baby was not a part of it. So she ended up settling for the Wyomissing doctor.

Kate realized that the infertility doctor is just a minor player in the whole baby-producing process. Dr. Botti, her maternity doctor,
was the real brains of the operation and someone Kate respects and speaks very highly of, very often. Why do you suppose that Kate never mentions the names of either of her infertility doctors who gave her perfect twins and sextuplets? After all, these doctors were the conduits between God and science, right?

In
Multiple Blessings
, the only mention of Dr. xxxxxxx is that he was her “African Doctor.” I know his name. In fact, I’ve been to his office several times. Wyomissing is a small town. It’s hard to not know a friend of a friend who works anywhere around here, and nurses and staff at a local doctor’s office are no exception. Anyway, Kate found herself a new doctor who would give IUI treatments for her undiagnosed case of PCOS.

Kate
’s doctor gave her injections of a drug called Human Chorionic Gonadotropin, or HCG, which is an ovulation inducer that would help Kate ovulate and release her eggs. Since Kate never really had PCOS in the first place, her eggs were released on their own, so adding injections of HCG to the mix would only serve to release even more eggs for possible fertilization. (For the men or other scientifically challenged: Ovulation occurs when a mature egg is released from the ovary, pushed down the fallopian tube, and is available to be fertilized.)