Teen Mom Confidential: Secrets & Scandals From MTV's Most Controversial Shows (3 page)

Once a popular cheerleader, country girl Leah is now the mother of twin girls Aliannah and Aleeah (b. December 16, 2009). A graduate of Herbert Hoover High School near Charleston, West Virginia, Leah got pregnant on prom night - the first time she had sex with her boyfriend of one month, Corey Simms. She went into labor three months early and was forced to remain on bed rest for the duration of her pregnancy. Leah married Corey on October 17, 2010 but they divorced six months later after he learned that she cheated on him just a week before their wedding. With one of her girls suffering from a mystery ailment that slowed her development, Leah continued working part-time as a dental assistant while taking online courses at Mountain University. She eventually began dating pipe-liner Jeremy Calvert. They married on April 4, 2012 - just months after Leah suffered a heartbreaking miscarriage. Her second marriage is “different from Corey and my relationship,” Leah told
Us Weekly
. “Because we were kinda like forcing it... With Jeremy, you know when you're supposed to be with somebody and you're not.”

JENELLE EVANS
(b. December 19, 1991)

The ultimate bad girl from Oak Island, North Carolina has a growing rap sheet and a volatile relationship with her mother, Barbara. No longer in contact with baby daddy Charles Andrew Lewis, she drinks, smokes pot, steals credit cards and isn't afraid to open up a can of whoop ass on anyone who crosses her. When Jenelle couldn't curb her excessive partying, Barbara stepped in to take temporary custody of son Jace (b. August 2, 2009).

KAILYN LOWRY
(b. March 14, 1992)

A former high school lacrosse player from Nazareth, Pennsylvania, Kailyn wanted to give her baby what she never had: a loving, two parent family. She worked two jobs to support son Isaac (b. January 18, 2010), while tackling a full course load at Northampton Community College. Early on, “Kail” said she tried to hide the pregnancy from friends at school. When her mother Suzi - who struggles with addiction - moved into a motel with her boyfriend, leaving Kailyn essentially homeless, the teen who dreamed of becoming a dental hygienist took up residence at baby daddy Jo Rivera's house. Unfortunately, they fought all the time and he wanted nothing to do with her - until she started dating someone else. Kailyn's dad, Ray, took off when she was just six months old. He now lives in Texas in a home with no back door, but a lock on the freezer - to protect his $200 stash of meat! She saw him again for the first time during her episode of
16 and Pregnant
, but hasn't had contact with him since.

CHELSEA HOUSKA
(b. August 29, 1991)

A star softball player in Vermillion, South Dakota, Chelsea's dreams of attending beauty school were put on hold when she went into labor five weeks early with daughter Aubree Skye (b. September 7, 2009) on the first day of her senior year. The youngest of four daughters, she received lots of support from her family - especially dad, Randy, a dentist - but almost none from boyfriend Adam Lind. Chelsea tries every option to make their relationship work, despite Adam's constant claims that she is “nagging” and “annoying.” But when he goes M.I.A for three weeks after Aubree's birth - and sends Chelsea an abusive text message calling their daughter “a mistake” - she decides to cut the cord and promptly changes Aubree's last name to her own.

TEEN MOM 2
CANCELLED: IS JENELLE TO BLAME?
January 29, 2013
According to the
New York Post
, the decision to end the show followed several months of erratic, headline-grabbing behavior by the loose cannon star. In that time, Jenelle became pregnant (again), got married, lost her baby and publicly demanded a divorce. She also posted what appeared to be disturbing play-by-play updates of her seven week pregnancy ending on Twitter. “And this is the end, I think,” she shared with 632,800 followers. “Feel light headed.” Hours later, Jenelle tweeted that she was with her ex-fiancé, Gary Head, at a North Carolina bar. Insiders said producers were concerned the attention-seeking reality star had become too much of a liability for the show.

“I don't know why we are not picketing out MTV. These are the kind of shows that are so disgusting with what they are promoting and they are pretending that they are showing how horrible teen pregnancy is? I call bullshit on that! You are not doing anything but making girls want to be pregnant. Now they are big celebrities. They get endorsement deals. They are on television. They have no right to be on television. They have done nothing to be on television.”

- LEAH REMINI, Actress

Amber Portwood was drifting in and out of consciousness. She lay face up on the living room sofa - a rope around her neck, according to some reports - when police and paramedics arrived at her Anderson, Indiana home on June 14, 2011. The high school dropout was still reeling after losing custody of her two year-old daughter, Leah. Now convinced that her baby daddy, Gary Shirley, was cheating, she consumed what friends believed to be a potentially lethal combination of pills. Amber, who had privately been under a psychiatrist's care for almost two years, was “distraught,” police reports say, “and threatening to end her life.”

Amber's desperate cry for help came just one week after she pled guilty to domestic violence charges for beating the bejesus out of her on-again-off-again boyfriend during a blowup at their apartment. The jaw-dropping attack had been captured by MTV cameras and eventually turned over to Child Protective Services. Now with mounting legal problems, a crumbling home life, and her most intimate struggles playing out in front of four million viewers each week on TV, the girl who once dreamed of opening her own beauty salon had finally hit rock bottom.

At a time in their lives when most girls are consumed with
Facebook
, school work and finding a prom date, Amber and the 46 other mostly lower income girls featured on
16 and Pregnant
and
Teen Mom
were doing their best to navigate the perilous waters of parenthood - while still growing up themselves.

Like Amber, many of the girls quickly became overnight tabloid celebrities - their faces and personal stories splashed on magazine covers and entertainment news shows around the world. “MTV can be as objective as they want about it, but once these young women are being followed by tabloids and on
TMZ
and on the cover of
Us Weekly,
it's hard to view them as documentary subjects,” Jessica Coen, editor of
Jezebel.com
, told
ABC News
. “They're reality stars.”

The night that Leah's episode of
16 and Pregnant
aired, her producer phoned with an ominous warning: “Your life is about to change forever.” “Leah had no idea what she was getting herself into,” her former best friend Amy LaDawn Nichols tells us. “She never thought she'd ever be on a magazine cover or involved with paparazzi or anything.”

MTV, a network unafraid to push the boundaries of taste and exploitation, billed its most controversial series yet as “cautionary tales” about the perils of young motherhood. “What people connect to in these stories and on this show is family,” former executive producer Liz Gateley told the
New York Post
. “Everyone can relate to family and what buttons get pushed in a stressful situation. That is why, I feel, people are tuning in to these shows.”

16 and Pregnant
, the brainchild of MTV development executive Lauren Dolgen, was filmed in a no-frills, documentary style. Each episode took viewers inside the homes, schools and workplaces of its struggling, young subjects as they coped with money problems, cheating boyfriends and unsupportive parents.

“Awkwardly crunching pregnancy, childbirth and the first few months of parenting into an hour, the documentary-style program eschews tough questions and works too hard at entertaining, turning a potential public service into a bit of a muddle,”
Variety
television critic Brian Lowry wrote of the premiere episode, which featured fresh-faced high school cheerleader, Maci Bookout. “Even her 30 hours of labor is dispatched in a few seconds of pencil animation, making the act of childbirth look about as difficult as an a-ha video.”