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

by Robert Hoffman

  In addition, all, or most of, the clothing that Kate and her children wore on the show was given to them, either by sponsors of the show or from individual endorsement deals put together by Kate or her manager. The Gymboree, GAP, Peace Love World, etc., clothing you saw the kids wearing was all free.

  Kate had also received an enormous outpouring of support, both financially and in the form of clothing for her children, from her community and from people all across the country in the early days – when she was supposedly struggling to make ends meet for her family. So, it would be reasonable to think that this self-proclaimed Christian woman who had been on the receiving end of such generosity from others would be eager to “give back,” even just a little bit, to show how much she appreciated all she had been given. You would be wrong.

  In 2009, I watched as UPS employees loaded cases and cases of free Nestle Juicy Juice into Kate’s car. I learned by reading her contracts and endorsement deals that Nestle had donated a “lifetime supply of Juicy Juice” to Kate and the kids. As a millionaire who could afford to buy Juicy Juice, it would have been nice to see Kate donate at least some of that juice to the local food bank, or have Nestle send it directly there in her kids’ names.

  Also in 2009, when it was time for Kate to clean out some of the kid’s clothing that she could no longer use, I followed her, several times, to a consignment shop in Shillington, PA, where she carried in piles of children’s clothing, to RESELL. Kate Gosselin, a millionaire, was selling clothes she didn’t even pay for in the first place to those truly in need. There is no disputing this because I watched her and photographed her doing this, and the paparazzi photographed her doing this. I also spoke to the consignment shop owner after Kate had left. This particular shop is 3 miles from my house, and I had been there many times before.

  The worst part of this story is that, on the way to that consignment shop from her house, Kate had to drive by – in her $69,000 Toyota Land Cruiser – a giant Goodwill Industries distribution center and retail store, where she could have donated the items and gotten a tax write off in the process…and saved a lot of time if she was in a hurry. Kate was a millionaire getting everything for free, and she was reselling her children’s free clothing, rather than donating it to the needy.

  That was nothing new for Kate, though. As far back as when the sextuplets were babies, Kate was begging for help and handouts of any kind. It would have been easier and more honest if she had just come right out and told her community up front that what she was really looking for was cold, hard cash. Even then, Kate was accepting bag after bag of gently used clothing at her house in Wyomissing, only to then take it all directly to the local consignment shop where she would turn it into cash. Kate only wanted, and felt she deserved, brand new designer clothes for her brood. To that end, she was contacting stores every day soliciting freebies.

  Kate’s aversion to donating is not confined to clothing alone. This is a partial excerpt from my reporting for US Weekly:

  Jon and Kate Gosselin PA Reporting

  December 2009

  Kate cleaned out many of the kid’s old toys that they don’t use anymore and filled three giant trash cans and made a pile next to them with some things that wouldn’t fit in cans. There was a full-size electric keyboard sticking out of one of the trash cans with a pile of small, plastic chairs broken up and pushed all around it. On the ground next to the cans was a Buzz Lightyear stationary bicycle and a large, plush hobby horse on springs that a child can ride on and bounce up and down. The toys outside the trash can looked in very clean/new condition and I’m wondering why they were thrown away rather than being given or sold to a thrift store or charity.

  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:

  Yay! Enjoy! Did cover of people so u all would have something to keep to remember! :)

  Oh, how very generous of her. Another tweeter asked if Kate had approved the People article:

  xxxxx @Kateplusmy8 I hope all is going well with you & that you’re getting the support you need, Is ‘People’ article approved by you? XO

  Yes. People does interviews and NO they don’t pay for them!

  The tweeter simply asked Kate if she had approved the People article. There was no need for Kate to blurt out that People doesn’t pay for interviews. But once again, this is Kate Gosselin doing what she does best. She’s lying, while sort of telling the truth. Kate was correct in saying that People magazine does not pay for interviews. US Weekly does not pay for interviews, either. But do you know what they do pay very big money for? Photos. They pay for photos to go along with the interview. Kate did a photo shoot for People magazine that included an interview and was paid, by my guestimate, between $50,000 and $75,000. And she did it all for you.

  Thanks for giving back, Kate.

  “Be careful not to do your ‘acts of righteousness’ before men, to be seen by them.

  If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven. So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full.