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

by Robert Hoffman

  What was lost in the midst of Kate’s excited tweeting and blogging about a staycation for the kids was the fact that Kate had no intention of settling for a staycation herself. Instead, she snuck away to Las Vegas with her handler, Steve, to attend a comedy club opening. She wasn’t even smart enough to continue tweeting to her fans at least once or twice a day to give the impression that she was at home. It was only after a few photos of Kate and Steve at the comedy club turned up online, and a designer/dressmaker outed her on Twitter by telling her she looked “amazing” in his dress, that she came out of hiding and admitted what we already knew – that she was away from her kids once again having a grand old time on a lavish trip for herself.

  With Steve accompanying her, the question arose yet again about Steve’s role in her life. A tweet from one of her superfans gave Kate the chance to explain why Steve has to accompany her on her travels. Apparently, this 38-year-old mother of eight, former reality star who is now fading away into obscurity, desperately needs a bodyguard. She tweeted that having a bodyguard was “Important for my safety. :)” (Somehow, the story, “The Ransom of Red Chief,” by O. Henry springs to mind.) Kate said just a few short months ago that Steve was now her “road manager,” so it remains foggy what it is he actually does.

  The bottom line is, while the kids got to do absolutely nothing but work around the house and play school in the basement on their spring break, Kate treated herself to a four-day birthday present away from them, to Sin City. Then, in true Kate fashion, she returned home and tapped out these “Look, I’m a regular mom, just like you all” tweets:

  Good day!This morning sure came fast! We had egg, ham and cheese burritos for breakfast then quickly out the door..grouchy Monday morning..

  ...sitting at the bus stop eating dry organic 'Cheerios'... So hungry!!The life of a mom, I guess??! :)

  HOPPY EASTER, GOSSELIN KIDS

  As Easter approached in 2012, Kate posted her “much-anticipated” coupon blog about her plans to save money for the holiday. Any guesses on where she planned to cut corners once again? If you said, “on the kids,” you would be correct. That question was too easy, I know.

  While their friends were probably getting Easter baskets filled with fresh chocolate, assorted candies and maybe a few toys, the Gosselin children’s mother planned to fill their baskets with … “toothbrushes, socks and batteries.” And if we are to believe what Kate wrote in her blog, the kids were also going to be lucky enough to get year-old, non-Easter-themed candy that she kept in the freezer all year because she got it at half-price the day after last Easter. Her advice: “Don’t waste money on Easter-themed candy.”

  Kate also informed us that her kids were not getting any special Easter outfits that year. She wrote that, instead of buying said Easter outfits, she would be buying the kids one pastel-colored item of clothing, like a polo shirt or skirt, so they could wear it year round. Her frugality would not be the object of anyone’s scorn if she worked just as hard trying to save money on purchases for herself.

  The disgrace of this is that Kate actually described how she would be saving on buying things for her children just two days after returning home from that expensive, first-class trip to Las Vegas with her married “friend.” Kate was comped two tickets to the comedy club opening in Vegas, but her first-class travel, including limousine to and from her MGM Grand hotel suite, her expensive meals, and her Vegas shopping spree all came out of the family money. Money the kids earned.

  Kate got a luxurious trip to Las Vegas with a handsome, married man. The Gosselin kids got a working staycation and year-old Easter candy.

  But a new twist was about to impact Kate’s Easter plans.

  On Friday, April 6, 2012, Kate “found out” via Twitter that Jon might possibly be going to court the following week to fight for more custody time with his kids. Kate pretended not to be aware of the impending court appearance. Whether she knew or not, the fact that it became public knowledge might be why she suddenly did a 180-degree turn from her previous Easter plans, where the kids would be getting year-old candy and batteries, socks and toothbrushes, and they would not be coloring eggs. These were Kate’s Easter tweets before the court news reached her:

  xxxxx @Kateplusmy8 how many dozen eggs do you color?

  kids get bored of it so I’ll probably HB a few dozen (were overrun remember) and see how they go…

  xxxxx @Kateplusmy8 mine only wanted 2draw on them w/clear crayon.I ended up coloring.Ran out of gloves (see bike tweet) so now my fingers r awful

  yep. Happened to me last year. Make a mess then run off… Ugh!

  But in the span of three days, after news broke of Jon possibly going to court for more custody, Kate suddenly changed her tune about her Easter plans:

  GM everyone! Busy day here! 800+ eggs&8 baskets to fill, cooking, baking and Easter outfits to lay out! I better get going…!! Yikes!

  xxxxx @Kateplusmy8 Do you still hide hundreds of Easter eggs around outside for the kids to find?

  yes.. Stuffing is on the list for today and tomorrow. 6-800 this year!

  just counted my supply.. Actually 1100-12—eggs this year… We have 2 little friends joining us :)

  According to Kate’s tweets, the number of eggs she filled went from 600-800 one minute to 1100-1200 the next. How is it possible that Kate “just counted” her supply and she didn’t know exactly how many eggs she had? Keep reading for the answer to that question. ;) Here are some more of her pre-Easter tweets:

  xxxxx @Kateplusmy8 Please tell me @Kateplusmy you’re not really hiding 800 eggs. It seems like the kids would get burnt out trying to find all of them

  my kids dash like its an Olympic sport! Gotta hide that many (or more!) to make it last more than a blink of an eye!

  Kids in bed,dog in bed,house is cleaned up so I’m saying GN! Lots of cooking,easter basket preparing&egg filling tomorrow,oh my!Need sleep!

  ....settling into another four days with my kids....plan to over Easter egg,candy and toy them..So excited to see hoppy faces all around! :)

  xxxxx @Kateplusmy8 I'm betting this is a custody hearing. Explains why you are going overboard with Easter celebrations. You will never learn.

  lol. Overboard? I'm actually scaling back this year...I go overboard for every holiday and birthday... The nature of a mom!

  xxxxx @Kateplusmy8 Still filling eggs Kate?:)

  yes. Then onto Easter baskets… Almost done!:) yay!

  xxxxx @Kateplusmy8 I have just read that you have 1100/1200 eggs …that will keep the ADULTS occupy for a while haha xx kids can chill out xx

  oh yeah- always takes way longer to hide than to find. Why is that? :)

  ….and with that, good night to all! What a long fun day! As for tomorrow, I better rest quick! Hoppy Easter! http://t.co/ybmYOl94

  The link Kate posted in this last tweet was to a photo of her Easter baskets on the dining room table. Kate had made it sound like she had created the most incredible baskets in the history of Easter basket making. The photo showed them to be nothing special; really very mediocre at best for a woman nearing 40 who claims to be super at everything she does. Her tweeties were absolutely amazed, though, and gave her an A++++ grade for her effort. Well, at least the kids got baskets.

  Things got far more interesting on Easter Sunday. This is Kate’s version of how Easter day went:

  4.8.12 (Easter Sunday)

  Home fr church (wonderful Easter celebration!) now let the candy,lunch&egg hunting begin! Excitement in air- Feels like Christmas here….;)

  And so the eggs were filled (well, last night) hidden, hunted, emptied and returned to the bin within two hours! http://t.co/Wd2NnQXp

  …it’s all over!The last of r guests hav gone, house is still in partial disarray,all r well fed,very well candied (includingmommy!)& happy

  Now that you’ve read Kate’s version of Easter, I will tell you what really happened on the Gosselin’s 2012 Easter Sunday. I can do this because I was there, at Kate Gosselin’s house, watching t
he events unfold.

  Just as she had promoted on Twitter for a week, Kate did take the kids to church on Easter Sunday. I watched and photographed them as they entered and exited the building. Despite online rumors that they left church early, the Gosselins stayed inside the church through the entire service and exited with the rest of the huge crowd.

  As she was leaving the parking lot, Kate stopped her van to take a photo of a donkey that was tied up behind the church. She posted the photo to prove to the Twitter world that she actually did make it to Easter services. One thing strikes me as very funny about her Twitter photo of the donkey. If you look in Kate’s side mirror, you can see my car directly behind hers. At the time I couldn’t figure out why she was stopping and holding up traffic. I thought she saw me and was coming back to confront me. Nope. Just a routine snapshot of a jackass.

  After Easter mass and the donkey photography, Kate drove straight back home. I had fully expected to see the Gosselin yard covered in Easter eggs placed there by a “helper” while Kate and the kids were at church. I just knew that Kate wouldn’t be doing the menial job of placing the eggs in the yard herself. She’s just too lazy. But when we got back to the house, the yard was bare. Where were the 1100-1200 Easter eggs? And if they weren’t there now, how long would it take for Kate to scatter them around?

  This was a real bummer to me because here I was, wasting my Easter Sunday watching Kate Gosselin while my own family was at home enjoying their day without me. I did break away at 11:45 to head home so I could help my wife put eggs in our yard for our own egg hunt. The kids had a great time. Each of our three kids got 27 eggs and that seemed more than enough to make them happy. I took tons of photos and video of the great fun my kids were having, but I just had to see for myself what 1200 colored eggs looked like for ten children, so I raced back to Kate’s house and took my place among the trees with the pap. And there we sat – the pap and I. Sitting in the bushes in the chilly air, waiting for something to happen. Anything. On Easter Sunday. Lame, I know.

  Up to this point, all we got to see were the three boys walking down to the barn to take care of the chickens. Their chore. They walked down at exactly 11 AM and stayed until 11:30. They looked so happy to be out of the house and doing what little boys should be doing – playing around the outside of the barn and just enjoying being outside.

  Meanwhile, back at the house, Kate had company. I photographed a happy couple wandering around outside. I didn’t recognize them, but I later identified them as Kate’s stylist Deanna from New York City and Deanna’s boyfriend/husband/companion? Take your pick.

  Several hours went by, and the only activity we saw was what appeared to be a family portrait sitting being set up by the front of the house. Deanna’s boyfriend/husband/companion spent 30 minutes moving several potted plants around so they were “just right” for the photos. Pretty boring stuff. This took place between 3 and 4 PM. After the photo shoot, the kids were allowed to play outside for a bit for the first time that day. They rode their scooters for a few minutes, and then the excitement started.

  At 4:15 PM, two SUVs arrived at the Gosselin compound. Within minutes, two strangers – an Asian man and a Caucasian woman – emerged from the vehicles with a large storage tub filled with plastic Easter eggs. (Apparently, the Easter Bunny drives an SUV. Who knew?) The strangers transferred the eggs from the tub into white garbage bags, then carried the garbage bags around the property, scattering the eggs for the upcoming egg hunt.

  I showed Jon some photos that I took of the two strangers, thinking that the Asian man was a family member or friend of the family, but he had no idea who they were. He had never seen them before.

  The fact that strangers delivered and scattered Easter eggs around the yard meant that Kate never even had the plastic Easter eggs at her house, so her entire week’s worth of tweets about filling Easter eggs was yet another whopper of a Kate Gosselin lie. Once again, Kate did nothing…yet she had spent a week on Twitter telling everyone how hard she was working to prepare for the holiday.

  Kate tweets photos of every minor thing she and her kids are doing during the day. She once tweeted photos of a bag of flour that she bought, and she tweeted a photo of a bunch of towels that she folded. She thinks these photos prove to everyone what a wonderful mother she is and how hard she works. With all of her photo sharing, how is it possible that she failed to tweet one single photo of the actual stuffing of the 1200 Easter eggs that she said she herself filled full of candy and other surprises? Was it that she couldn’t take pictures because the eggs were filled elsewhere and brought to the house at 4:15 PM on Easter Sunday by complete strangers?

  During the hour that the two strangers were meticulously placing the eggs, Kate tweeted a photo of a glass of red wine from inside the house, while the kids were once again being entertained by strangers. So Kate’s exhausting Easter preparations consisted of her hiring a company to set up and orchestrate an Easter egg hunt for her children while she stayed inside and drank wine? Kate never once set foot outside of the house to watch the kids during the egg hunt. Not once. The strangers even took pictures of the Gosselin kids collecting the Easter eggs, so that was another annoyance Kate didn’t have to bother with either. I guess that was part of the “egg hunt package.”

  If you were following along at home via Twitter, you would probably have assumed that the egg hunt took place right after church and that Kate was unwinding with a glass of wine later in the day after all of her hard work. In reality, the egg hunt didn’t start until 5:15 PM, and it was over by 5:45 PM. It took 30 minutes for the kids to pick up 1200 eggs scattered around 23 acres. By 6:00 PM, Kate put a photo on Twitter of the Easter eggs packed up back in the storage tub.

  Meanwhile, questions arose on Twitter about the pap pictures from the Easter egg hunt. Deanna, the newest self-appointed defender of Kate, decided to ‘clear things up’ about who took the photos. She tweeted:

  I was there on Easter &there was a pap that drove by and took pics during hunt

  Um,yes,1camera was mine.The guy in the pap photo is a family member of a kid at EEhunt--he has a short lens-not pap

  When Deanna mentioned “The guy in the pap photo,” she was talking about the stranger who placed the eggs in the yard and who was also taking pictures of the kids. If we are to believe Deanna that “The guy in the pap photo is a family member of a kid at EEhunt-,” here is a question to ponder. If you brought a child to an Easter egg hunt at a “friend’s” house, would your friend expect you to volunteer to spend an entire hour walking around a 23-acre property individually hand-placing more than 1000 plastic eggs, while your friend sat inside the house drinking wine? No friend of mine would.

  As I said, I was there. And I took pictures. I photographed this so-called “friend” and his partner placing the eggs around the yard for more than an hour while Deanna was inside with Kate. I took several hundred photos with a 500-mm lens, so I was very much up close up and personal to the action.

  Kate claimed on Twitter that she had absolutely no idea that a pap was there taking pictures. Someone tweeted Deanna asking her about this:

  xxxxx @deannatweeting @xxxxx @xxxxx @xxxxx @kateplusmy8 How were you able to see the pap & Kate couldn't? Said she didn't notice a pap.

  Deanna answered:

  I didn't see the pap,but can tell where he was on the road based on pics.He drove by

  That was a lie. Deanna was outright lying when she said “I didn’t see the pap.” I took a nice, clear photo of Deanna and her man smiling and pointing DIRECTLY INTO MY LENS as I stood across the street. Someone sent this tweet calling her out and questioning her story:

  xxxxx @deannatweeting @xxxxx @kateplusmy8 this is why ppl call BS. You say a pap drove by then u say u didn't see one. Sounds fishy.

  Deanna then tried to extricate herself from her lies by responding that there’s a single spot on the road where the paps can drive by and see in the yard only for a second:

  There is a curve of the road where the paps
drive by &can c into the yard 4 a second.im not a fan of paps:(

  I was not driving back and forth on the road shooting from a single spot. There were no trees in front of me. The Easter eggs were placed in the only area of the property where the paps actually CAN just stand there and take as many pictures as they want. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why the Easter eggs were placed in that exact area. Kate had tweeted about the Easter egg hunt for an entire week, basically inviting the paps to show up to take pictures of her kids enjoying the fabulous egg hunt she was putting together.

  If Kate wanted to protect her children from the lone paparazzo and me, she wouldn’t have had the eggs placed around the only part of her property that gives a crystal-clear view of the action. She would have had the eggs placed only on the right side of the house, behind the house, or better yet, in the HUGE horse paddock behind the house where nobody could ever see. I was back in that area many times before the divorce, riding motorcycles, cooking out and walking in the woods. It’s completely private. But that’s not what Kate wanted. Sorry, Deanna. We’re not buying your lies.

  Of all Kate’s lies and misdirections about her Easter preparations, one particular Twitter exchange sums up the most important part of this Easter story. In the span of two weeks of tweeting about the Easter holiday – the absolute most important day on the Christian calendar – Kate never once mentioned one word about the true meaning of Easter or expressed any sentiment about the solemn days leading up to Easter Sunday. This tweet (in bold) is Kate Gosselin’s only mention of Good Friday, the day on which Christians believe Jesus carried his cross, was crucified and died for our sins: