Jon Gosselin has opened up about his ex-wife Kate in a sit-down interview with Dr. Mehmet Oz on The Dr. Oz Show.
In a teaser clip released on Friday, the former Jon and Kate Plus 8 star spoke candidly about Kate when asked if he thinks his ex-wife is an unfit mother.
“Do you believe that Kate is an unfit mother?” Oz asks Jon.
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“Well, I believe that her belief system is skewed. That’s what I believe,” Jon replies.
“I believe that her intentions, in the beginning, were good intentions bringing kids into the world,” Jon adds. “And that she fought to have these kids.”
“But I think once fame and money got involved it twisted her belief system. On my end, I’ve been fighting to get my kids off TV forever,” Jon says.
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The Gosselins famously had eight children (now 15-year-old sextuplets Aaden, Alexis, Collin, Hannah, Leah and Joel, and a set of 19-year-old twins, Mady and Cara), and their TLC reality show, Jon & Kate Plus 8, was a ratings juggernaut … at least at first. Over time their popularity waned, and due to the stress of having eight children and the constant scrutiny of TV cameras, Jon and Kate divorced in 2009.
The series was later renamed Kate Plus 8 in 2010, focusing on Kate as a divorced mother raising all eight children, with Jon mostly absent from the show. Filming was later suspended after Jon’s lawyers delivered letters to TLC, demanding they halt production. He even stopped production crews from walking onto their property. The last episode aired in 2011.
Jon told Oz that TLC sued him “for breach of contract.”
“I literally hung a sign on my gate saying if any crew members show up I’ll have you arrested for trespassing,” he says. “They (TLC) sued me for breach of contract. I pretty much bankrupted myself but I did it for moral reasons, obviously.”
The father of eight said he spent nearly $2 million in legal fees, trying to get his kids out of the spotlight, but Kate later starred in Kate Plus 8 with the kids.
“I didn’t understand, at first, why, but now I understand why,” Jon says. “All she wanted was legal custody to film my kids to sustain her lifestyle and their lifestyle. It gets all warped. That’s fame though. It just twists things around.”
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In another preview clip for the episode, Jon says he had a gag order — in which a judge orders that a case may not be discussed in public — from TLC and family court for 10 years.
“It was to protect the kids… seems reasonable but then it got kind of dragged out as they got older and rumours were cropping up anyway,” Jon tells Oz.
He continues: “It got to a point where I couldn’t defend myself because Kate’s show continued. And it just got super difficult and I didn’t have a platform so I really didn’t have a voice.”
After Oz asks Jon to explain his relationship with Kate right now, the former reality star says, “We don’t have a relationship right now so we don’t talk, nothing. It’s very nothing.”
“The only time I see my ex-wife is in court because we’ve exhausted all opportunities to co-parent. It’s never going to happen due to personality disorders and everything else,” Jon reveals. “We just have different aspects on how we want to parent, and moving forward, my twins are 19 years old now and my sextuplets are almost 16.”
—With files from Chris Jancelewicz
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