Teen Mom Confidential: Secrets & Scandals From MTV's Most Controversial Shows (6 page)

Kailyn Lowry was fuming as she watched the second season finale of
Teen Mom 2
. The most quiet and conservative of the show's four young mothers says she was ready to quit when producers edited footage to make it appear that she and ex-boyfriend Jo Rivera had hooked up for a soap-filled romp in the shower!

“MTV wasn't there [when Jo and I hooked up] but they tried to play it like they were,” Kail tells us. “They had us reenact it. The scene where I tell Jordan about cheating on him was reenacted. That's why I was so coldhearted. Jordan already knew about it at that time, and we had already moved past it, but they made us reenact it and live through it again, and then again when it aired. It really upset Jordan. We had broken up and had gotten back together. Jordan had no choice but to do it because he was under contract, too. There was a point that I wanted to quit and rip up my contract because of the way they treated me.”

Like many of the MTV girls, Kail agreed to share her very personal story because she was sold on the “documentary” style of series. Her day-to-day interactions - and the struggle of raising son Isaac on her own - would be portrayed to viewers exactly as they unfolded, she believed. Wrong! What the heavily tattooed 20 year-old didn't realize was that both
16 and Pregnant
and the
Teen Mom
franchises are carefully crafted by a team of directors, editors and producers, who ultimately shape each girl's on-screen persona and decide how their individual stories will play out on TV.

“They just beefed it up with drama,” says Sabrina Solares, who appeared on the fourth season of
16 and Pregnant
. “I don't want to show my daughter Audrey [the episode]. I just wish they showed [the good stuff] rather than the drama.”

Danielle Cunningham, a fan favorite from season three says producers would purposely instigate conflict during the filming process, in hopes of capturing dramatic blowups with boyfriend, Jamie Alderman, on camera. “They would tell us to talk about touchy subjects that would cause us to fight,” the Ohio teen tells us.

Whitney Purvis, one of six girls featured during season one, told a similar story to
ABC News
in 2009. “They would take you in separate rooms and then they would film me with my friends and my boyfriend with his friends and just get you to talk about the things you don't like about each other,” she said. “They want you to argue. They want you to talk about each other. They want you to get where you want to break up with each other to go stay at separate places. I just didn't like that at all.”

Neither did season three's Cleondra Carter, who claims footage in her installment of
16 and Pregnant
was purposely pieced together to make her boyfriend, Mario Escovedo, “look like an asshole.” Of course, she concedes, “during some of the filming it was him who was making himself look like an asshole!”

The filming process was “emotional and exhausting” says Katie Stack, one of three teens featured in the 2010 special “No Easy Decision,” which featured
16 and Pregnant
season two's Markai Durham as she contemplated having an abortion. “The actual staff and crew of MTV were amazingly supportive,” Stack tells us. “They really went above and beyond to make sure that we felt supported through the process - even coming to our hometowns to let us see the show before it aired, so we could be prepared. I've maintained relationships with many of them.”

Still, Cleondra says, nothing was off limits once cameras started rolling. “They made us film EVERYTHING!” she says. “You could never get out of it. I remember when I did not want them to film when Mario and I were at Sekesui [a restaurant in Memphis] and we got into that argument.” While MTV team members never put exact words in her mouth, she says “they would just get things out of us that we would seriously never have talked about. They were like counselors with cameras.”

Other girls say the often eight-member production crew was more like paparazzi. Danielle, just 16 when she became pregnant with son Jamie during junior year, says it was an ongoing struggle to shield her friends and family from overly-invasive cameras during personal, private moments. “[My ex-boyfriend Jamie's] dad got evicted and I refused to let them film it,” she says. Danielle also contends MTV crews tried to get a little too up-close-and-personal while shadowing her in the fall of 2010. “I refused to let them film me pumping milk,” she remembers. “I felt that it was an invasion of privacy. They actually begged me to let them film it. They were very forceful. They would say things like, 'This is your story so let us film what's really going on!'”

Capturing each girl's story is a full time job that usually begins around the fourth or fifth month of pregnancy. Each girl is assigned a director, producer and camera crew to trail her up to 13 hours a day for approximately one week each month. “It's one of the worst jobs I've had,” one former camera operator posted during a bombshell August 2012 Q&A chat on
Reddit.com
. “Opticalsk” - whose identity we have agreed not to disclose - also revealed several other interesting tidbits about what goes on behind the scenes:

* Members of the production staff must remain completely removed from the action - even in situations where babies could be in harm's way.
“As a camera operator i'm not allowed to interfere. legally can't even hold the babys. the producer/director's would interfere and shape the 'story'.” [sic]

* Conditions inside the girls' homes are often dirty and disgusting.
“Every shoot i would want to call CPS. filthy houses (dog poop on the floor, bloody tampons sitting in a corner for months, weeks old food everywhere, etc) one of the worst is Leah (Messer), filthiest person i've met. when feeding her twins she would spill a bunch of cheese puffs on the nasty carpet and the girls would crawl around and suck up the cheese puffs, no hands involved. this made me cry a few times.” [sic]
* The production company has a policy in place for when abuse or neglect is suspected - but nobody follows it.
“[The] rule was to file your complaint with production manager. if the production manager felt that they were legally bound to submit the complaint to the authorities they would. of course they never did. it took a lot of alcohol to fall asleep. i couldn't take it half way through the 3rd season and quit.” [sic]

* Some members of the film crew would try to party with pals of the girls they were filming.
“One crew member was caught in the hot tub at our hotel with one of the girls friends. He was promptly fired. She asked for his age. He was 38. She started screaming and *beep* hit the fan. He is bald and always wears a cap. Looks young with the cap. In the tub he took it off. She was like WTF!”

____________________

“It gets to the point where the director is feeding them lines.”

- FORMER TEEN MOM CAMERAMAN
____________________

The veteran cameraman also confirmed multiple reports that episodes of both shows are “heavily scripted.” “It gets to the point where the director is feeding them lines,” he said. In some cases, entire scenes are set-up and inserted to speed up or fill in blanks during the story telling process. “They recreated key things like walking up and down stairs, in and out of doors,” says Jamie McKay, who shared her experience of welcoming daughter Miah during season three of
16 and Pregnant
. “They made [my boyfriend] Ryan go back to the hospital and recreate going inside.”

“One part in my episode where [Mario] was in a red hoodie and he was throwing the ball back and forth with the dog was SO FAKE!” Cleondra adds. “I understand their concept of how it was already hard to get him over to my house, but that was just crucial. I had no idea about it and I was mad as hell when Mario told me. After they finished that scene, he walked over to my house and was like 'Don't be mad, they told me to say that.' I was like 'Wow!'”

It turns out Cleondra's episode wasn't the only one with re-enacted or completely fabricated content. In the summer of 2011, 23 year-old Daniel Alvarez, a recent college graduate from Austin, Texas, briefly dated new mom Farrah Abraham after she relocated to Florida. Their six-week courtship was documented and shown over the course of several episodes during the final season of
Teen Mom
. “The day they filmed me 'meeting' [Farrah's daughter] Sophia, I had to pretend like I had just met her, even though I had already met her and hung out with her,” he confesses. “They needed to get it on film. They also made us do things like say we were on our second date and pretend we were just meeting again even though we had been dating for awhile already...”

Alvarez, who provides marketing and brand recognition services for a company in Austin, says producers staged numerous other events, including his introduction to Farrah's mother, a horseback riding date (“I didn't really want to go because I don't like horseback riding, but they wanted to get us dating on film”) and a July 4th fireworks outing. (“It was weird with the people from the show there. They would make us do things over and over again so they could get the shot they needed.”)

Still, there were some moments producers only got one crack at. In each episode of
16 and Pregnant
, the money shot was the birth of each child. Film crews would hunker down at a nearby hotel beginning two weeks before the projected due date and the girls were under strict orders to call their main producer the moment they went into labor. “[The crew] had just left my house probably like four to five days before,” Cleondra remembers. “I was blowing up my director, Allison's phone. I went into labor at 1 in the morning and she probably did not answer until around 5 AM. They got on the plane after that. As soon as she made it to the hospital, [my daughter] Kylee was coming. After she came in the room to say 'hey,' I began to push.”

As Cleondra recalls, the MTV crew “had the hardest time getting clearance” to film at the hospital. “They never got it, actually,” she admits. Instead the episode's director had to pretend to be a family member to gain access to the delivery room. Producers ran into the same problem in season two with Florida teen Nicole Fokos. “They had to sneak little Flip cameras in there,” Nicole remembers. “They got caught with that, too. [The hospital] started threatening everybody that they were going to call security. My mom was like 'This is her cousin. He's just filming it.' But they didn't believe it.”

Most of the show's participants have remained quiet about their experiences - until now - because of intimidating confidentiality agreements they are required to sign with producers and the network. MTV has been notorious for the way it has exploited reality show contestants for more than two decades. In 2011, the
Village Voice
dropped a bombshell on the former music channel by exposing the 25 page agreement signed by each house member featured on another reality show,
The Real World
. Among the stipulations:

* You may be humiliated and intentionally portrayed “in a false light.”

* Producers can make any changes they want to your life story.

* Camera crews can show up to your home at any time to film and may take anything they want -- as long as it gets returned once production has ended.

Terms for the participants on
16 and Pregnant
and
Teen Mom
- which are produced by 11th Street Productions, but still in close conjunction with MTV - are equally restrictive. Several of the girls tell us they are forbidden to make drastic changes to their personal appearance, including hair color and style. On occasions where a “new look” cannot be worked into the show, some girls have been forced to wear wigs and hats.

“If they need to film a pick up, which is when they weren't there for certain things and they need to go back in time [and restage what happened] sometimes they have to get creative to make it look like no time has passed,” one insider says.

Producers reportedly panicked when Jenelle (following the lead of Maci and Farrah) decided to get a boob job in the summer of 2012. Possibly sensing the backlash the show would receive if all of its “struggling” young stars were able to afford pricey cosmetic procedures, producers sent the word out that plastic surgery was strictly off-limits until after the series ended.

The biggest - and most problematic - stipulation for many of the girls: social media postings are strictly monitored and no one is permitted to talk to the media without an MTV representative present or on the phone. Anyone who violates the gag order is subject to a fine of up to $1 million, several girls have said.

But that hasn't stopped some former cast and crewmembers from opening up about their experiences participating on the show. “We get in trouble all the time for what we post on Twitter,” one cast member says. Predictably, 18 year-old Megan McConnell received an immediate order to remove the following 2011 post from her personal blog, which details how she say producers bullied her into reading “a bunch of lies” during the narration for her episode of
16 and Pregnant
:

As most of you may know, I was on MTV's hit series
16 and Pregnant
. I was part of season 2-B. I like to consider our season as the “forgotten step child” because most people don't remember the season. Being on TV was a cool, once in a lifetime experience. Unfortunately, once the show aired I had no desire for it to ever play again.

They depicted my family and I completely wrong, and the worst part? My voice overs were pretty much all lies! I would say 90% of the stuff they MADE me say was a lie. It took 5 hours to record voice overs because I fought every little bit of it. All they would say was “We can't change it now because everything is already timed with the episode.” That made sense to me, but they should have run it by me before making everything official.

One of the things I had to lie about was my dad being active duty. He has been retired from the Army ever since I was 10 or 11 years old. He does still work over seas, but as a security contractor. He now works for a very important, and top secret company. Another thing I had to say was “I've never been outside of our tiny town”. That is a complete lie. Think about it, a military family, never moving, living an hour and a half away from the closest Army base. Yeah, right. Those were the two main ones that bothered me.