14 DAY TRIAL // Kate Gosselin’s reputation as a kind-hearted, nice woman has always been subject to dispute but never before as it is now, when a new book by journalist Robert Hoffman, a good friend of her ex, is threatening to expose her.
In “Kate Gosselin: How She Fooled the World,” Hoffman claims that Kate never wanted the two dogs who also made an appearance on her and her ex-husband’s now-defunct show “Jon & Kate Plus 8,” Star magazine reports (story via CB).
The two German shepherds, Nala and Shoka, lived in total squalor, completely neglected by Kate, who would only remember them when the cameras were around, rolling.
Not only would she keep them locked in their cages in the back yard, but she’d also “forget” to feed them or clean up after them.
Hoffman recalls seeing the two dogs knee-deep in their own filth.
“Kate left the family dogs in their cages behind the house for hours on end with no food. She never cleaned the cages. Jon would return to find them filled with urine, poop and puke. I saw vomit in them,” he writes in the book.
Unfortunately, Kate’s despicable conduct towards the animals, which Hoffman says she only got because the kids had been asking for pets for some time, did not stop here: she would also abuse them physically, to the point where neither could stand to be in her presence anymore.
“She would knock them over the head and yell. The abuse caused Nala to become very resistant to Kate, so that any time she came around, Nala growled. After a while, Kate began to fear she’d be attacked, so she sent the dog back to the breeder,” the journalist says.
Whenever Jon would muster the courage to say something to Kate, she would always fight back that she’d never wanted the dogs in the first place and, as such, they were not hers to care for.
“The kids had been begging for pets for years but Kate was adamantly against it, until the show needed content for an episode. She was only nice to the dogs for the camera. As soon as filming was done, she never wanted anything to do with them. She’d tell Jon, ‘They’re yours… I’m not taking care of them’,” Hoffman writes.
Hoffman’s book has been pulled off Amazon after Kate’s attorney threatened to take action against him for making untrue “allegations.”
Considering that he’s a close friend of Jon’s, all of the above is probably best taken with a grain of salt.