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Nadya Suleman (aka Octomom)
165 Plays27 days ago
Listener discretion is advised.
May contain explicit language and unfounded accusations.
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Mothers of All Crime' Podcast
00:00:22
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Mothers of All Crime. This is a podcast where we deep dive into mothers involved in infamous crimes and scandals. I'm Monica and this is Crystal.
Who is Octomom, Nadia Suleiman?
00:00:57
Speaker
Welcome back to the Mothers of All Crime. This week we're going to be talking about one of my all-time favorite scandals, Octomom. How are we doing today, Crystal? Excited about Octomom?
00:01:08
Speaker
I'm good. Yeah, Octomom is one of those ones that, i I'm going to be so honest, I don't think I knew her name for the majority of it. It was just Octomom. For sure. I think Nadia was, i probably knew it in the time when it was super topical in the news and then things like that, but after that, it fell right out of my brain. So... I'm excited. What about you?
00:01:31
Speaker
I was obsessed with this at the time and I watched her new series on Lifetime and I've always been kind of checking in on Nadia. um And I just I'm excited to talk about it because I feel like it's not something I get to talk about.
00:01:47
Speaker
Yes. Yeah, I think she obviously is what she's known for is her having eight babies at the same time. But I think a lot of people forget she actually had 14 kids total and living in California, which feels like a wild thing to do in the modern age, having that many children.
The Controversial Birth of Octuplets
00:02:12
Speaker
Let's set the scene of just how um eccentric the situation was. So Nadia, who used to be nata Natalie Denise and had rebranded herself several times. Her name is Nadia Suleiman when she comes to public attention. She had six children conceived through fertility treatments as a single mother.
00:02:37
Speaker
And for almost all of that time, she is unemployed and is using what she says is anonymous donor sperm to create children through IVF. So she has six children and decides that she needs one more and gets her doctor...
00:02:57
Speaker
Dr. Michael Camrara to put what he says is six embryos, but he actually puts in 12 at one time and eight of them take. And she has octuplets who are the first surviving octuplets in America.
Public Backlash and Financial Struggles
00:03:16
Speaker
wild yeah 14 children yeah and I think a lot of the heat that she got wasn't necessarily the fact that she had 14 kids I think a lot of it came from the fact she was unemployed and she was doing it out of pure desire of quote wanting to be a mom a single mom more than anything yeah And not being able to financially support and also at 14 kids, even emotionally support all of these children, I think is really where her scrutiny started.
00:03:53
Speaker
Because the ones we've talked about in the past, and I think people are familiar with who have a lot of kids tend to come from, some kind of religious background. And don't get me wrong, there are exceptions to that. But we talk about like the Duggar family or the Kingstons or FLDS.
Comparison to Other Large Families
00:04:12
Speaker
And these people are very, very large families, 10, 14 kids.
00:04:18
Speaker
But it's also a cultural thing. Everyone they know comes from families like this. And they're able to have that kind of support that they know what to expect.
00:04:31
Speaker
And I think when you have a modern woman trying to do this as well, like she was by herself. She didn't have the support that a lot of these other communities have.
00:04:44
Speaker
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean, it' was very out of the norm, what she was doing, and her family wasn't really in favor of it either at the time. They thought it was pretty excessive to have this many children.
Media Appearances for Financial Support
00:04:56
Speaker
And I think for two um gainfully employed people, this amount of children would be...
00:05:05
Speaker
impossible still. I know that people do it, but it boggles belief that you could really successfully, financially, emotionally, physically, logistically parent, house all of these children.
00:05:20
Speaker
And to do it by yourself without a steady stream of income also seems... just even more difficult. And when she had the first surviving set of octuplets and even during the pregnancy, it was so sensational that she became, on you know, a huge household name, basically, and was on different talk shows and did lots of different appearances and was in tabloids and newspapers, magazines, and made money doing that, which...
00:05:53
Speaker
which helped you know but it's still a enormous amount of kids to support oh 100 and she was living in california to top that all off which is also one of the most expensive places to raise kids and what we learned a lot of her publicity because like you said she she jumped in and depending on different podcasts and reviewers and new media outlets you listen to her motivation tends to change so you have everyone from being she just was a mom didn't want the publicity didn't want to have her kids exploited but like because it's so strange it kind of got thrust upon her and then you have other
00:06:41
Speaker
extreme end that people are saying that she kind of took advantage of the situation and used it to her benefit to quote become famous and it's an interesting how far that is Because she did become
Lifestyle Choices Under Scrutiny
00:07:00
Speaker
a media sensation. And she presented this idea that she is now going to get into fitness and faith. And she's going to raise her family vegan. And all these other decisions. Which is great.
00:07:14
Speaker
But again, how are you going to prioritize your fitness journey after having 14 children at over the welfare of your children.
00:07:26
Speaker
Like, how are you going to afford to feed all these children vegan, which is an expensive lifestyle. I understand there's a lot of health benefits, but when you're on disability or getting money just from like the talk shows or occasional counseling sessions that you get hired to do, that's still not enough to raise 14 kids.
00:07:48
Speaker
Yet, you're gonna pay for a gym membership. You're going to ah feed your kids a vegan lifestyle versus just a healthy diet and a balance. So she really kind of, depending on what you read, had such drastic opinions kind of either of herself or thrusted onto her.
00:08:12
Speaker
Yeah, I think that people assumed a lot about how she was essentially, you know, abusing welfare, abusing the system, and was at the same time trying to live like a luxurious type lifestyle with a million kids and it just was, you know, it didn't sit well with people and she faced a ton of scrutiny for pretty much everything that she did. And she's always said that she didn't want fame and it was just thrust upon her.
00:08:47
Speaker
And it is true that she would have had to kind of actively avoid the fame if she really did not want to be a part of that. But I think that she kind of needed to take whatever she could get at that point. Like she put herself in a position where she basically couldn't say no.
00:09:02
Speaker
Which led to her, you know, making even more bad decisions, like not reporting all of her earnings and getting charged with fraud because she was getting public assistance and not reporting her
Legal Troubles and Welfare Fraud
00:09:15
Speaker
income. And when you're a celebrity, it's even harder to get away with stuff like that.
00:09:20
Speaker
Yeah, I would i use the celebrity loosely. That's true. I think you kind of hit the nail is the public. is She wasn't like she was just on one public assistant. She was on CalWORK. She was on Capra. She was on Medicaid. Like she was on multiple different kinds in multiple different areas. And it got to a point where.
00:09:44
Speaker
it I don't even think it was the fact they were looking into it. I think it was just because of how popular it is and how much she was using really is what sparked that. Because if you don't keep up with that kind of stuff, they're going to start looking into it.
00:09:59
Speaker
And when you're also taking avenues that are not necessarily...
00:10:10
Speaker
has lot of word it publicly accepted, which we'll get to in a second. But you have these avenues and you're again, blaming or justifying your behavior because you have all these kids that you chose to have. And I think that's part of where the pushback was.
Public Perception and Adult Work Decisions
00:10:29
Speaker
It'd be different if,
00:10:31
Speaker
she was making money like here and there like any way she could i think there would have been some leeway but it really was just the blatant disregard of she basically said she didn't get anything else and i think that's put the push yeah i i totally agree
00:10:55
Speaker
But yeah, it was ah nearly $30,000 that she didn didn't require, like that she got that she said she never got. And that was from personal appearances, endorsement, media royalties. And she had benefits, I think, of of almost $30,000. So it was pretty much equal. And that's, I think, also the thing is it's not like she made $1,000 and got $20,000. Like she pretty much broke even between the two.
00:11:24
Speaker
Yeah. and at that point, from an outside perspective, be like, listen, hold on, if you made this much money and that's how much you got from us, why do you need it? Like, there's other people who probably need it that aren't getting it.
00:11:38
Speaker
So I could see why they zoned in. Yeah. And I mean, she did ultimately plead no contest to a misdemeanor and she had to pay back like $26,000 the $30,000. Yeah. money. Yeah.
00:11:53
Speaker
which i do i do believe that she probably did need the money But that doesn't mean that you you can't report it and it would affect your income and how much you're going to receive in benefits. And she's always been kind of weird about that in interviews, like sort of dodgy about how she really was just on disability and it wasn't welfare and, you know, that it's overblown.
00:12:18
Speaker
But don't think it really matters. She still was evading, defrauding, being sketchy. Yeah, public assistance. And i think what also is kind of funny in her judgment, she also got ordered for community service to be completed because she has so much of time. to Like, let's just add one more thing that she needs to do in addition to taking care of 14 kids.
00:12:47
Speaker
So it's a it's a complicated one for sure. Yeah, definitely. And I think we definitely need to talk about other things that she was doing to make money. And I feel like that's one of the things she's most infamous for is that she she says that she was basically on the verge of homelessness. And in an act of desperation, she agreed to do porn and she was stripping.
00:13:14
Speaker
And, you know, she has said that it was exploitative and dehumanizing. She didn't want to do it. But... It also enabled her to pay for some plastic surgery, some reconstructive surgery, because her body went through a lot in her, you know, her pregnancy journey. So that, I think, really intensified the public scrutiny against
Societal Judgment and Personal Choices
00:13:38
Speaker
her. And it kind of even changed the perception of her further is that she's, you know, she's all of these stigmas of a single mother to the extreme.
00:13:48
Speaker
hmm. yeah And i I feel like I'm going to be really hard on her during this episode because I i just have such a hard time grasping the idea of like, putting yourself voluntarily into that situation, knowing, like, she was an educated person. She had a bachelor's degree in child development. She wasn't naive to what it takes to properly tend to a child. So, like...
00:14:16
Speaker
i I know going to be hard for throughout this whole episode, but only defense for her is that the one thing I do feel bad is if you do look at pictures before and after, she does look like completely different person. She had a full mommy makeover, as they call it. And i think any woman who goes through that, we see that consistently of there's the scrutiny of women in general with plastic surgery, regardless of your reason, is the, oh, well, you're beautiful always. Like, no matter, every everybody's beautiful. And those are all true. But, like, if a if someone wants to change their appearance to make them themselves feel better, they have every right to do so.
00:14:55
Speaker
And I think particularly people in the spotlight get even more scrutiny of like, why are you doing this? And now adding someone who has so many kids and having the responsibilities of like most women who are raising one child have the concern of like, I don't have time for me.
00:15:15
Speaker
So her doing something for her, I think is also still important because you can't take care of your kids if you don't take care of yourself. But yeah If you're not employed, probably shouldn't get any plus. It's poor choice of funds. But I will say, I think that is a consistent thing we see society kind of do is just attack any kind of physical change.
00:15:40
Speaker
Yes.
Child Neglect Accusations
00:15:41
Speaker
Attacking sex workers, attacking single mothers, attacking poor people, attacking, you know, like there's all she fits all of these categories. And it's kind of like a perfect storm situation. um And she also had some, you know, investigations, like child services was called on her a lot. And I think some of it unjustifiably, probably, but they did find some things like there were some points where she was living in a house with one working toilet with all of these kids.
00:16:15
Speaker
in kind of gross conditions and the kids were never taken into custody they were never really found to be in danger but there was some neglect going on which i think it would almost be impossible not to have some neglect going on in this kind of a situation as a single mother to 14 kids and it kind of led to a situation where these kids are in this situation where they're not famous
Impact of Lifestyle Choices on Children
00:16:44
Speaker
but they're in the spotlight there's paparazzi there's their mother doing weird stuff on social media putting them in front of cameras she's doing sex work she's doing porn that's all very well known and
00:17:01
Speaker
Through all of this, these kids are living in not great conditions and not getting that much attention. So it's, you know, it's just really not an ideal situation all around.
00:17:12
Speaker
Oh, absolutely. And part of these investigations were not just standard neglect. There was abuse conversations, there was sexual abuse conversations, where even her mental capacity and mental well-being was being brought into question. Where there was an incident that she didn't know where some of her kids were when they were there. And you have external people, i think everyone from her neighbor to her own manager having concerns. The babysitter who's coming in and helping having concerns.
00:17:51
Speaker
So it's not just like it was one person. Because I think sometimes we see like the same person having a problem. These accusations of neglect and abuse were coming from multiple sources, which for me brings up a little bit of more validity to it. um if you have If one person says it, you could probably get out of it. But if you have three or four people saying and the same thing, they are they all liars?
00:18:20
Speaker
Yeah, I don't think so. But I think you also kind of like mentioned something that important is the sex work and the porns that she did and the nude photos. And this was something that was very contradictory to what she would say publicly and then her
Branding as 'Octomom' and Media Attention
00:18:41
Speaker
actions. So she would openly say that she doesn't want to do any of this, but then she would be volunteering for these things and seeking out things that kind of
00:18:54
Speaker
Highlighted her body and then commenting, well, I've been focusing on weight training and after my pregnancy and helping pain management. And this' the behaviors didn't always match depending on who was talking to her.
00:19:09
Speaker
And then she goes and tried to trademark the term Octomom. So again, if you're in this just to help like survive, why are you trying to trademark something the media named you? like I mean, to be fair, we did say in the beginning that nobody knows her name and she's just Octomob. Very true. So really, how can anyone else use this name for anything? You know what mean? It's... yeah
00:19:42
Speaker
Yeah. But, you know, something I find kind of interesting is like thinking about her and Kate Gosselin because I feel like that was sort of a you know, that was a sextuplet situation, six babies at once, but it had like a similar media frenzy. But she was able to turn that into a TV show very quickly and was even more in the spotlight and even more of a household name. And I feel like Nadia never really quite had that. She did recently have that Lifetime series, but she was never able to transition into just regular reality TV where we see so many of these giant families.
Reality TV Aspirations and Image Issues
00:20:24
Speaker
I do think she tried. because when you always talk to her managers, and when I say talk to, you I mean listen to interviews on them, um they all kind of were like, we did what we could. Like, there was the potential for that. And Nadia was, they described her as, like, unmanageable, where she was not very compliant. She was very...
00:20:50
Speaker
difficult to work with. And when you're in that world, your manager is your best friend. Like that's the person who gets you everything. And when you're not responsive, when you're not agreeable, it makes things hard.
00:21:10
Speaker
And then when, again, your manager is having concerns about your mental but being and your children who are the spotlight, Like, how can you put that on TV? Hey, let's broadcast neglect. Like, um you can't paint in a picture if she can't fake it. You know what I mean? i don't want to say fake it, but you have families like,
00:21:35
Speaker
the Duggars, for example, and that now that coming out of shiny, happy people and like what was on the screen wasn't necessarily the whole truth. And i don't think any reality show ever is, but if you can't even have the confidence that your client can fake it that much, how are you even going to put your name on the line for this potential opportunity?
00:22:04
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. i do She does seem to be very, very difficult to work with and that there's always some sort of problem. And I think that she has kind of a complicated relationship with the truth in general, which also makes somebody pretty difficult to work with.
00:22:17
Speaker
um And I think that she just has a completely different vibe and image than the Duggars and the
Financial Troubles and Legal Implications
00:22:24
Speaker
Gosselins. And it just doesn't it doesn't hit the palate the same way.
00:22:29
Speaker
no I agree. Yeah. And then there was a lot of controversy even when she started and pretty early on, which makes it harder to start those realities. ah For example, she did in 2012, she filed bankruptcy.
00:22:47
Speaker
And in 2014, she had that welfare fraud. So like, you don't want to put that being the start. Like we look at sister wives, they end up having some financial issues, but that was...
00:23:00
Speaker
seasons into the show you have shiny happy people that came out after the fact again seasons after the original show if you can't start with bankruptcy porn and welfare fraud
00:23:19
Speaker
Unfortunately, because that would actually make for a much better show. That would be so good. i mean, I think it would be great to watch. It would be... There would never be a dull moment going on. Because, i mean, I feel like with the Gosselins, it was kind of controlled chaos. But I don't think that she even had...
00:23:38
Speaker
um a slight amount of control over the kids so it was just constant chaos that we would have been watching and her navigating these very um interesting decisions like i kind of wish she just got a reality show during her pregnancy and they never stopped filming her that would have been a better way to do it yeah yeah calm But again, I think that brings us back to the complicity of it, because even during her pregnancy, that's what sparked a lot of the ethical concerns about how she got pregnant to begin with.
Ethical Concerns in IVF Treatment
00:24:14
Speaker
Yes. Because there was that whole investigation on the doctor who ended up losing his medical license. Yes, and rightfully so. Because even if you have a patient that's asking for this kind of treatment, you should know as a doctor that this is a crazy, ridiculous harm to transfer. And he was he has said that he was just desperate to help her have a family. She really wanted to have a large family, and this is all what she wanted. But this is someone who has had six successful live births.
00:24:49
Speaker
Yeah. you do not need to transfer this many embryos. To me, that reads more of she had that many left and we just, you know, we're going to be done after this cycle. So we're just going to chuck them all in and see what happens. But,
00:25:05
Speaker
The odds of high order multiples were ridiculously high and like the toll and the risk that put on her health and her life and all of the children. It is against incredible odds that they're all alive now, which they are. They're all 16. now yeah and she's 50 i mean she's survived this and but it was an incredibly dangerous position for this doctor to put her in and she's many times and including in her new series that she really regrets not suing him because that could have been millions of dollars basically in malpractice
00:25:42
Speaker
which yeah i don't disagree with the nico bills alone wonder because i agree there it's a million dollar thing if everything thus far that we know is true because knowing what we know of with nadia's way she presents things I would be very curious what his notes say about what their conversations were prior to implantation.
00:26:11
Speaker
Because i definitely agree. I think he was experimenting. I think he knowingly put more than he should have been. But I also wonder how involved she was in the kind of conversation of, let's just let's just put them all in. i can't do this again. Presenting the idea of, I can't do it again. This is my last chance, blah, blah, blah.
00:26:34
Speaker
clearly she probably would have it like on what we know i would be very curious if part of the reason she didn't is she knows that there's something in there that the doctor like she would go down to and don't know why i just feel like she would have if she could have yeah i wonder if maybe Yeah, it's honestly kind of surprising to me because we know that when she, in her previous life, prior to having all of these children, she was psychiatric technician and got injured at work and sued and got her startup money for IVF through that. So it's not like she's the kind of person that wouldn't sue. Right. She certainly would. so
00:27:22
Speaker
and I don't know how long you have to file in that kind of situation, But, i I mean, I'm sure she probably did ask for whatever he ended up doing.
Surviving a Dangerous Pregnancy
00:27:34
Speaker
Like, she says she asked for six embryos.
00:27:36
Speaker
He put it in 12. You know, maybe she... To me, it doesn't make sense that he would put in even more than she'd asked for. but Right. um Either way, that's still on him, ultimately. Oh, 100%. I don't think he's without blame. But I do think...
00:27:54
Speaker
like you mentioned, i'm like she would have if she didn't, if she thinks that something didn't, wouldn't have come out about their conversations prior to, I think she would have personally.
00:28:05
Speaker
Yeah. this Yeah. It's so, I mean, it's so unbelievable to me that she even survived that pregnancy at all. Oh yeah. Yeah. i um And if she had not, then there would have been six children, possibly 14, that would have not had any parents at all because there is no father. And Nadia was in this very serious mortal danger.
00:28:31
Speaker
so again, it's just like wildly irresponsible medical practice. And it's amazing to me how healthy the 16-year-old octuplets seem to be.
00:28:41
Speaker
Oh, yeah. And I think just kind of looking at current, because a lot of this was in the mid 2000s, early 2000s that we were looking at.
Life as a Grandmother
00:28:54
Speaker
And now the octoplets are 16. Her other children are adults. and she became a grandmother recently, which I think is complicated because you look at individuals from a statistical perspective that grow up before they should tend to have these kids younger or aren't taught sexual reproduction, they're not educated on certain things, tend to lead to teen pregnancies.
00:29:33
Speaker
And or young person pregnancies, like very rarely kind of like we talked about, unless there is some kind of connection, are you having a baby in your late teens, early twenties? It's not typically planned.
00:29:48
Speaker
Yeah, definitely. And if it is planned, it's planned because of a lot of times I think because of growing up in a chaotic environment or, maybe not getting all the love that you needed and something like that it or religion or religion yeah again all all kind of questions and i know she's consistently always mentioned that she's working on a memoir about her her resilience and her challenges and
00:30:21
Speaker
and I just again i i kind of want her to finish it because I think it would be very interesting
Future Revelations and Memoirs
00:30:27
Speaker
but i think it would also open a can of worms because whatever she says i think the people that she talks about are going to challenge I think like you mentioned she has this complicated relationship with the truth so when you start publishing a memoir people have the right to challenge that
00:30:48
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, would I read it? Yes. Would I be so thrilled if that came out? Yes. But would, if I was in her family, if I was a work associate, if I knew her in any kind of capacity, I would be very scared about what she would write because I think that she's kind of reckless with what she says and what she does.
00:31:10
Speaker
Oh, I agree. think yeah we touched on on a lot of the main... the main things with octo mom do you have any thing left that we wanted to talk about no i think we talked about most of it she's just one that i think was very chaotic and there's a lot we don't know anything there's a lot we'll never know with her life and i do think as her kids get older we'll start
00:31:43
Speaker
learning more as her kids talk about things because I do think there's going be opportunities in the future for media to reach out to them because again eight surviving octopo is like crazy and their mom will always be octomom and she will always come up at some point And i think there if her patterns show anything, she's going to end up in
Continued Media Presence
00:32:10
Speaker
media again.
00:32:10
Speaker
Because 2025, she just put out a new like TV show. And this happened in, like we said, mid-2000s. So I think she's going to keep popping up.
00:32:22
Speaker
And I hope the kids are more of a focus as we go and we kind of get their perspective on things. Okay. What about you? Any final thoughts? No, I mean, I would love if one of the kids would write a book.
00:32:33
Speaker
I think that would be really, really interesting to get one of their perspectives. I always kind of love like the, I mean, it's sad, but I kind of love hearing about kids who grew up in the spotlight because I just think it's such an interesting childhood experience. And it definitely um would be a unique perspective. And also being just such a high order multiple in such a large family. I think it would be an interesting perspective. And um yeah, I, I hope that she kind of keeps herself in the spotlight a little bit and I'll always be checking in.
00:33:07
Speaker
Time will tell. all right. Well, we'll pick up here next week. Until next time.