Controversial mum-of-14 Natalie Suleman says she’s left her sordid Octomum days behind her for good.
After years of “dehumanising and exploitative” work as a porn star and stripper to make ends meet, Natalie says she’s determined to live a more normal life for the sake of her children.
In a frank tell-all with the Daily Mail, Natalie, now 41, says she was numbing the pain with prescription drug Xanax and would have killed herself if she made a dramatic change.
Natalie openly admits she had plastic surgery to keep the money coming in, but denies ever spending welfare money on operations.
“I admit I’ve had plastic surgery but not half of what the media have said I had,” she confessed.
“I had a breast augmentation after breastfeeding three kids, which I paid for myself as I was working.
“I had a tummy tuck after the octuplets after a media outlet promised me $100,000 to pose nude.
“I have had no work on my face but I admit that in 2008 I injected my lips and it looked horrible. I was so embarrassed and ashamed. In 2009 I did it again because a media outlet paid me.
“I was so embarrassed I denied it, but it feels so freeing to finally tell the truth. I don’t want my girls to go down the path of plastic surgery and wanting to change themselves.”
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Natalie says that she embraced her Octomum persona out of desperation to survive. Contrary to popular belief, Natalie never planned to get pregnant with multiples and only wanted one more child when she went for IVF in 2008.
She had already had six children – including twins – from previous IVF treatments, and only consented to the high number of embryo implants because she feared only one would “take”.
Natalie says that when she told her manager she was quitting, he threatened to sue her if she didn’t turn up for a scheduled bikini shoot.
“I didn’t even have $30 in my pocket, never mind $30,000, so I had to do it,’ she said.
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However, when Natalie returned home from the shoot she found her then 10-year-old daughter Amerah playing dress-up and parading round the house in a pair of spike heels.
“Later on I was cleaning up in the middle of the night and I saw that heel on the stair and the kids were all sleeping.
“All my emotions I’d supressed started to bubble out into rage and I took the heel and threw it across the house and it stuck in the wall.
“It was like I’d escaped prison. That character of Octomum was dead.
“We packed up all our things and I quit my manager.
“I’d rather be homeless with 14 kids living in my van than allow any of my girls, my daughters to go down the path I had gone down.
“If I had stayed in that life I might be dead right now.”
The trained psychiatric nurse and counsellor got a job within a month working with troubled and vulnerable women and moved back to her hometown in Orange County.
