Kate Gosselin On Her Secret Family Tragedy & Why She’s Staying In The Spotlight

Kate Gosselin knows all about break-ups, and in Part 2 of Access Hollywood’s interview with the reality mom, Billy Bush asked her about a family tragedy that very few are aware of, a seventh child who did not survive her last pregnancy.

“You mention the seventh child, there was seven in there and now [you have] six. But you don’t elaborate much, it’s just a mention,” Billy said, bringing up the passage in Kate’s new book, “I Just Want You To Know: Letters To My Kids On Love, Faith and Family,” where she made the admission in a letter to daughter Alexis.

“What was her name?” Billy asked.

“Well, we still talk about what we would have named her,” Kate said. “I mean, I only mentioned it once in passing once or twice here or there over the years.”

With the child unable to survive her incredibly high-risk pregnancy, Kate reopened the wounds of loss in a letter to Alexis. Inside her new book, Kate wrote, “As you know, our seventh baby now lives in heaven with Jesus and went there when she was very tiny.”

“I didn’t spend time maybe grieving or dealing with the fact that there was a seventh baby,” Kate said. “It makes you wonder like, who would this baby have been? Alexis still asks about her and so I wanted to kind of include that in her letter.”

In her book, Kate also revealed the wrath she has endured from viewers, some of which have gotten frighteningly close to her family.

“There was a moment where there was vandalism, your tires were slashed outside of your twin’s, Maddy and Cara’s, window,” Billy said.

“That was a moment that you ask yourself, ‘Really? Is this really happening?’” Kate said. “The tire slashing was probably the third, at least, incident of vandalism we had in a short period of time.”

“What else happened?” Billy asked.

“Our mailbox was smashed twice, our house was egged,” Kate said.

“Death threats?” Billy asked.

“Never directly brought to our doorstep, but there were things out there on the Internet that I chose not to pay attention to,” she said.

“When you signed up for the TLC show, you know, they paid you. You sold the privacy. Do you ever have a hard time reconciling that?” Billy asked.

“In that situation, you could shut it down and say, ‘Oh my gosh. Our privacy is gone,’ but at that point we’d still have the paparazzi, we’d still have the fan and viewer inundation when we went out in public and we’d have all of that stuff without the paycheck and to us… It didn’t make sense,” Kate said.

“But I’ve bet you’ve done pretty well,” Billy commented. “Could you, if you had to, retire right now and have the kids be OK?”

“Sadly the answer to that question is no because I have major, major, major, major legal debt. That’s the truth,” Kate said. “I mean, honestly if I could disappear tomorrow because I was financially set and could do so, I love you, Billy, but you would never see me again.”

Kate told Billy that her eight are absolutely enamored with her job on “Dancing with the Stars,” however on the dance floor, they rarely see her costumes accessorized with a smile.

“I do smile, contrary to popular belief,” Kate laughed.

“You have beautiful teeth by the way, they’re very white,” Billy said.

“Oh, thank you,” Kate said. “I tend to take good care of them… When I’m scared to death on the dance floor no, I don’t tend to smile. Who smiles when they’re scared to death?”

Kate’s lack of coordination isn’t lost on her little firecracker, daughter Maddy.

“Maddy called a half an hour before the results show on [Wednesday] and she goes, ‘I just have one question,’ and I was like,’ What?’ And she said, ‘OK, so, like are you getting voted off tonight, or what?’

“I said, ‘Hold on, let me put Tony [Dovolani] on,’” Kate continued. “She asked him and he goes, ‘No’, like Arnold.”

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