When Natalie (formerly Nadya) Suleman, gave birth to the first surviving set of octuplets in history, she gave extremely limited information about their paternity.
Now she’s finally sharing details about the fathers of her 16-year-old octuplets and 6 older children.
In the March 17 episode of her docuseries, “Confessions of Octomom” on Lifetime, Suleman described her years-long hunt for a “donor dad.”
“One question I was relentlessly asked about in the media is who the donor was,” Suleman said in the docuseries. At the time, she said that the father was a “platonic friend” who was “not a civilian.”
Former and current friends, lawyers and managers and others who know Suleman relay slightly different details. So what is the real story?
Here’s everything Suleman said in the docuseries.
Was Natalie Suleman was married?
Suleman was married to Marcos Gutierrez in her early 20s. They separated in 2000 and officially divorced in 2006.
“I got married only to appease my Middle Eastern family,” she explained. “We never consummated the marriage. That was not a real marriage. It’s not even worth speaking about.”
Suleman may not have been interested in marriage, but she was interested in having kids. She was afraid her conservative family wouldn’t accept her as a mother unless she was first a wife. However, she wasn’t interested in conceiving children with her husband naturally and said that he wasn’t interested in fathering children “artificially.”
Though she referred to her ex-husband as a “potential donor” at the time, he did not father any of her children.
Who was Suleman’s first sperm donor?
In an on-camera Lifetime interview, Denis Beaudoin, Suleman’s ex-boyfriend, claimed to be “the original sperm donor.”
Suleman said that asking Beaudoin to father her children was “natural” and “not really a big deal,” especially since they were in a relationship at the time.
Suleman had endometriosis, which made getting pregnant naturally a challenge, so she began trying intrauterine insemination (IUI) using Beaudoin’s sperm.
After undergoing “at least 10” unsuccessful IUIs, she moved to in vitro fertilization (IVF) with Beaudoin, but their relationship ended a few months later. She did end up getting pregnant with Beaudoin’s sperm though IVF but the ectopic pregnancy was not viable.
“At that point in time, I took that as a sign that maybe he wasn’t the right one,” Suleman said. She decided to move on and look for an alternate donor.
Who fathered Suleman’s 6 older children?
The friend/donor who ultimately fathered Suleman’s older children was “ideal,” she said. “Highly intelligent, tall, good looking, athletic and seemed very mature.” She added, “He was in my life for a year — a couple of years — and then I lost contact with him, but in the back of my mind, I was like, ‘He’d be a really good donor.'”
Suleman said, “I asked him, ‘Hypothetically speaking, if a friend of yours asked you to help them if they wanted to have a child … would you consider helping and donating to a friend?’ He was stunned. And then he agreed to do it.”
Through letters and phone calls, Suleman requested samples from the donor.
“It wasn’t too difficult for the first, like, four. But then I had to really beg him to do it again,” she said. The fifth pregnancy with the donor sperm resulted in twins.
The same donor is the father of all six older children: Elijah, Amerah, Joshua, Aidan, and fraternal twins Caleb and Calyssa.
After that, Suleman shared that the donor said, “Absolutely no.”
Who fathered Suleman’s octuplets?
Suleman said she was “not sad” when that donor refused to father another child. Instead, she saw his refusal as a challenge to overcome.
She contacted a sperm bank in California for her next pregnancy.
“I was determined — I was vehemently determined — to have a seventh. One more,” she recalled. “And I would do it no matter what.”
She purchased one vial of sperm that eventually resulted in her octuplets: Noah, Maliyah, Isaiah, Nariyah, Jonah, Makai, Josiah and Jeremiah.
Do Natalie Suleman’s kids know their biological fathers?
In an on-camera interview, Suleman’s oldest daughter, Amerah, said that she found her father on Facebook when she was 12. She reached out to him without her mother’s knowledge.
The information traveled back to Suleman, who told Amerah that she was welcome to get to know her father once she turned 18. “But after then, I never felt the need to,” Amerah explained. “He’s a stranger. I understood why he didn’t feel the need to be in our lives after the eight came, and that’s it.”
“I was never personally interested in who my biological father was,” said Joshua, Suleman’s 21-year-old son. “She explained to me that it was a friend of hers, a donor. That’s all I needed to know.”
Elijah Suleman, 23, chose not to comment on the topic.
Because the octuplets were conceived from an anonymous donor, they are unable to contact him even if they wanted to.
