'Teen Mom OG' stars get real on romance
Fox411: Amber Portwood and Matt Baier discuss engagement, prison
Amber Portwood and Matt Baier believe their relationship is misunderstood by the media.
The 26-year-old star of MTV’s hit reality TV series “Teen Mom OG” is engaged to the 45-year-old single dad, but the stars aren’t phased by the significant age gap.
The pair met on Twitter and began chatting about what they had in common, Portwood revealed to Fox News.
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“I think the initial thing was music,” Portwood said. “Because I grew up on a lot of older music with my father and everything. It meant a lot to me. So we listened to music, talked about music. It became a great friendship… [We were] best friends for six months to the point that it felt so comfortable enough to meet each other in person. We met and fell in love.”
Baier after a few days the pair felt they'd met who they were "supposed to be with."
The couple are currently gearing up for a wedding on October 13th. However, the duo haven’t decided if they’re going to have cameras capture the special moment for audiences or keep it as a more private affair.
But one thing they’ve never hid was their personal battles with pain killers. The mother of now 8-year-old Leah was addicted to prescription pills, prompting her to go to rehab on several occasions. And even while in rehab, she was still using.
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“I was chewing on fentanyl patches because it doesn’t show up in the urine test,” she tearfully explained. “I didn’t think I’ve seen my daughter for like a month or so. And I was in a really bad place. Probably close to dying. I went to court one day and I said, ‘I want to go to prison.’”
According to Portwood, she chose prison to save her life. In 2012, she served 17 months of a five-year sentence at Rockville Correctional Facility in Indiana and was released on good behavior, time served and the completion of two prison courses. Today, she still takes medication, but for her mental illness.
“I have borderline personality [disorder] and bipolar disorder,” said Portwood, adding that she works with a psychiatrist to make sure her prescriptions don’t interfere with her sobriety. “When I got out of prison, I was sober from everything and I tried to do it myself for probably about two years. And I didn’t take any medication… Now I do have to take pills for the rest of my life… We started very low, the medication… I’m still on a very low dose of medication, and I’m very proud to say that.”
Today, Portwood is still filming “Teen Mom OG,” but also runs an online fashion store, Be Forever Haute.
And the duo insist everything they show in front of cameras is real. Baier is even getting ready to release his memoir in June, which he said will continue to reveal “the truth.”
“I hope people will see me as not the guy in the tabloids, but the person in the actual book,” said Baier. “Like a human being. The reason I did it was because I wanted people to understand that just because something is in print doesn’t make it true.”
“We don’t go by a script. You see our lives,” added Portwood. “I’ve never let a director or producer tell me what to do, or how to think or what to say. But if I say something and they want me to repeat it, that’s what you do, that’s your job. However, you don’t let them give you the ideas, you don’t let them make your story. And that’s what it becomes, especially after nine years of this.”
A new season of “Teen Mom OG” premieres Monday, April 17th on MTV.
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