Does ‘Teen Mom OG’ Star Matt Baier Have 7 Kids? Amber Portwood Tells Truth About Gary Shirley’s Claim

“Teen Mom OG” star Amber Portwood had a bombshell dropped on her during Monday’s episode when her ex-fiancé, Gary Shirley, claimed her current fiancé, Matt Baier, fathered seven children and abandoned five of them. Portwood was originally dumbfounded by the claim but told the truth about how many kids her husband-to-be has during an exclusive interview with Us Weekly Tuesday.

In the most recent episode, the MTV reality star told her ex she thought Baier, 44, had only two children. A day after the episode ran, Portwood amended to Us Weekly that she knew of five children he had but said they were older and had families of their own. “It wasn’t something that we wanted out,” she said. But having as many as seven kids “is not accurate.”

Shirley, 29, provided Portwood with this false information because they were going through a custody battle with their 6-year-old daughter, Leah, at the time. “Gary had told me a couple weeks after that he actually had known for a while, which just tells me that he just literally waited for the cameras to be there,” she said. “I think what his main goal was, was to humiliate us and to try to make our family look like it’s not stable because this was when we were in the big custody battle with Leah.”

Baier said he wasn’t upset with Shirley because of what the claim did to his reputation but for how it affected his children. “That doesn’t hurt me. That hurts my kids,” he said. “I have no shame at all about my older kids, none whatsoever. I love my older kids, but they were born in a time when I wasn’t capable of taking care of them myself.”

Like Portwood, Baier is a recovering addict. “If you look at both of us now as compared to then — the people — they’re not even similar people,” Baier added. “And I think who we really are has finally come out once we’ve cleaned up.”

Though Portwood and Baier maintain he fathered only five children, the Indiana transplant actually fathered seven children with five women, according to Madison Circuit Court documents exclusively obtained by Radar Online Tuesday. Women from Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota have filed lawsuits against him for overdue child support. Two of them said they have two children with Baier, a native of Massachusetts, which brings the total count to seven. Ashley’s Reality Roundup confirmed Shirley’s accusation in December.

Regardless, Baier and Portwood plan to marry in October.

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