I’ll admit, I stopped following the Gosselin drama a couple of weeks ago. I find both Kate and Jon to be abhorrent people, and the whole drama with Jon and his latest girlfriend(s) was just sad and depressing. I just read CB’s summary from earlier today about this Star Magazine reporter, Kate Major, and her claims that she was “dating” Jon. As it turns out, Kate Major’s a liar, and now she’s unemployed. Star has a little one sentence update on their site saying this: “Star Senior reporter Kate Major resigned this morning, Thursday, July 23, citing a conflict of interest between her reporting duties for the magazine and her relationship with Jon Gosselin.” Except that Jon’s friends have run to Radar to claim that he’s “distraught” with the notion that he and Kate Major are dating, and that “she just wanted to put herself in the spotlight.” Dur. What did Jon think, that he just had young girls flinging themselves onto his Ed Hardy jock?

Jon Gosselin says he never had a romantic relationship with Star magazine reporter Kate Major and was tricked by her, sources closes to the situation told RadarOnlne.com exclusively.

Major suddenly resigned from Starmagazine Thursday.

Major, 26, announced to the world Wednesday night that she was romantically involved with the 32-year-old Jon & Kate Plus 8 dad. She was at dinner with him last night with Michael Lohan and two couples and Major and Jon had been to dinner Saturday night in New York City.

Meanwhile sources close to the situation told RadarOnline.com that Jon is distraught over Major’s claims that they were romantically involved.

He told a close pal that despite her public proclamation, he never slept with her and never was romantically involved with her.

“Oh my God, I can’t believe she did this to me,” he told a source. “What do I do? She’s totally (bleeping) me over?”

In a statement released Wednesday night, Major said they were romantically involved. “I didn’t mean it to happen, it just did,” she said. “I went to do a story on Jon and ended up falling for him.”

That statement caused the scandal to explode in national news coverage and, the source said, infuriated Jon. Major was unavailable for comment Thurdsday and her father said, “No comment. I don’t want to be involved in this whatsoever,” when a RadarOnline.com reporter asked him about his daughter’s relationship with Jon.

Jon said he went to dinner with Major on Saturday night because she wanted to get details for a story she was writing. But her announcement last night that they were romantically involved completely caught him off guard, the source told RadarOnline.com.

“She just wanted to put herself in the spotlight,” the source said. Jon has been dating Hailey Glassman, 22, who said she had no knowledge of a romantic relationship between Jon and Major.

Major resigned suddenly on Thursday as the controversy over her alleged relationship with Jon grew. Her access to Jon seemed to put her into position to become the perfect Deep Throat for the magazine, on a story that has taken a reality TV family with mediocre ratings and turned them into one of the hottest subjects in the entertainment news world. Major did not say if she would continue working for Star in a freelance role.

[From Radar]

It’s so shocking to think that a Star reporter would have a fishy relationship with the truth! I’m clutching my pearls and dropping my monocle as I type! What the hell was going through Kate Major’s mind? That she was going to be the new Kate Gosselin? That she was going to be famous, just like Jon Gosselin is famous? Here’s a tip for all future “girlfriends” of Jon Gosselin: he’s only famous in the way huge, industrial, environmentally-catastrophic accidents are famous. Jon Gosselin is like Chernobyl. You don’t want to date Chernobyl.

UPDATE: Argh. I hate these people. Now Radar has another interview up, this time with Michael Lohan. He’s talking about how Jon and Kate Major slept over at his house, but Lohan plays coy about whether they slept in the same room. Then Michael says this: “Let me ask you a question: If she was using him why did she resign from the Star?” After reading the full text of a Michael Lohan interview, I feel like I need to take a damn shower. As for whether Jon and Kate Major are really “dating” or “banging” or whether she’s “delusional”… I seriously have no idea.

Photos are from 7/18/09. Credit: INFPhoto.com

Oprah is starting to make herself look a little gullible. In 1996, she had Herman Rosenblat and his wife, Roma Radzicki Rosenblat on her show. Oprah said their romance was “the single greatest love story” she’d ever heard. And that’s saying something. What was so romantic about their tale? Herman is a survivor of the Buchenwald concentration camp. He told Oprah that a young girl saved his life by throwing apples over the camp’s fence. Twelve years later, he said, the pair were set up on a blind date and discovered that Roma was the little girl who tossed the apples. Pretty incredible, and definitely an amazing love story.

Unfortunately, the story isn’t true. While Herman is a survivor of Buchenwald, Roma never tossed him any apples. In fact she and her family were hidden at a farm 210 miles away from the camp. Herman has written his memoirs, Angel at the Fence, which were scheduled to be released in February by Penguin Group – the same publishers that fell for fake memoirists James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces and Margaret Seltzer’s Love and Consequences. Now the book has been scrapped.

After several scholars and family members attacked Mr. Rosenblat’s story in articles last week in The New Republic, Mr. Rosenblat confessed on Saturday to [his agent, Andrea] Hurst … that he had concocted the core of his tale. Ms. Hurst said that in an emotional telephone call … Mr. Rosenblat said his wife had never tossed him apples over the fence.

In a statement released through his agent, Mr. Rosenblat wrote that he had once been shot during a robbery and that while he was recovering in the hospital, “my mother came to me in a dream and said that I must tell my story so that my grandchildren would know of our survival from the Holocaust.”

He said that after the incident he began to write. “I wanted to bring happiness to people, to remind them not to hate, but to love and tolerate all people,” he wrote in the statement. “I brought good feelings to a lot of people and I brought hope to many. My motivation was to make good in this world. In my dreams, Roma will always throw me an apple, but I now know it is only a dream.”

[From the New York Times]

What was Herman’s undoing? A professor at Michigan State University who has been working on a book about Jewish boys who were rescued from Buchenwald. He asked some of the men if the story could have happened, and all of them said no.

The primary sleuth in unmasking his fabrication of the apple story was Kenneth Waltzer, director of Jewish studies at Michigan State University. He has been working on a book on how 904 boys — including the Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel — were saved from death by an underground rescue operation inside Buchenwald, and has interviewed hundreds of survivors, including boys from the ghetto at Piotrkow in Poland who were taken with the young Herman Rosenblat to the camp.

When Dr. Waltzer asked other survivors who were with Mr. Rosenblat about the tossed apple story, they said the story couldn’t possibly be true.

In his research of maps drawn by ex-prisoners, Dr. Waltzer learned that the section of Schlieben where Mr. Rosenblat was housed had fences facing other sections of the camp and only one fence — on the south — facing the outside world. That fence was adjacent to the camp’s SS barracks and the SS men there would have been able to spot a boy regularly speaking to a girl on the other side of the fence, Dr. Waltzer said. Moreover, the fence was electrified and civilians outside the camp were forbidden to walk along the road that bordered the fence.

[From the New York Times]

Versions of Rosenblat’s story have been featured in magazines and one of the Chicken Soup for the Soul books. The couple have been on Oprah’s show twice, and were on CBS’s “Early Show” in October. Something like a little girl throwing apples over a fence doesn’t seem like the worst of lies, however the entire premise of Rosenblat’s story is based on it. I think any Holocaust survivor’s story would be intriguing, but obviously he felt the need for an additional twist.

What I don’t understand is why Rosenblat didn’t tell the story as fiction from the beginning. If I were to read the plot for his story on the back of a novel, I’d find it somewhat intriguing. Most novels mix truth and fiction, and there’s often a great amount of the author’s own experiences in there. It’s hard to do it after the fact – like the way James Frey’s Million Little Pieces is now marketed as partly fiction. But if Rosenblat had done that from the beginning, he could have been honest about being creative, and it wouldn’t have blown up in his face.