Kate Gosselin gets a virtual hand-holding session with Meredith Vieira, is invited to cohost The View and serenely tells Larry King about the vault where she keeps her juicy secrets.
So what does Jon Gosselin get? His ass handed to him, of course.
Whether it was his heart-pounding, "soul mate" connection with 22-year-old Hailey Glassman or his possible reality-TV project with Michael Lohan and K-Fed, ABC News' Chris Cuomo raised an eyebrow at every turn as he single-handedly went to bat for skeptics everywhere during tonight's Primetime: Family Secrets on ABC.
"My heart pounds, I get sweaty—I don't know," Gosselin said of girlfriend Hailey Glassman, who he insists he was not involved with before his separation.
"I feel like I love her more than I did Kate," he said of the woman he somewhat despises nowadays. "I get encouragement from her, I get respect from [Glassman]. Two things that a man needs. This is someone, I mean, like soul mate—like people joke about that. But I'm not joking about that."
Could that just be the rebound effect? inquired Cuomo.
"Hailey and I have talked about that," the 32-year-old father of eight replied. "I have so much to lose in this situation. I could lose custody, I could lose my kids, I could lose—but I feel like with her that I'm not going to lose them. It's just going to get better."
Of course, all this romantic bliss fits right in with Cuomo's midlife crisis theory.
Gosselin maintained that he and Glassman do not go out and party together, despite talk about Hailey's wild, marijuana-smoking past.
"We don't go anywhere! We enjoy watching movies," he said.
Cuomo also suggested that Gosselin's interpretation of the Jon & Kate Plus 8 situation—that he and Kate aren't forcing their kids on camera—"doesn't wash."
But while Jon insisted that his children were willingly active participants, his interrogator took issue with another possible series in his future—Divorcing Dads, a totally heinous-sounding program that could end up starring Gosselin, Lohan and Federline.
"What impression do you think people are going to get from that?" Cuomo asked, demanding to know what the Gosselin children were going to think of their dad.
"It doesn't matter, if they speak from the heart…" began Jon. "It matters—if you care about your kids, it matters," interjected Cuomo.
"My kids don't know Michael Lohan," Gosselin quipped.
"They're going to! They're going to know what you do," Cuomo insisted.
"They know I have a good heart," Gosselin insisted back, adding that he has got to the point where he cannot pay attention to what the media says about him anymore.
"It's just like the change from America's favorite dad to dirtbag. Tomorrow I could be maybe America's favorite dad again. It could be after this interview. I don't know," he said. "Whatever [the tabloids] want to write, let them write it. They're going to write it anyway. I've learned that lesson."
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After spending years playing the afterthought parent, Jon's been stealing the spotlight on his show these days with moments like this.