‘Octomom’ Nadya Suleman eyes an ‘empire’ -- but first, bankruptcy

“Octomom” Nadya Suleman filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy on Monday in Orange County, suggesting there’s some validity to the notion that for a single mom with 14 kids and no steady job, it can be difficult to pay the bills.

“I have had to make some very difficult decisions this year, and filing Chapter 7 was one of them,” Suleman told the Orange County Register in an email sent by her manager. “But I have to do what is best for my children, and I need a fresh start.”

Among those tough choices: Deciding to accept $2,000 a month in food stamps and posing nearly nude in March for British magazine Closer -- though she told Anderson Cooper she was “not ashamed” of what she’d done in exchange for $8,000.

“I have never sacrificed my morals and values,” she said at the time. However, those morals and values now appear to include gigs that didn’t make the cut a couple of years ago.

And yes, she was answering a question specifically about doing porn.

“If it’s a job, and it’s a well-paying job, and it’s going to allow me to get us out of here and a very safe, huge home that they deserve, I’m going to do it,” Suleman told HLN’s “Showbiz Tonight” in an interview that aired Monday. Basically, if it’s a paying gig (though nothing involving touching or even kissing, which could complicate matters in the adult-film arena), she would consider it.

In the documents filed Monday, Suleman declared assets of less than $50,000 and debts somewhere between $500,000 and a million bucks -- a tough nut to crack, even $8,000 at a time. She rose to fame in January 2009 as “Octomom” when she gave birth to octuplets, who joined the six kids she already had. All of the children were conceived via in vitro fertilization.

The house where she and the kids have lived since 2009 was on Monday’s auction schedule until a last-minute reprieve came in the form of an unexplained one-week delay announced on the Orange City Hall steps, the Register reported. It’s unclear how long the gang would be allowed to stay in the house if it were sold.

But Suleman still has high hopes for the future -- if you go by what she just told HLN, which was invited inside her house after authorities stopped by last week to investigate allegations of general neglect. (“We were set up” in photos taken by her hairstylist and given to TMZ, she told “Good Morning America.” Oh yeah, she also hates the name Octomom.)

“I don’t want these kids to just get by,” she emphasized on HLN. “I want us to have, they deserve, I want an empire. And I’m going to have one.”

Kim Kardashian, watch your back?

The answer, she said, is businesses. “But,” she said, “if you’re hated, you’re not marketable.”

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