Watch: Collin Gosselin Alleges Mom Kate Gosselin Once Bound Him With Zip Ties
For a chunk of his childhood, Collin Gosselin says he was minus seven siblings.Â
By the time he’d reached elementary school, the now-22-year-old had tired of growing up in front of cameras alongside fellow sextuplets Leah Gosselin, Alexis Gosselin, Hannah Gosselin, Joel Gosselin and Aaden Gosselin and older twin sisters Mady Gosselin and Cara Gosselin.Â
What had started as TLC’s Jon & Kate Plus 8 in 2007 became Kate Plus 8 once matriarch Kate Gosselin split from Jon Gosselin in 2009 and Collin was eager to divide himself from the whole thing.Â
“I didn’t just voice it,” he explained in an exclusive interview with E! News, “it was in my actions. I literally would move away from the cameras, go to the next room when we were out in public, try to get away when we’re at department stores.”
Though he feels his siblings also weren’t thrilled about putting on the show, “I was the only one who voiced it,” he noted, “and my mom retaliated against me because I wasn’t willing to give in and be a part of the paycheck and the program.”
As he alleges in his newly released memoir In the Shadow of Eight: Surviving the Reality of My Childhood, that retribution came in the form of emotional abuse (in addition to insults, Collin said Kate kept him from seeing his father while relaying that Jon was the one cutting him out), isolation from his siblings and years of increased physical punishments.Â
E! News reached out to reps for Kate and TLC about the accusations in Collin’s book and has not heard back. However, this past June, Kate referred to her son’s accusations as “ridiculous” in the comment section of her TikTok page.
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By the time he was 11, Collin alleges, he was spending some 70 percent of his time locked in his basement bedroom. “We were in the same home,” he told E! of his siblings. “I was living with them, but they would play, they would go have fun.”Â
The situation only escalated when he attempted to escape, Collin landing at Fairmont Behavioral Health System, a Pennsylvania mental health facility where he’d spend the next 21 months of his life before, the reality star reveals, he smuggled a letter out to his father who then fought his ex for custody.Â
Though the Special Forces star is now tight with his dad and sister Hannah, he remains estranged from both his mother and his six other brothers and sisters.Â
“Sending me away from the home and actually not being with my siblings was hard,” he recounted to E!, “but living under the same roof and having a life so separate from them for two years was, I mean, it was devastating.”Â
We’ve added up everything he shared in his new book.Â
Photo by Donna Svennevik/Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty Images
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Photo by Donna Svennevik/Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty Images
Photo by Donna Svennevik/Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty Images
Michael Simon/Getty Images & Noel Vasquez/Getty Images
Amanda Edwards/Getty Images
Instagram/Jon Gosselin
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