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Those of us who watched the Jon & Kate Plus 8 crisis unfold in real time are unsurprised by Collin Gosselin’s very measured public statements about how his mom scapegoated him and sent him away. It was also predictable that his sister, Mady, came out in defense of their mom to say that it was Collin who was abusive. Jon Gosselin has since defended his son by saying that Mady hasn’t even seen Collin since he was in the sixth grade. The only thing that surprised me was how careful and circumspect Collin was when describing the hell he went through. He just graduated from high school and he sounds like a 30-something man who has been able to put his abusive childhood behind him after a lot of therapy. I truly hope that’s the case for him.
Now Kate Gosselin is responding to Collin’s interview, which aired on the Dark Side of the 2000s documentary. She is of course smearing Collin and claiming he’s violent. This is classic DARVO and it’s despicable.
Following accusations made by Kate’s ex-husband Jon Gosselin and two of the pair’s sextuplets — Collin and Hannah — in Vice TV’s Dark Side of the 2000s, one of the exes’ eldest children Mady called out her estranged brother, in particular, for his previous actions and the claims he made on the show. Now, Kate, 48, is standing by daughter Mady’s initial statement while also shedding light on her alleged past dealings with Collin.
“I have never wanted to have to do this, but I feel I have been backed into a corner and left with no choice. Although it saddens me to do so, I need to speak out now,” she tells PEOPLE exclusively. “My son Collin, whom I love with all my heart, has received multiple psychiatric diagnoses over the years. For the safety of myself, his brothers and sisters and for his own well-being, he was placed in a facility following years of outpatient treatment which proved insufficient for his needs. The decision to admit him was made by emergency room doctors following one of his many attacks/outbursts — this one involving his use of a weapon.
Fast forward to the present day, and following Jon’s removal of Collin from treatment, my son’s unpredictable and violent behavior has sadly continued regularly towards Jon, Hannah and others around him.
Collin’s distorted perception of reality is one of the many issues that he has always struggled with. As many people who have family members grappling with mental health issues can attest, it is rarely and sadly surprising when complete fabrications occur, and this is just another heartbreaking facet of this fight. All parent-child relationships are complex, but when mental illness is involved, it is incredibly complicated and painful, let alone easy for others on the outside to understand.
All measures that were taken in our home were at the explicit recommendation of his pediatric psychiatrist and/or his team of specialists and were put into place to safeguard every member of our family, our friends as well as our family pets.
Unfortunately, I believe Collin remains a very troubled young man who continues to need a lot of help. His brothers and sisters and I have not been directly involved in his life due to his history of unpredictable behavior and violent tendencies towards us. What his sister Mady posted on social media recently is completely accurate and I deeply appreciate her bravery in doing so.
This is all I have to say on the matter and I will not be discussing this subject any further at this time.”
Jon and Collin both have acknowledged in the past that Collin was hospitalized at age 12. In their episode of Vice TV’s Dark Side of the 2000s, Jon said he spent $1 million to get Collin out of treatment. He also previously told the Daily Mail in 2019 that Collin had no known diagnosed medical condition at that time other than common ADHD.
Jon, meanwhile, claimed in the Vice TV program that a doctor said there’s “no diagnosis yet” and that they’re “gonna figure that out…”
Kate has zero sympathy for Collin and didn’t even pay lip service to the fact that she could have done things better. She doesn’t say she wants a relationship with him, that she misses him or that she’s glad that he’s doing OK and wishes him the best. How does Kate even know that Collin’s “unpredictable and violent behavior has sadly continued regularly towards Jon, Hannah and others around him“? She admits in this same statement that she’s not “directly involved in his life.”
This woman is a narcissist who turned her children against their father and against each other. I’m glad that Hannah and Collin got out and got help from their dad and that the rest of these kids are now old enough to leave. This sad story shows how children in entertainment, especially reality shows, need more protections. They cannot consent to having their childhoods broadcasted and it’s clear that so many of their parents do not have their best interests in mind. Kate Gosselin abused her kids, picked one to make an example of to his siblings and sent him away for acting out. She didn’t even inform Collin’s dad that he had been institutionalized. When Collin revealed just a small fraction of what he went through, Kate attacked him and blamed him for it. It would be laughable if it wasn’t so cruel.
photos credit Getty and Will Wade Jr., PacificCoastNews.com/Avalon.red
Oh Kate showing us exactly who Colin says you are is nothing new to those who watched you abuse your children in one form or another. Seek help you miserable monster. The ugly inside you is showing on your face. Unfortunately I believe more will be coming out as those kids get older and start leaving her.
Uh Karen…I mean Kate, your son was institutionalized for a decade and you have nothing to say? Except to praise your mini-Kate for speaking on your behalf? Why don’t you reach out to your son Collin, IF he will allow you after the years of abuse and torment, to see how HE is doing? We don’t care how you are. As parents we want the best for our children. We want to do better for them than what WE went through. IF my son was institutionalized, I would have been up there at every opportunity during visiting hours. I would have let him know that I loved him, I was there for him and that I hadn’t abandoned him.
Why don’t you try talking to your son FIRST Kate instead of crying “victim” to the press???
Oh, that’s right…..that’s the only trick you know. Grow up. Your son certainly has.
I sincerely hope she does not reach out to him. She will make his life infinitely more miserable. She is clearly a horrible human. And she says her son in sick and violent while in the next breath admitting she hasn’t been in his life. So how would she know? And I suspect his outbursts as a kid were based on frustration, abuse and the crazy-making situation of being watched by the whole world yet not being seen.
What. A. B***h. We’ve all seen two decades of your life, lady, and we know who you are.
“ This is all I have to say on the matter”
Oh, is that ALL?
“I’ve dragged my son through the mud including describing his personal medial history (which I may have made up), but THATS IT. THATS ALL IM SAYING”
I would call this woman a see-you-next-Tuesday, but I’m not even sure that covers it.
She lacks the depth and warmth to be called that.
@Elaine ~ I ROARED!! Where o where is the like button? A thousand likes and a vote for BCOTW
HA!!!!!!!! Omg that was so clever
Elaine! Starting the week with that cold fire!!!
Omg I’m screaming!
BRAVA Elaine!! 👏👏👏👏
My mother caused me huge pain growing up and as a young adult through these same type of narcissistic behaviors… I can’t even type out some of the things she did. The way Kate has responded is so familiar to me, so selfish and angry. I applaud Colin for speaking much more eloquently than I ever could.
@Lauren 42, I am deeply sorry that your mother caused you so much trauma and pain in your childhood and life. I am sending you virtual hugs and excellent juju for you and a lifetime of happiness and joy!! 🤗🤗
This woman, a nurse, thought it was best to throw a blanket on the floor in the laundry room for Collin when he was a little guy & sick with some sort of virus. Nice. Her vague ‘mental health’ assertions sounds a lot like what Britney went through. And how would she know how Collin acts with his dad & his sister if she’s not in touch & hasn’t been for years? Apparently she’d just been writing checks to keep him locked away.
I also find it interesting that Hannah made the break away. I remember when she went on & on about Hannah being her beautiful little Hawaiian girl. Mady may have been her favorite, but I think Hannah was a strong second favorite.
Except they’re Korean, not Hawaiian, and Hannah always pushed back. She always advocated for the siblings. Kate only liked Hannah bc she thought she was a pretty accessory. Hannah and Kara were the two Kate seemed jealous of and would do things like cut their hair, nails, and dress them in more masc clothing. Look back at the show and you’ll see how she treated them. Im glad Kate showed herself.
I think Jon released a statement that Collin has joined the Marines after graduating high school. If that’s the case, I highly doubt Collin is violent or psychotic as Kate suggests. The Marines would not let him in if Collin had a mental health diagnosis that severe.
The psych facility also wouldn’t have let him out if he was violent. This woman is simply a monster. Who BTW we’ve actually seen forcefully yank these kids around on multiple occasions when they were small children on national TV. I think Kate forgot that footage is a thing that exists.
abusersplain it to me w a bit more unconscionable deflection and maybe then this smear share of a child abuse victim by an adult abuser will fly with me
Wait nope
Collin 💕 🌄
No, Kate. You are not backed into a corner, and you never have to speak out against your child unless they are a convicted serial killer.
Even if some of what Kate describes is true, Collin’s behavior is expected in a 12 year old living through an acrimonious divorce, kept away from one parent, and being forced to go through it all on tv for our amusement. I’m kind of surprised she couldn’t make up a better justification; she’s had YEARS to create a better storyline.
Exactly. I am sure Collin’s behavior at that age probably was hard to handle – even families without the baggage these people had can end up with kids who are violent and act out and are troubled. But decent parents figure out solutions that help those kids. They don’t dump them in an institution and wash their hands of them!
All these reasons are why most doctors will not give a young child a diagnosis that follows them through life &, if one is obviously present, will reevaluate if it was the appropriate diagnosis later. Kate is showing her goal & it isn’t her children’s well being.
reality tv can show yourself unfiltered to a certain extent. Yes it’s edited and the show writers/producers can make a character out of you but the things they show are things you did. I can’t believe this woman could watch her own show and not be horrified by the way she yells at her ex-husband in the intro. Not to mention the countless other things she did. I’d have been embarrassed enough to try and change. She just blows it off. She’s unbelievable!
so Kate is trash but let’s not rewrite the narrative that Jon was a good dad, but kate turned her kids against him. He is garbage.
omg. I’ve gone through this with my mother multiple times, to the point that I’m now choosing to move away (I came here to help with my dad, who has dementia and is now in a home). Once I leave, I’m going full nc because this is exactly what she does. Collin sounded so poised and competent in his statements. She sounds like a narcassist who doesn’t care about him or even like him – instead of reaching out to him to repair their relationship, she’s doing this because she’s way more concerned with what other people think of her. Because everything is about her.
I hope Collin stays strong and moves forward, and I hope all of her kids get any help they need because growing up with a parent like that, as I can see now, is terrible.
Team Collin. Poor kid. How awful.
For the short time I watched this show (first season maybe 2) I saw the way she singled out poor Colin. I knew that little guy was in the a long, traumatic childhood with her as his mom. She did not seem loving to him at all. JMO.
she had her 12yo son committed and did not visit him at all (she also didn’t let any of his siblings visit, even under supervision). She didn’t let his father, who had visitation rights, know where Collin was so Jon could visit Collin and provide him some familial support.
Jon only found out where Collin was institutionalized when Collin got a letter to Jon. I’m guessing that Kate kept tight control to ensure that Collin had no outside/familial interaction which means that it’s likely that someone on staff helped make sure Collin’s letter got out to Jon. If true that means that at least one person on staff recognized the cruelty of Kate basically locking Collin away and cutting off all contact. As soon as Jon started asking questions, Kate had Collin relocated to a different facility in Pittsburgh (hours further away from the family).
None of the children, other than Hannah, have had any contact with Collin since he was first institutionalized when he was 12, and he was pretty much cut off from his siblings in the final days he was living with Kate so Mady’s statement seems to be based primarily on the children being told that Collin was dangerously violent. Hannah doesn’t describe his behavior as anything significantly beyond a child acting out badly and felt safe enough to move into Jon’s home with Collin (you would not expect that if she had actual memories of Collin terrorizing his siblings or committed egregious acts of uncontrolled violence prior to being sent away). Even if Collin were diagnosed with Bipolar or Schizophrenia w/a history of some violent outbursts, one would have expected a caring mother to ensure he was getting diagnosed, getting the best of care in the form of finding which medication regimen worked for him plus psychological therapy, given him emotional support and worked with his psych team to have some additional family support/visits (supervised/family counseling visits at the very least) to help him get better as opposed to deciding he was some sort of sociopath that needed to be locked up for life.
One additional thing that really stuck in my craw: despite locking Collin away, knowing he’d never be back, they continued to call the show Kate + 8.
I’m not surprised Kate has never been able to hide the fact that she is a horrible person.
I remember, after not watching the show for years, I turned into one episode were Kate was screaming at the, kids who were crying because the nanny split the last slice of pizza between 2 or 3 of the kids. Because the slice, was going to be for the married bodyguard she was having an affair with.
I have always been surprised that CPS was not called after that episode alone.
I think that even some members of her family called CPS but nothing was ever done. My guess is that the producers helped their cash cow out whenever CPS came calling
This frustrates me even more and I’m not the least surprised if TLC protected their cash cow at the expense of the children’s well-being because it was outed that one of the production people working on the show was a child predator.
TLC tried to downplay it, but given their history, where multiple shows where children were/are had a child predator involved in the shows in some aspect. It speaks volumes that TLC never actually did their homework on the type of people they were hiring.
I always felt so sorry for those children and even a little bit for Jon though I think he’s messy as hell. Kate is a really miserable person, who seems to be a user, abuser, manipulator and an opportunist.
What a piece of work, and all of this is so familiar to me it’s downright triggering. The kids siding with her are still young and still processing/under her control. She has repeated this narrative so much to them since they were little – it’s no surprise they are reciting it as their truth. Wait until they are 50 and have children of their own – wait until they start processing their own independent recollections – they will want nothing to do with her.
My mom had 4 children – only one of them speaks to her. One of my siblings and I are 100% no contact, I am the latest having made that decision only recently. Another sibling calls 2-3 times a year and keeps contact to a bare minimum. The only one who contacts her regularly is the oldest who was out of the house by the time she went full on abuser.
That Karen haircut in the last picture – damn.
WW abusing her children who are POC is also downright triggering. Where the hell was CPS for all of this???
I have no contact with my mother either Side Eye. This is VERY triggering. People like Kate see their children as property. They MUST conform to the parents standard. When they don’t, they’re discarded.
Hugs to you K8erade! I am so glad there are now conversations about cutting out toxic family. It took me having a kid and saying I don’t want my kid around this. I wish I had done this for myself a long time ago, it would have spared me years of heartache and hoping in vain this person may grow or change but she never does.
Kate should have kept silent. Anyone with eyeballs has known what she’s about since tlc aired their dysfunctional and awful family life. Team Colin.
I feel for all their kids, they were exploited and used, and fed a lifetime of lies.
When you enlist in the military, they require everything you have about your medical history. They will find out if you’ve had therapy, been medicated for certain issues, etc… MEPS runs you through the gamut of background and health checks and even one small blip can set the process back several weeks. The fact that Colin is currently at basic right now, rather than later on in the summer, says that his evaluations cleared him for duty.
Kate is telling on herself each time she says something about the children negatively, but nothing says more than her institutionalizing her child and then never visiting him again. He was 11-12, a literal child, and she abandoned him entirely and pretended as if he simply didn’t exist. Her saying that this was recommended by professionals is her outing herself as a liar, because no child psychologist, no child behavioral specialist, no child psychiatrist, no pediatrician would ever recommend doing what she did. Alienation of a child’s familial support system is abusive and for a child supposedly in a mental health crisis, the last thing any person in the medical and/or mental health field would ever ever ever recommend is not just the removal of that support, but the complete evisceration of it.
Kate is a liar.
Thank you! I worked at a lockdown psychiatric facility for children at the beginning of my career. Every weekend families would come for therapy and to visit with their child. At no point in time, would a therapist ever suggest cutting off contact with a child in an institution. It did not happen. Even if a parent could not make it on the weekend in person, then phone calls were done.
I saw some of my client’s parents take out second and third mortgages to pay for their child’s treatment. That’s love. Kate is a vile person, you’ll never convince me otherwise.
Thank you DaisyFly!!! Awesome post. You are spot on – everything you just said.
Am I remembering this right: Colin was sent away at 12 and there was no announcement to his siblings and they never asked about him to their mom as if they knew not to ask? How messed up is that? Like they knew don’t ask, don’t get on her bad side what happened to Colin can happen to you
They all went to school together too, his classmates didn’t ask hey where’s your brother?
Jesus this is so messed up of Kate, she’s even worse than I thought
I hope Colin has the best support system reminding him it wasn’t his fault.
She does NOT have to speak out. She COULD keep her mouth shut to protect her child over herself, but she would never do that.
I’ve seen narcissists tell all sorts of lies about their own children’s mental health to make themselves victims. That’s page 1 of the narcissist playbook. She is not credible.
I dont understand how anyone (besides her brainwashed kids) can believe anything that woman says. She’s so vile.
Toxic people who feel like kids are property believe and agree with Kate. One of those people love to leave comments on here attacking Colin for speaking out.
Collin was 11 when he was sent away, but he had been isolated and “homeschooled” by Kate for a year before that. Hannah said he was isolated from the family at meal and play times. That poor kid.
Jon and the kids didn’t know where Collin was. Kate took pleasure in that. There is an old clip of that circulating somewhere.
Jon got close to discovering the first facility, but then Collin was transferred. Once Hannah found out where Collin was, she had to fight (literally and legally), to stay with Jon. Then the two teamed up to get Collin out. It wasn’t easy or cheap. After a long fight, Kate didn’t bother showing up to the custody hearing.
Kate said her Instagram post was her last word, but she was very active in the comments. She even implied Collin lied about his past to get into the Marines.
Hannah participated in the same show, but she escaped Kate’s wrath. Kate works very hard privately and publicly to make Collin the only “bad” one.
Kate is a monster.
I remember watching their show thinking how overwhelmed I would be with that many kids. Just getting all of them into shoes, getting out the door, potty training, all of it had to be endless and stressful. But as messy as Jon was he had the patience and enjoyed his time with the kids. Good on him for paying out so much money to get Colin. They were all abused by Kate, she had no business having so many children. She had help and there’s no excuse for her abhorrent behavior. May Colin, Hannah, and all of the kids reconnect and heal and thrive.
Wow, what a disgusting and vile woman Kate is!! A narcissist still gaslighting her own son. If she has no relationship with him, how the hell would she know if he was violent with Jon or his sister Hannah and others? Way to expose herself as a complete liar!! As others pointed out here, with Colin’s acceptance into the Marines, a full psychiatric history would be done and he wouldn’t be accepted and cleared if any of the things she is saying are true.
I hope Colin continues to heal from the traumatic past of having this b**ch for a mother. My heart goes out to him.
He is still practically a child, if he’s violent (which I doubt or else the institution and court system wouldn’t have granted John custody and released him. He was in a psych facility they cannot legally discharge violent patients)- THAT’S ON HER as his sole raising parent for years. She blocked John out of his life for years and then threw Collin in an institution after exploiting him, a special needs child, for his entire early childhood. If Collin’s violent that’s your doing Kate. Especially as we’ve seen her manhandle these children at times on her TV show so we know who modeled this. Take some damn responsibility you’re the adult. That kid was not raised in a vacuum. She’s absolutely sickening.
“Distorted version of reality?” It runs in the family
Jon to Kate, while they and the kids were riding, and what I think was a little train going through a park? Kate and Jon weren’t sitting together, and he said the following to her:
“ if you stick me with Colin again, I’m going home”
The family heard this. I didn’t know which one Colin was or why Jon said it, but I’ll never forget all the bad parenting behind that statement.
I hope colin isn’t reading this.
Yeah, she’s awful. The Gosselins come from the County where I live; they were always in the papers even before the TV show.
I will never forget how they published a list in the paper of all the stuff they wanted when the babies were born. I get that it is hard to afford kids, but this was their decision. It always rubbed me the wrong way that they had this list of stuff, including a new van. They got it, too.
Anyway, Jon and Kate struck me as major attention-seekers. In it for the money and fame. Not surprised to hear the home situation wasn’t great. My heart goes out to the kids.
I was wondering if anyone else remembered the greed. I read something years ago about how it was Kate’s idea to do IVF this second time (after the twins) and then not do selective reduction when she found out there were six fetuses. Jon was like, how are we going to afford this? And she pitched the tv show to him. Later I read, she said, what am I supposed to do, work 5 12-hour shifts a week to make enough money to support them? My parents were far from perfect, but they both worked hard and my dad had two jobs (National Guard was second) and they stopped after two kids when they realized what they could afford. They even worked opposite shifts so we had a parent to be there with us. Kate seems like she had kids just for the attention and money.
Astonishing that she put put her own life and health in jeopardy, that way.