When Collin’s dad Jon Gosselin got custody of him and his sister Hannah in 2018, the court mandated that Collin and Hannah reunite with their fellow sextuplets
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():format(jpeg)/kate-gosselin-children-wife-swap-071026-b096532f13444f74a9a1e62ad394a002.jpg "Kate Gosselin, Joel Kevin Gosselin, Collin Thomas Gosselin, Madelyn")
Credit: Donna Svennevik/Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty
NEED TO KNOW
- Collin Gosselin recalls a court-mandated 2019 reunion with his sextuplet siblings at a Pennsylvania amusement center
- He says he had not seen the siblings since childhood after living separately from them for years
- Collin shares his account in his new memoir, In the Shadow of Eight: Surviving the Reality of My Childhood
Former Jon & Kate Plus 8 star Collin Gosselin is opening up about the last time he and his sextuplet siblings all saw each other seven years ago.
In his new memoir, In the Shadow of Eight: Surviving the Reality of My Childhood, Collin, 22, remembered meeting up with siblings Leah, Alexis, Joel and Aaden at the Works, an amusement center in Wyomissing, Pa., for an hour-long reunion in spring 2019 that had been mandated by the court when their dad, Jon Gosselin, got custody of him and his sister Hannah the December prior. At the time, Leah, Alexis, Joel and Aaden, as well as twins Mady and Cara were still living with mom Kate Gosselin, who split from Jon in 2009.
Collin said he’d been hesitant to meet up with his siblings — who all rose to fame on the family’s reality show, which premiered in 2007 — as “we’d been growing up in completely different worlds. They were living under my mom’s thumb, and I knew exactly what that meant — sheltered, and shaped by her version of things. Whatever they believed about me, I knew it wasn’t coming from their own experience. It was coming from what they’d been told. And I had a feeling none of it was positive.”
Credit: Jon Gosselin/Instagram
Prior to the reunion, Collin hadn’t seen any of his siblings except for Hannah since he was 11, when he said Kate had him hospitalized and sent to live at an institution after he attempted to run away from her home. Collin claimed Kate physically and emotionally abused him for years and kept him locked in a basement bedroom.
When he first saw his siblings at the Works, Collin said he was surprised to see how much they all had changed since the last time they’d seen each other.
“Leah and Alexis each carried purses, and I could tell they had lip gloss on,” he said. “Joel’s face was filled out like a teenager’s, not a kid’s. Aaden’s hair was longer than last time. It was hard to wrap my head around the fact they’d kept moving forward without me.”
He said that after standing there “awkwardly for God knows how long,” he and Hannah made the first move and walked into the arcade. After playing some games, Collin bought lemonades for his siblings with the money Jon gave him.
“As they cracked opened the lemonade bottles, our chatter started opening up,” he said. “We were quicker to laugh, unselfconscious in our oohs and ahhs, watching each other win and lose various games. Maybe there was still a small connection left that could grow.”
Since Collin said he and Hannah had gotten more money from Jon, 49, than the other kids had gotten from Kate, 51, he started to add some of his own money to their cards.
“I started to hope that with every swipe of my debit card, they’d like me a little more,” he said. “And then I ran out of money.”
Credit: Donna Svennevik/Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty
They tried to visit Ballocity, an area of the amusement center he said had “slides, a ball pit and tunnels with nets that caught you when you fell,” but were disappointed when they saw a sign saying only kids 12 and under were allowed in.
“Each of them had blossomed and grown up,” Collin said. “They weren’t the chaotic, silly, innocent kids with kitchen-shears haircuts and OshKosh overalls I left three years earlier, and neither was I. We had grown up. Separately.”
Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE’s free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.
Collin realized they’d missed out on years they could’ve spent playing at the center “laughing, climbing, falling, getting back up.”
“I’d been medicated, restrained, kept in an enclosure behind locked doors and security glass,” he said, referencing both his basement bedroom at Kate’s home, as well as the first institution he was sent to, Fairmount Behavioral Health System. “They’d become America’s sweethearts, grown up in front of an audience, navigating adolescence and some weird version of fame while always trying to look like the perfect family. We weren’t those kids anymore. Not together, at least.”
When the hour was up, Collin said the siblings all exchanged “fast and casual” goodbyes with “side-hugs and murmured see you laters.” When Alexis, Aaden, Leah and Joel headed toward the exit, he said he stayed behind out of fear of potentially seeing Kate outside.
“The possibility of seeing her again, even just for a second, was more than I could handle,” he said. “I pictured her looking at me, disgusted, reminding me that I’d broken our family. I imagined her telling everyone that everything that was so hard about today was my fault, and no one else’s.”
Collin said he hasn’t seen Alexis, Aaden, Leah and Joel “since” that visit but that he still cares for them and Mady and Cara.
“No matter what’s happened or what was said, no matter how things look from the outside — I love you,” he said. “I always have and always will.”
While Kate has not responded to specific claims in Collin’s memoir, she said in a 2023 Instagram statement that “all measures that were taken in our home were at the explicit recommendation of [Collin’s] 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.”
In 2024, Kate’s attorney, Richard Puleo, told The Sun that he didn’t believe that Kate had done anything to “intentionally harm” her son and that “she did what she did to protect herself and her family” from what he called “troubled behavior.”
The day after the memoir was published, Kate reacted through a TikTok comment. A video she shared on Oct. 10 about her dog began filling with comments on Oct. 13.
One commenter shared her support of Kate in the comments of the post saying, “It should be illegal to defame someone that way, but I just wanted to say you are doing a great job keeping your head up through all of this. “We love you!” Kate responded: “Thank you so much. I know rational logical ppl or anyone who has dealt with mental illness understands what’s going on here :).”
Elsewhere under the comment thread, Kate liked a message from a user who claimed “he” would “regret all of this someday” and alleged that he’d been “encouraged and enabled by other dysfunctional and mentally ill people.” They wrote that they were “sorry that you have to relive this over and over” and called the situation “gross.”
Kate claimed in the thread: “Exactly! I had nothing to do with it, except for consent because it was medically necessary.”
PEOPLE has reached out to Puleo and Fairmount for comment.
Collin’s memoir included a statement from Fairmount that said they do not comment on specific patients and that “at Fairmount Behavioral Health System, every day our staff strives to maintain a total therapeutic environment through individualized treatment for each patient.”
In the Shadow of Eight is available now from Grand Central Publishing, wherever books are sold.
If you suspect child abuse, call the Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-4-A-Child or 1-800-422-4453, or go to www.childhelp.org. All calls are toll-free and confidential. The hotline is available 24/7 in more than 170 languages.
Comments
Post a Comment