America watched Collin Gosselin grow up in front of TLC’s cameras. Now 22, he is telling his own version of what he says happened when they were off, and aiming it at the system he says failed him.
The Pennsylvania family’s long-running fracture deepened Monday, with Collin, one of the Jon & Kate Plus 8 sextuplets the show made famous before they could read, detailing alleged childhood abuse by his mother Kate on Jay Shetty’s On Purpose podcast, per TMZ. The headline claim is as stark as they come: he says his mother zip-tied his hands and feet together.
His account, carried here as his account, reaches back nearly his whole life. Collin says Child and Youth Services reports began in 2006, when he was roughly two years old, and describes being bound with zip ties, locked in a room, and having his ear pulled so hard it swelled, an injury he says he was nervous to show a guidance counselor. He says child protective workers documented his account along with bruises on his knees, which he attributes to being picked up and dropped.
Then comes the fact that powers his whole argument: the report was marked unfounded, the system’s term for claims it could not substantiate. And that is where Collin’s telling turns, because he is not just recounting; he is campaigning. He argues the system should change, that investigators should at least have checked on his siblings still living in the home, and that reporting abuse is nearly impossible for a child, because a child who is not removed goes home to the alleged abuser, who may well know about the report.
Kate Gosselin has not responded to the new interview. She has pushed back on Collin’s descriptions of his childhood in the saga’s earlier cycles, and per TMZ’s reporting this June, she declined a lie-detector challenge over his allegations. The 2006-era report at the center of his telling carries the system’s own verdict, unfounded, and no abuse finding against her exists in the record.
The estrangement behind all of it is documented history: Collin was sent away from the family home as a preteen and has spoken before about growing up apart from his mother and most of his siblings. The other Gosselin children appear in his new telling only once, in his argument that someone should have checked on them.
The Sextuplet Who Grew Up
The comments filled with something rarer than verdicts: readers’ own childhood stories, corroborating not his claims about his mother, which no commenter can know, but his system argument. “Former educator…I called CPS once and that baby came back to school black and blue. I was horrified and felt so guilty,” read one, while the most-liked came from inside a school: “As a counselor at school I can confirm he is 100 percent correct, sadly!” The starkest told his exact mechanism: “CPS came and left, and we spent the next 10 years trying to keep it quiet because nothing was as bad as the night CPS left.“
Reality TV filmed eight kids for years and asked little about what happened after the crews packed up. One of them is now an adult with a microphone, an unsubstantiated allegation, and a policy argument aimed straight at the system.
The system said unfounded. He is asking it to look again at itself.
