Collin Gosselin is speaking out about the alleged “small holding cell” his mother Kate kept him in for two years.
In his new memoir “In the Shadow of Eight: Surviving the Reality of My Childhood,” Collin, 22, describes being moved to a walled-off corner of the family’s unfinished basement as a child, where he says surveillance cameras monitored his every move and he was isolated from his seven siblings. The room, which he claims was built by a contractor on Kate’s orders, contained only an air mattress, a pillow, and books.
“The cameras were connected to a device about the size of a baby monitor, it hung from a lanyard so it could be worn around someone’s wrist,” he writes in the book. “My mom carried it, then passed it off to a nanny or assistant when she left the house. It moved from person to person, a small screen that meant eyes were always on me.”
He describes a tiny window near the ceiling, dusty stale air, and temperatures that left him cold. Meals came only after his siblings — sextuplets Alexis, Hannah, Aaden, Leah and Joel, plus older twins Madelyn and Cara — had finished eating upstairs. He could smell their food through the basement vents.
“After the table was cleared and dishes stacked, eating alone at the long table, I felt like a ghost who had missed his own life,” Collin writes. “After I’d eaten and done chores I would be locked back into the room downstairs.”
The bolts on the door made a sound that stuck with him. “The bolts on the door always sounded louder than anything else,” he adds in the memoir.
Weekends brought the noise of his siblings having fun while he waited for Kate to wake and release him. One morning, unable to hold it any longer, he wet himself. “I stood in front of the cameras she had set up, calling her, then looking straight into them, begging,” he writes. “I started crying, quietly at first. Then louder. Trying to wake her up.”
Kate, 51, has pushed back against Collin’s claims before. In a 2023 statement, she said her son “has received multiple psychiatric diagnoses over the years” and described “Collin’s distorted perception of reality” as one of many issues he has struggled with. She added that his “history of unpredictable behavior and violent tendencies” had kept her and his siblings from being directly involved in his life.
On TikTok this June, Kate addressed why she wasn’t suing for defamation, noting that as a “public figure” the “rules are different unfortunately.”
The Gosselins became household names through TLC’s “Jon & Kate Plus 8,” which ran from 2007 to 2017 and documented the Pennsylvania family raising their twins and sextuplets. Jon and Kate divorced in 2009 after a decade of marriage, and the custody battle that followed ended with Jon receiving sole custody of Collin in 2018. The other children’s living arrangements have varied over the years, with Hannah also spending time with Jon.
A source said last month that Kate was “nervous” about the memoir’s release. “Kate doesn’t want anyone in the family to talk about their past,” the source said. “She considers any of the children who talk in the family as traitors.”
Collin previewed the book’s unflinching tone in his own interview. “I’m an adult now, and there’s enough of my life that my mom took from me and [my] childhood that she robbed from me,” he told the outlet.
He continued, “This book is going to expose a lot…. Children deserve to be protected, and that’s what you can expect from my story.”
The alleged basement confinement preceded Collin’s placement in a behavioral facility as a pre-teen, an institutionalization he has previously claimed was meant to hide the abuse from public view. The memoir marks his most detailed account yet of the period, including specifics about the room’s construction and the surveillance system he says tracked him constantly.