Colin Gosselin has revealed that he believes his famous mother, Kate Gosselin, put him in a behavioral facility when he was 12 years old because he didn’t want to be seen on camera with her mother.
“Even at the age of 12, before I was sent away, I was able to think about both sides of things,” Colin said in a September 2025 interview with the US Sun, which has now been published in full, adding, “It really allowed me to look back and see things.”
“And I was stubborn enough to question my mother,” he continued. “I asked her all sorts of questions, but that was even before her rebellion of not wanting to be on camera and not wanting to be part of her circus,” she added, referring to her decision to continue with Kate Plus 8 after her 2009 divorce from Jon Gosselin.
“That question made me not want to be on camera after that, and that’s what really killed her.”
Colin, who was sent to an institution in 2016 after the Duchess claimed he had “unpredictable behavior and violent tendencies” towards his family, also wondered whether the reality star’s “reputation” influenced his decision.
Kate was there for nearly two years until John gained sole custody of Colin in 2018. But before entering the facility, Kate had custody of Colin and his siblings, sextuplets Colin, Alexis, Arden, Leah, Joel and Hannah, 22, and twins Carla and Madeline, 25.
Hannah also appears to have sided with her father, living with Colin and John, but has since bonded with her mother.
“I don’t know what the reason was for that. I don’t know if she was protecting her reputation by kicking me out of the house or the fact that it might be easier to sign a work permit for seven voluntary children instead of seven voluntary children and one involuntary child,” Collin said in an interview. “There’s a lot of room for question there.”
He also said that while he was away from the facility, his mother came to visit him “once, maybe for about 20 minutes,” but “the whole time she was blaming me.”
“I was there for about a year, and the whole time I wore glasses and had tears rolling down my cheeks,” Colin said.
At the time, he recalled, he was “overweight” and “sick” because he was “on all sorts of medications.”
He also claimed that during the visit, his mother, now 51, told him “that I destroyed her family, that her brothers wanted nothing to do with me, and all that.”
Kate’s legal representatives did not immediately respond to Page Six’s request for comment Wednesday evening.
Colin, who recently announced the upcoming release of his bombshell memoir In the Shadow of Eight, which will expose Kate’s cheating behavior during their childhood, has previously claimed that he sent Kate to an institution to cover up what he says was abuse.
“I started telling people what was going on at home, and she sensed that and put me in a place where I couldn’t reveal any secrets,” he said in 2023’s “The Dark Side of the 2000s.”
Meanwhile, Kate has consistently maintained that her son’s accusations were due to mental illness. “My son Colin, who I love dearly, has received multiple psychiatric diagnoses over the years,” she said in part in a 2023 statement.
“For my safety, that of his siblings, and for his own well-being, he was institutionalized after years of outpatient treatment, which proved inadequate for his needs.”
She added that she believed he “remains a very troubled young man who needs a lot of help,” and claimed that “my brothers and sisters and I have not been directly involved in his life due to his past unpredictable behavior and violent tendencies toward us.”
Kate tempered her feelings in a TikTok comment on Tuesday after one follower wrote that the Dancing with the Stars alum’s “heart is with you” amidst escalating cheating claims by Colin’s mother, writing, “Only parents of mentally ill children can understand.”
Collin claimed in 2024 that he was discharged from the Marine Corps due to being held in a detention center.
“I’ve been in the facility long enough to be discharged,” he told Entertainment Tonight. “The fact that I was in the facility, that’s all.”
Kate told her followers on social media on Monday that she would not accept her son’s challenge to take a lie detector test in 2025, after he claims he kept her in a basement with zip ties around his ankles and wrists.
In 2024, her lawyer Richard Puleo told The Sun that he did not believe Kate had done anything to “deliberately harm” Colin, adding that “she did it to protect herself and her family” from what he called “questionable behavior”.
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