Collin Gosselin says the adults running “Jon & Kate Plus 8” knew children were being harmed on camera and chose silence over intervention because, as he puts it, “the show must go on.”
Gosselin, one of the sextuplets who grew up on the reality series alongside his parents Jon and Kate and twin sisters Mady and Cara, lays out the accusation in his new memoir, “In the Shadow of Eight: Surviving the Reality of My Childhood.” He told Fox News Digital the industry’s silence was a choice, not an oversight.
“It’s the simple fact that adults that are seeing these things, they surely understood that people are choosing not to say anything because the show must go on,” Gosselin said.
He argues that a child shouldn’t have to say the words “I don’t want to film” before adults step in. “And if, at any point in time, a child can voice that they do not want to film, we need to take that seriously,” he said.
Gosselin said the harm was visible even without a child speaking up, and that adults around him chose not to look.
“But even without a child saying anything, you can tell, you can absolutely tell. It’s reading body language,” he said. “You can absolutely tell and we should be aware. We should be paying attention. We should be protecting children.”
He said production needs and the children’s well-being were often directly at odds. “100% my entire childhood, what was best for production was this direct relationship to what was unhealthy for a child,” he said. “But nobody cared about the welfare of me and my siblings, they cared about my paycheck.”
Gosselin also said his siblings were deliberately kept from knowing what was happening at home while they were at school, and he said he hopes they’ll weigh his account for themselves now that it’s public. “A lot happened that was kept from them intentionally so that they could be told that their brother was this and that,” he said.
As the show’s popularity grew, he said, appearances mattered more than the kids’ actual experience. “It was always about how it looked for everybody else,” he said.
Gosselin was blunt about where the real failure lies — not in not knowing, but in knowing and doing nothing. “Doing something about it because the biggest thing is when we know something’s wrong, and we don’t say anything that’s worse than not knowing it,” he said.
He said the family America watched on television was a curated version of a much harder reality, and that opportunities offered to the children on camera were later taken away off camera.
Institutionalized and medicated
Gosselin also described being placed in a treatment facility as a child following his parents’ divorce and being put on medication there, a period he says left him with no agency over his own life.
“For a long time, my name was dragged, and I was put away. I was essentially put in a juvenile prison, put on all these medications,” he said. “I was a zombie half the time. I had no control, I had nothing.”
“I did what I was told. I went through the motions, and was like a zombie every day,” he said. He later moved in with his father, Jon Gosselin, after Jon won custody.
Gosselin said he held onto a belief that things would eventually improve. “I had very little hope, but I always had some, and I hung on to that … I just kept telling myself that there’s a better future for me and there will be a time where I will be past this,” he said.
No contact with his mother
Gosselin said he has not spoken with his mother, Kate, and described a visit when he was 13 that he says ended badly. “She berated me for all of 20 minutes after not seeing me for over a year,” he said.
He said an apology from her would not be enough to rebuild the relationship. “Reconciliation requires action and accountability,” he said. “I think we can all say, I’m sorry, but if we’re not willing to take the actions and take accountability for what has happened in the past and what happened my entire childhood, then what does that really mean, you know?”
“Jon & Kate Plus 8” aired from 2007 to 2009 and continued as “Kate Plus 8” starting in 2010, following the couple’s divorce. Gosselin’s memoir is out now.
