Collin Gosselin’s Memoir Ties a Zip-Tie Night to Fairmount

Collin Gosselin writes that his mother bound his wrists and ankles with zip ties when he was 11, then left him in a dark basement for hours. The scene is in In the Shadow of Eight: Surviving the Reality of My Childhood, the Grand Central 304-page memoir released Oct. 13. Kate Gosselin has called his accusations ridiculous and said specialists signed off on the home measures meant to keep the family safe.

Collin, now 22 and one of the Gosselin sextuplets, says that night was the last time she put her hands on him. EMS took him from the house. 22 months at Fairmount Behavioral Health System followed. A child-services file he has shown interviewers closed the complaint as unfounded. The book is his attempt to put that sequence on paper after a childhood spent on TLC.

What Collin Gosselin Says Happened With the Zip Ties

Collin writes that he tried to run away from Kate’s house at 11 because of how he says he was treated there. He had nowhere to go. He came back. In the book, his mattress and the few books he kept were already gone. Then, he writes, she came in holding black plastic strips.

I looked up to her standing there, holding long, shiny strips of black plastic. Then she came at me like a freight train. Her hands were on me immediately. She pried my wrists from my chest and wrapped zip ties around them, pulling them tight. They made a snappy sound as she pulled them tighter. She then moved to my ankles and did the same, zip tying them tight enough that there wasn’t room for any movement.

Collin Gosselin, In the Shadow of Eight

“I remember the pressure more than the pain,” he wrote. “The burning, the way circulation cut off so fast it felt like my hands and feet were disappearing.” He says she stayed silent while she bound him, which he recalls as worse than yelling, then pulled him up by the wrists and threw him down so his tailbone hit the floor.

When she spoke, he writes, the words came fast. “You’re a burden, Collin! You’re a burden to this family!” He says she told him he had brought it on himself, shut off the light, and left him to think about what he had done. He tried to sit up, could not, and went back into a fetal position. “The little room was dark. No sounds from upstairs. Just the quiet hum of the house continuing without me.”

He writes that she later cut the ties with kitchen shears and that her manner changed, the version he says she used when there were witnesses. EMS was waiting. He was taken to a hospital, then to Fairmount. “This was the last time she ever put her hands on me,” he wrote. “My resistance that day convinced her that the only solution was to have me removed completely. If she couldn’t control me at home, she’d make sure I was locked away somewhere else.”

The zip-tie night sits inside a longer basement chapter. Collin writes that he was moved out of the finished room he had shared with brothers Aaden and Joel and into unfinished storage, on an air mattress beside cleaning supplies, with a camera on a lanyard that passed from Kate to a nanny or assistant. He says he banged on a door that locked from the outside when he needed the bathroom. “Sometimes I wonder, if the house had burned down, would anyone have remembered to come unlock the door?”

He also describes a pattern of slaps across the cheekbone, yanks to the ear, and marks he says faded just in time for new ones. He writes that a teacher once noticed the ear. On NPR’s All Things Considered on Oct. 13, he said the physical treatment was aimed at him. “My mom would hit me. She would pull my ear, open-hand slap me, push me, yank me around.” He said he pushed back because he no longer wanted to be on television. People who need to talk through child abuse can call or text the Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-422-4453, staffed 24 hours in more than 170 languages.

Kate Still Calls His Account Ridiculous

Kate had not issued a new statement on the memoir’s specific scenes by Oct. 13, when the book went on sale. Her lawyer and her own posts from earlier years are the record she has left standing. In June she called Collin’s accusations “ridiculous” in her TikTok comments and wrote that her page was “about kindness, love, honesty and definitely not for made up accusation discussion.”

The fuller case she has made is that Collin was a sick child, that the house was managing risk, and that outsiders cannot see that fight. She put that in an Instagram statement in 2023, which Collin reprints in the book.

All measures that were taken in our home were at the explicit recommendation of his 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. Unfortunately, I believe Collin remains a very troubled young man who continues to need a lot of help. His brothers and sisters and I have not been directly involved in his life due to his history of unpredictable behavior and violent tendencies towards us.

Kate Gosselin, Instagram statement, 2023

In the same post she wrote that Collin had received multiple psychiatric diagnoses, that emergency-room doctors admitted him after an outburst that involved a weapon, and that “complete fabrications” are a heartbreaking part of mental illness. She said his “distorted perception of reality” had continued toward Jon, Hannah, and other people after Jon removed him from treatment.

KATE’S PUBLIC ANSWERS

• 2023 Instagram: She said home measures followed a pediatric psychiatrist and a specialist team, and that ER doctors sent Collin into a facility after an outburst involving a weapon.
• 2024, Richard Puleo: Kate’s lawyer said he had known the eight children since they were small and did not believe she had done anything to harm Collin on purpose.
• June 2026 TikTok: She called the accusations ridiculous and said her page was not the place for that discussion.
• On suing him: She told commenters she could not, because she is a public figure, and that she had already consulted a Los Angeles attorney when “crazy stuff” circulated.
• Oct. 13, 2026: No new comment on the memoir’s zip-tie chapter, the basement lock, or the Fairmount pages.

Puleo’s 2024 statement is the closest thing to a legal voice on her side. “There is always two sides to every story,” he said, adding that people remember the past differently. He also said that if Kate had done what Collin alleges, “she would have been investigated by the authorities and prosecuted.” That line is the hinge the book now presses, because Collin says an investigation did happen, and that it closed without a finding against her.

The Complaint File Came Back Unfounded

On Jay Shetty’s On Purpose podcast, Collin walked the host through a report he says came out of the Fairmount period and from child protective services. In the account he read aloud, Kate is quoted saying, “He always tells wild stories. I’ve been investigated before. Yes, I have a room that I lock him in, and a psychiatrist approved that.” He told Shetty the same file notes that the child reported being zip-tied and that there were bruises on his knees, which he says came from being picked up and dropped.

“Then you look at the determination of the report, and you know what it says? Unfounded.” He has also put medical records in the book that, he argues, show he was misdiagnosed. That is his case in one stack of paper: the complaint listed the restraints and the marks, a psychiatrist’s approval was already on the locked room, and the stamp at the bottom still cleared the house.

Kate’s 2023 post is the counter-stack. She says the locked room and the other steps were clinical, that the admission was a hospital decision after violence, and that Collin’s story is a symptom. Puleo says he does not believe she meant harm. Those two files, the one Collin reads on a podcast and the one Kate wrote on Instagram, are now both public. Neither has been tested in a new court case tied to this book.

Collin has asked her, more than once, to sit for a lie detector. In interviews around publication he said the question he would ask, hooked to the machines, is whether she zip-tied him. She has not accepted. He told one interviewer it still sounds unbelievable that a parent would do that, which is why he wants the test.

22 Months Inside Fairmount Behavioral Health

Fairmount Behavioral Health System sits on a 27-acre campus at 561 Fairthorne Ave. in Philadelphia’s Roxborough section, bordering Fairmount Park. The hospital’s own about page says staff work to keep a total therapeutic environment for each patient. Collin’s memoir includes a statement from the hospital that it does not comment on specific patients and that every day staff strive to maintain that environment through individualized treatment.

He was 11 when he went in. On NPR he said adults told him nothing about why. “For 22 months, I was in this institution. And I did ask. And upon asking, there were no answers.” He spent his 13th and 14th birthdays in care. He writes that one employee called him “fat boy,” and that another bent kids’ wrists forward “until it felt like it was going to snap” when they stepped out of line. After Fairmount he was moved to George Junior Republic, where he says he began coming off the medication he claims Kate and the hospital had forced on him. Grand Central’s listing says the book covers “the cocktail of powerful antipsychotics forced on an eleven-year-old boy.”

Paris Hilton, in a blurb on the publisher page, wrote that she knows firsthand what institutional trauma can do to a young person, and that she was moved by Collin’s honesty. Jay Shetty’s blurb sits above hers. Collin has been doing Shetty’s show, morning television, and NPR with a worn voice and a short list of things he wants believed.

FROM THE BASEMENT TO CUSTODY

1. 2007: Jon & Kate Plus 8 premieres and puts the twins and the six toddlers on Discovery Health, then TLC.
2. 2009: Jon and Kate split. The cameras stay on the kids as the marriage becomes tabloid copy.
3. 2016: Collin, 11, says he was zip-tied, left for hours, then removed by EMS and sent to Fairmount.
4. 2017: A letter he wrote reaches Jon, who has said he did not know where his son was until it arrived.
5. December 2018: A Pennsylvania court awards Jon custody after Kate does not appear at the hearing. Collin goes home to his father.
6. 2023: Kate posts the specialist-and-safety statement. Jon, on Vice’s Dark Side of the 2000s, says, “I spent $1 million to get my son out. Everything I had, I spent.”
7. June 17, 2026: Collin posts the cover, Kate’s hand over his childhood mouth, and the Oct. 13 on-sale date.
8. Oct. 13, 2026: The hardcover, listed at $30, goes on sale. Kate has not answered its scenes.

Jon has said Kate had full custody when Collin disappeared from the house, and that a court order let her keep the location from him. Collin writes that he had been told his father did not want to see him. When he learned Jon had the letter, he told NPR, they had to learn how to be father and son again. “Today, I mean, we’re like best friends.”

On Camera He Stopped Performing

The publisher copy is blunt about the gap the cameras left. TLC captured milestones, it says, and missed a Christmas morning when gifts were reclaimed as soon as the crew packed up, and a basement room where silence was the boy’s companion. “This is a reckoning with the dark side of fame: the systems, the entourage, and the institutions that allowed one boy to be erased.”

Collin’s own theory of how he got there is smaller than that sentence. He says he was being forced to perform, and that punishment followed when he would not. On Shetty’s show he described a child’s form of strike. He made sure that if viewers watched, they would know something was off.

Collin Gosselin, who confirmed he has not spoken to Kate Gosselin in years, said he rebelled against his mother by not performing on demand for the Jon & Kate Plus 8 cameras:

“I made it so when the viewers would watch, they would know something was up”

🎙️ On Purpose with Jay… pic.twitter.com/weDSA3l6y6

— Netflix (@netflix) October 12, 2026

People who grew up with the series are matching that line to a stiffness they already remember. The zip-tie chapter is new in print. The sense that the house was not the cheerful set TLC sold is not. Collin told NPR that many adults, institutions, organizations, and networks “did not recognize or chose not to recognize.” NPR said it had reached Kate and a former TLC president and had not received a response.

He is back on a reality crew anyway, this time as an adult on FOX’s Special Forces, doing press for the series and the book together. He has said he would tell his younger self that it worked out, and that he now has “this passion to protect him and all others like him.” The cover image is the argument in one still: Kate’s palm over a child’s mouth, from the years when that mouth was also a product.

Only Hannah Still Shares a House With Him

Eight children came out of that production. The household split that followed Collin’s discharge is now the family’s map. He told NPR he has not spoken to most of his siblings in about eight years, because “my mom told them the story she wanted them to hear about me.” He still says he loves them. Hannah is the exception. She lives with Jon, as Collin does, and he says they talk here and there because she understands some of where he comes from.

WHERE THE EIGHT LANDED

Kate’s 2023 post said she and the other brothers and sisters had stayed out of Collin’s life because of what she called violent tendencies toward them. He has a message for those siblings in the press around the book: no matter what was said, he loves them, and he always has. The four who still sit in Kate’s photos have not answered him in public. The twins, who were already adults when the custody fight over Collin ended, are living their own lives off that ledger.

The Question He Would Ask on a Lie Detector

Collin announced the book on June 17 with a line that now reads like a caption for the zip-tie chapter. “My life was always broadcast to millions, but what was actually happening in my life was never shown, in fact, much of it was deliberately kept hidden.” He wrote that he kept it to himself because he was afraid, because he did not think anyone would believe him, and because he was not ready. He has also said the book is not entertainment. He wants it used against the abuse and the use of children on camera.

Kate’s standing answer is that a psychiatrist approved the house, that doctors admitted the boy, and that the story he is selling is a fabrication born of illness. Collin’s standing answer is a file he says already listed zip ties and bruised knees, a hospital that held him for 22 months, and a father who spent what he had to bring him home. The memoir does not resolve which account is true. It puts both in the same binding, at $30, under a photograph of a hand over a mouth.

The question he says he would still ask her, on a machine, is the short one. Did you zip-tie me?