Siblings in families with a narcissistic parent often turn on each other because the parent sets them up to be in competition. It’s a way for the parent to maintain control and is a form of triangulation. Collin Gosselin, 19, of the TLC series Jon and Kate Plus 8 was scapegoated by his mother, Kate, and sent to an institution for two years at the age of just 12. He was rescued by his dad, Jon, after Collin snuck a letter to him. Collin only has a relationship with one of his siblings, Hannah, also 19, who went to live with their dad too.
Collin is now talking about his mom’s abuse, which has been confirmed by Hannah, and did a recent interview that was included in the FX documentary Dark Side of the 2000s. That documentary has aired, along with Collin’s full statements about his abusive childhood. He said his mom sent him away because he was starting to talk to teachers about the abuse at home. Jon was given no notice about the fact that his son had been institutionalized. Given everything we’ve seen from Kate over the years, including photos and allegations of physical abuse, I believe Collin. However now Mady, one of Collin’s two older siblings, has accused Collin of abuse and racism, I would assume in retaliation to him speaking out. As I said this is typical in toxic families.
Mady Gosselin made a rare statement about the reason for her estrangement from brother Collin Gosselin after he discussed their family dynamic in a new docuseries.
“I never wanted to have to speak up about this in order to allow my brother the ability to live privately after the conclusion of our family’s TV show, but I’ve been overwhelmed by hate messages in the last few days and I feel I must set the record straight,” Mady, 22, wrote via her Instagram Story on Wednesday, July 19.
Mady claimed that her ups and downs with Collin, 19, recently hit a turning point, adding, “I do not owe my allegiance to any person(s), who has physically threatened me and every member of my immediate family (some incidents as recent as last year). Further, I will never allow someone who has exhibited hateful and even violent behavior towards others based in their racial identity, gender identity, or religious beliefs to be in my life.”
She continued: “Kindness, tolerance, love, and acceptance are core values in my life and I refuse to compromise them for ANYONE, even my brother Collin, who has unfortunately made his opinions very clear in private.”
“For me, there is no further conversation to be had about rebuilding relationships with anyone in my life after reaching the point of physical violence and hate speech. I cannot speak any further on why Collin has done these things, just that I have witness them,” she concluded. “I’ve had hundreds of people messaging my private accounts with the most hurtful words you can imagine in the last few days, all without knowing the full truth of what we’ve been through. I’m asking for peace and privacy (and no more hate mail) going forward…”
In a response to his daughter’s comment, Jon Gosselin told PEOPLE, “It took courage for Collin to sit down and speak about his past and the last thing I would have expected was more abuse to come his way from a sibling that hasn’t seen or spoken to him since he was in sixth grade.”
I don’t doubt that Mady blames Collin, who again was just 12 when his mother had him sent away. I’m sure he wasn’t a perfect child victim and had issues which were exploited and weaponized by his mom. If you read Collin’s account of his childhood, he sounds so gracious and well adjusted at this point. I hope all of these kids can get a lot of therapy and distance from Kate Gosselin. She’s an awful person and TLC just enabled her abuse of these children for ratings and cash.
After that Mady issued another statement (below) and I do feel for her. I don’t think she should have said anything in the first place but I don’t blame her either.
Mady wouldn’t know kindness if it hit her in the head. Mady is her monster mothers favorite she sounds just like Kate nasty and mean. Mady should keep her mouth shut.
Although I haven’t seen anything with these people in years and years I did watch the show when it first aired for a while and it was clear that Mady was the favorite and her personality mirrored Kate’s. I distinctly remember that she was not a very nice kid and her twin Cara was the quiet kind one. I feel terrible for all of these kids though, who were put on TV for the world to see without their consent and have a monster for a mother who I’m sure has never said she was sorry for anything and has zero self reflection even now. I also have a narc mother so I know how it goes. It’s honestly sick to me that families continue to exploit their children and put them on TV and social media without their consent still today.
Macy was also a child raised by this same person. A little grace would serve us all.
I don’t know who Macy is, do you mean Mady? Like I said in my comment I feel terrible for ALL of the children raised in that family.
@Erin- apologies for the autocorrect. My reply was intended for Susan Collins.
Crowhood. I stand by my comment had you watched the show you would see that the monster mom was an abuser to some but definitely not Mady. Grace will not be given to those who have none.
Crowhood. Also there are many comments just like mine and I don’t see you having a problem with them. What is your problem with me? I don’t like the attack. I will defend my comments.
Your claim that the mother did not abuse Mady is just not true. Picking a favorite and making that child the embodiment of oneself is a form of abuse. The child is under tremendous pressure and grows up with all sorts of lies. The favored child is very literally separated from their siblings. Golden child syndrome is a real thing. I don’t think that excuses what Mady said, but Mady clearly is a kid of abuse, too, and needs help.
Josephine. I agree she needs help. Her mother has turned her into her. She displays same behavior as Kate. All those children will need help. I remember when the show was airing people where waiting for the kids to grow up and write books about their experiences with her. We are seeing some signs of how they feel and act. I’m sure there will be more to come and it won’t be good.
Well, this whole thing is just horrific ☹️
Since the beginning.
We all knew these kids were going to have problems with Kate being their Mom.
Kate is a nasty, nasty piece of work.
I don’t feel sorry for Mady one bit. She kicked and hit her younger siblings all the time and it was on TV so what she did was also abuse. She even said on numerous occasions how she resented her parents having the sextuplets.
That’s not saying much. I can’t imagine any child wouldn’t resent their parents for having a damn litter of babies. It’s almost impossible to be a good parent under those circumstances.
@Brea
Yes I remember she was very mean to the sextuplets and only semi-nice to her twin.
@ HeyKay, that she is and it looks like the only “work” she has invested in herself and her life is plastic surgery!! Eehhhhh gggaahhhddddddd’sss…….😳😳
Oh, Maddy. I feel so sorry that she raised by that horrible, manipulative, abusive woman, but she’s sliding right into her mom’s methods of villainy. She vilifies and tries to destroy her brother’s credibility and character and then tries the old “there is no reason to take sides,” stop picking on me, I’m the victim. So ugly.
It should be illegal to put minors on reality shows. They can’t give full consent. I would die of embarrassment if my younger years were put on full display for public consumption. Honestly if there is a parent who wants to put their child on some crappy show for money and attention, they most likely are not the best parent.
This.
Maybe some kind of law to this effect will come out of this debacle. These poor young people never had a chance.
I completely agree with you KentBrockman.
Oh boy. In my opinion they could all hopefully benefit from some major therapy. Their mother was just horrible and the whole world saw it. They were thrown into the spotlight by their mother, at least from what I read. Their lives were show to the world and therefore we witnessed a lot that probably should have been kept behind closed doors. Even though children were involved with the show, we as the public have our own opinions on everything we heard and saw. I just feel when your life is an open book you give us the green light to comment on these things. Privacy goes out the window especially when your own parents are to blame for the world witnessing the good, the bad and the ugly on their show.
Textbook malignant narcissist triangulation, golden child, and scapegoat. These kids are so deep in the fog, they will destroy each other to win the narcissist’s approval. Sad to see. It will only get worse.
This is the perfect encapsulation of this situation.
It is, actually. As for Mady’s take on the entire hated thrown her way, she was explicitly taking side and now she wants all of us to not take sides when she clearly came out of the gate doing so???
Mady is just as f’ed up as her mother. Kate encouraged and rewarded Mady with performing as the mini-Kate and the world would watched. Mady has a lot of chutzpah coming out now telling us; “There’s no need to “take sides”. Please be kind ❤️” This is EXACTLY what she did though which resulted in hate messages and now she is trying to “change” her narrative from escaping the hatred.
This, exactly.
Mady was always Kate’s favorite. She favored her over all of the kids. I’m not surprised she said something. What I’m waiting for is Kara to come out and say something. She was always picked at by both kate and mady.
I think Kara was Jon’s favorite. They spent more time together, and he said she was his brave kid. There’s an episode where they’re skiing, and Kara jumps on a snowboard immediately and starts learning to use it. Mady is scared and doesn’t want to do it. Jon says something from the private camera room explaining that Kara is his little daredevil and he loves doing things with her. Cut back to that day when she’s on her own and doing well, and Jon is walking behind her saying, “I love you, Kara,” over and over.
Neither one is a stellar parent, but I will give Jon the advantage over Kate. He came running the second he found out about Collin, took him and Hannah in, and worked as a waiter to make ends meet. Colin seems to be doing well, and if Jon provided him the environment to heal and thrive, I’ll give him credit for it.
Jon was also abused by his ex wife. I watched the show in the earlier years and she was so AWFUL to him. He has to have PTSD. I don’t know how he has any strength or self esteem after how much she berated him and put him down. Sure, he did some weird things after they split, but she took everything from him and he was so lost .. if the kids weren’t already established as Gosselins, she’d have changed their last names too (my brother’s ex did this and it was so vindictive.)
That said, I agree that Jon deserves credit for getting a normal job to provide for them and for doing whatever he could to give Collin the space and place to heal and grow and become a strong enough young man to speak about these things.
“Siblings in families with a narcissistic parent often turn on each other because the parent sets them up to be in competition”
This hit home my mother was a narcissist to a t and as a result her 4 daughters have split 2 of us (me and 1 sis) had shunned her she has now passed and I have no regrets. The other 2 embraced her.
It’s a sad situation but unavoidable with a narcissistic parent.
I wish all the children the best.
That line punched me in the face too. You’re so right CJW it’s such a sad situation and unavoidable with such a horrible parent. They want you competing against one another for their approval instead of examining how they are actually parenting.
I think both things can be true. Kate is/was a terrible mom that did not have the tools to help Colin- and Colin may have been a difficult child that terrorized his other siblings (partly due to his mom’s behaviour)
I feel sorry for all those kids
Kate sent Colin to a psych center for almost two years and didn’t visit him once. There’s not knowing how to handle him and then there’s not caring about your kid at all. Colin had started to tell people at his school that he was being abused by his mother right before he was sent away.
He didn’t need that sort of help, he needed to be allowed not to film-but his mother had already tied his hands with the TLC handcuffs and the only loop hole was institutionalizing him.
Mady might have been her mother’s favorite and might not have been nice to her siblings, but I still feel for her. I feel for all of them. No parent should allow their children to grow up with the world watching like that. And people should not be sending her hateful DMs!
Colin was mistreated, clearly. It might also be true that he had serious behavioral problems that were distressing to his siblings. That family needed tools, they needed help. I know the money they got from the show was very useful, but it hardly seems worth it now. It created more problems than it solved.
You’re probably right. However, I cringe at adjudicating abuse via public opinion.
Normally I agree, but unfortunately for those children their abuse was monitzed in the public and even those of us who were not interested in watching the abuse were exposed to it
Um, they are siblings and therefore the same race? I don’t even understand what she is accusing him of here.
Likely that he’s made comments about other races. I find the ‘they’ve said horrible things but I won’t say what because I don’t want to hurt them—while tarnishing their reputation’ just so distasteful.
I hope that Colin has a lot of healing and peace. I agree that Mady is her mother’s Mini-me and I’m. Or surprised that she lashes out just like Kate always did. I pray those children all are able to heal from the toxic way they were raised.
Keep in mind that it’s entirely possible her experiences with her brother were overtly negative. It doesn’t justify her taking this public to undermine him, but there’s likely two sets of experiences there, even in one family. They’re all traumatized from this experience, just with many of them not realizing it. The evil of toxic, narcissistic parents is they often set their children against each other, so you can’t even find allyship together against a common enemy.
TLC and the adults working with them have a lot to answer for the damage they did to these families between this one and the Duggars.
💯 this !!!! Agree TLC is a sick network
The idea that Kate Gosselin is a terrible person can coexist beside the possibility that this kid was exhibiting behaviors that presented a danger to his siblings. They’re not mutually exclusive.
And I am not here for the revisionist history that Jon Gosselin “rescued” anyone. He’s a grubby little skirt chaser (the younger the better) who got a taste of freedom and forgot he even HAD kids. For years.
“My dad is a liar. Yesterday he beat me up and thought nothing of it, he punched me in the face and gave me a swollen nose and I started bleeding. He then continued to kick me in the ribs after I was on the floor. He is a liar.” (Collin, via Instagram, late 2020.)
Pick a story, kid.
(A big takeaway from the Duggar sh1tshow was that the parents didn’t do anything to protect their children from their brother’s abuse, even though they were fully aware of it for years.)
It’s very time-consuming, difficult, and expensive to institutionalize an adolescent, especially in Pennsylvania. It’s an eyes-on process with a lot of moving parts. You can’t just drop the kid you don’t like at the nearest “home.” This isn’t a Dickens novel.
Cys said it was unfounded as did Hannah. Jon acknowledged Collin was in a manic state and he put him in a therapeutic hold. Nothing more.
https://hollywoodlife.com/2020/11/10/jon-gosselin-collin-abuse-accusations-kate-dr-oz-interview/
Paris Hilton went to one of those places Colin went. Britney spears has shown that industry and people who work in it can be capable of doing anything for money
What Mady doesn’t realize is that she was also abused by her mother, although in different ways from Colin. Simply being forced to have her childhood filmed for public entertainment is abuse. I remember a group photo of Kate and the kids in Alaska; I had read that Mady hadn’t wanted to go on the trip and in the photo, she was so sobbing her eyes out. The other kids had forced smiles but Kate was grinning ear to ear, oblivious to Macy’s distress. She is also the victim of parental alienation: she refuses to have anything to do with her father. Yes Jon is far from perfect but unlike Kate, he seems to genuinely love his kids and not see them as little money makers.
After Collin damaged his car in a violent rage (and not the first one) Gosselin beat the ever-lovin’ CRAP out of him in 2020. Collin called the police, there were witnesses to his injuries, and the report states that his injuries were consistent with the attack he described.
The next day, he recanted and said someone else beat him up.
Both the Berks County Child Services and Lower Heidelberg Township PD are *very* familiar with Jon Gosselin. (I have extended family in that area of Pennsylvania; my aunt lived on the same street as Jon’s mother when he was staying with her on and off. Gosselin shenanigans regularly make the local news.)
Does he “genuinely love his kids”?
*shrug* I’d say he has a distinctly funny way of showing it.
I wish those bashing Mady for growing up as a narcissist’s golden child would learn more about how being the golden child can be a worse form of child abuse than being the scapegoat.
My mother is a textbook narcissist as well as a misogynist and male supremacist. My sister and I were her scapegoats that she took EVERYTHING out on. She was sadistic and set up no-win situations daily that would give her an excuse to abuse us, which she made no secret of finding highly pleasurable.
On the other hand, our younger brother was her golden child who she treated as the next coming of the Dalai Lama. She held us down (sat on us) so he could join in on physically abusing us, which he also very much enjoyed. However, she treated him as her surrogate husband. In EVERY WAY. In E-V-E-R-Y W-A-Y. She abused my sister and I that way too but more as another form of torment so we never had confusion about whether or not it was evil/wrong/bad. I would never ever ever ever ever ever trade places with my brother and his status as the golden child. He never had a chance. My sister and I today are extremely functional and competent adults.
My brother is the opposite of a self-sufficient adult. Being the golden child can F you up so much more than being the scapegoat, and I had an extreme case of being the scapegoat. The golden child gets out into the real world and NOBODY thinks they are special, just dysfunctional/toxic. They have developed no skills for the real world and normal people. They are so f’d up and twisted mentally and carry so much trauma. The scapegoat gets into the real world and experience people treating you with kindness and humanity for the first time, and actually appreciating all your work and efforts, adult life can seem like Candyland. Being the golden child just as much child abuse as being the scapegoat and in some cases much more.
Please do a follow-up on the terrible statement Kate put out today. I cannot believe that she shared so much of her son’s private heath and personal information with the world. Horrifying.
it really was. she has removed all doubt about her parenting abilities. she’s a monster who is very willingly throwing her child under the bus to save herself and her golden child. she’s a sick woman and what she did is disgusting.
Side Bar=> Kate was a cast member on a reality show entitled “Boot Camp” [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boot_Camp_(TV_series) ]. Within Episode 1, she ended up leaving due to trying a task regarding a body of water and a helicopter. This series was testing to see which celeb or celebs have what it takes to prove the survival of the fittest. Kate, on the other hand and who is wooly-bully towards her ex-husband and children, couldn’t accomplish this task, although it was not easy for the remainder of the cast.
Also, according to some of other persons I know who watched this remarked that she knew that she couldn’t really achieve/complete the assignments of this military caliber in the first place–due to some medical issue on her part. If she had foreknowledge of this, why did she contract herself to participate in a program of this quality anyways? Or, was it for the CHECK plus NOTERIETY–just like her other reality shows of prior?
Anyways, I’m personally glad that Collin and Hannah are not in her household any longer to receive any abuse from her.