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    Collin Gosselin Reveals His Hope to Have Kids

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    Watch: Collin Gosselin Tells Mom Kate Gosselin to Take Accountability

    Collin Gosselin is looking to his future. 

    While the Special Forces season five winner is grateful for what he’s achieved in his life as an advocate for children and those in need, he does have an idea of what he thinks could be better than this. 

    “The one thing that could top this beautiful mission I’m on is probably being a father,” Gosselin exclusively shared with E! News, “but I feel so young. I’ve already found something so great and so meaningful, and to that I am very fortunate.”

    And so much of that mission crystallized for the 22-year-old in his memoir In the Shadow of Eight: Surviving the Reality of My Childhood—which is currently a New York TimesNo.1 best seller and has been nominated for favorite memoir and audiobook in the Goodreads Choice Awards.

    The release of Gosselin’s book has allowed him to reach new audiences, many of whom have been moved by his vulnerability as he discussed growing up in the public eye on the reality series Jon & Kate Plus 8 with parents Jon Gosselin and Kate Gosselin, as well as his fellow sextuplets Alexis, Leah, Joel, Hannah and Aaden, and 26-year-old twin sisters Mady and Cara.

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    “The coolest, the most meaningful messages I’ve got from people are them sharing their stories with me,” Gosselin told E!. “Talking about their dynamics with their parents and their siblings and their childhoods. And people I’ve never met before having that vulnerability? That’s hard to do.”

    Even he himself was nervous about being so vulnerable regarding his life in his memoir, adding, “That’s scary to do.”

    Amanda Edwards/Getty Images

    “But now, they’re coming back to me, they’re messaging me and they’re sharing their stories with me,” he said, “and I’m like, Wow.’ I know it doesn’t sound crazy, but to me it’s really crazy because I know how scary it is to wanna open up.”

    And that fact that so many people felt comfortable “choosing to do that with” him felt incredibly empowering and helped Gosselin learn how true emotional healing can happen. 

    Michael Simon/Getty Images

    “I’ve started this cycle of people choosing to talk about their emotions, to be vulnerable, and to talk about things that they’re scared to talk about,” he explained, “and that’s how healing happens. That’s how we heal, is by talking about things.”

    And despite a difficult childhood, Gosselin found that it inspired the mission he’s now on, saying, “The greatest thing is that what has happened in my past—as hard as it was—it has given me a purpose to do something greater with my life.”

    For a look at all the difficult moments Gosselin wrote about in his memoir, keep reading. 

    Photo by Donna Svennevik/Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty Images

    Collin Gosselin Says His Mom Separated Him From His SiblingsOn a 2015 episode of Kate Plus 8—the Jon & Kate Plus 8 spinoff Kate Gosselin  led following her 2009 divorce from Jon Gosselin—TLC viewers watched as twins Mady Gosselin and Cara Gosselin moved into their own rooms in Kate’s 7,500-square-foot estate, while their younger sisters Leah Gosselin, Alexis Gosselin and Hannah Gosselin inhabited a shared upstairs room and brothers Collin Gosselin, Joel Gosselin and Aaden Gosselin made over a basement space.  “It was like a slumber party every night,” Collin recounts of that first week in his memoir Shadow of Eight: Surviving the Reality of My Childhood. “Then, one day, I was told by my mom I’d be moving out. An air mattress appeared in the unfinished part of the basement, shoved into the far back corner like an afterthought.” Coming on the heels of him being cut out of weekend visits with his dad (he was told Jon didn’t want to see him; Jon was told the opposite) and frequently isolated (he recalls one night where he was sent to bed while his siblings watched TV with Kate), having to live next to their deep freezers felt particularly cold. “I was part of a plan,” he notes of the punishments, he attributed to his unwillingness to play ball on camera “I just didn’t know what it was.”E! News reached out to reps for Kate and TLC about the accusations in Collin’s book and has not heard back. However, this past June, Kate referred to her son’s accusations as “ridiculous” in the comment section of her TikTok page.

    Amy Sussman/WireImage for Discovery Communications

    Collin Gosselin Claims His Parents Kate Gosselin and Jon Gosselin Were Offered Millions to Stay MarriedAs Jon and Kate’s marriage began to unravel, claims Collin, Dr. Phil host Phil McGraw was teaming with TLC “to negotiate a deal to keep their marriage together for cameras.” So, when the couple shared their plans to divorce in January 2009, writes Collin, “the network responded by offering my parents $2 million to stay in the marriage and pretend the relationship was intact for the sake of the show’s longevity.” Turning down the offer, Jon told the Daily Mail in 2019, “I couldn’t live with myself. I couldn’t live a lie.” E! News reached out to reps for Kate and TLC, but they did not respond. They also declined to comment on Daily Mail‘s previous story. A rep for McGraw called the allegations “false” in a statement to Us Weekly. Noting the talk show host didn’t have “any direct or indirect interest, financial or otherwise,” in the series, the rep added, “Neither Dr. Phil, nor anyone associated with his show ever facilitated, encouraged, participated in or knew anything about any payments to the Gosselins by the other network as alleged by their son Collin, who Dr. Phil has never met.”

    Photo by Donna Svennevik/Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty Images

    Collin Gosselin Says He Spent 70 Percent of His Time Locked in His Basement BedroomAccording to Collin, some 14 complaints were made against his mom to Children and Youth Services, one of them coming after he turned up to his fourth-grade classroom with a noticeably injured ear. Not long after, “my mom pulled me from school,” he wrote. “She told me it was temporary. That it was for my own good. That people were ‘asking questions’ and we needed to keep things calm for a while. I didn’t argue or ask how long. I’d learned that asking questions made things worse.”Collin said he was also banned from playing with the family’s LEGO sets. But perhaps the biggest change, Collin alleged, was the walls Kate had built around his basement air mattress with two security cameras he had to speak through if he needed to be let out to use the bathroom. “Most days, I spent about 70 percent of my time locked in that room,” writes Collin. “The rest was split between meeting with my teacher, eating alone without my siblings, cleaning up after everyone or pretending to be happy when the cameras came around. That was my life.”

    Photo by Donna Svennevik/Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty Images

    Collin Gosselin Claims Mom Kate Gosselin Told His Siblings He Was a Bad KidTo explain why Collin was no longer attending school with them or even joining the rest of the family to eat dinner, Kate would tell his siblings he was troubled, Collin writes. “‘Collin needs more help than you kids,’ she would say right in front of me,” he details in his book. “‘You and your friends at school aren’t bad like your brother.’ They were repeatedly told that I was unpredictable, violent, beyond help. They grew up around me as if I was a cautionary tale. They were children themselves. How could they know to doubt her?”Kate previously told People that Collin received “multiple psychiatric diagnoses” and inpatient psychiatric treatment in response to “unpredictable and violent behavior.” But Jon claimed to the Daily Mail in 2019 that Collin had no known diagnosed medical condition other than common ADHD.

    Michael Simon/Getty Images & Noel Vasquez/Getty Images

    Collin Gosselin Alleges Mom Kate Gosselin Once Bound His Wrists and Ankles With Zip TiesHaving tired of his basement existence by age 11, Collin plotted his escape, using his twin-size air mattress to climb out the tiny basement window. But with nowhere to go—”It had been almost two years since I’d seen my dad”—he returned home. Once there, his mattress was gone, as were the few books he had. Then, Collin detailed, Kate allegedly came in with zip ties for his wrists and ankles.”Once I was bound, she grabbed me by my wrists, pulled me up into a standing position and then threw me down, slamming my tailbone against the hard floor,” Collin alleges, adding she told him he was a burden to the family. “She went on, calling me crazy, dangerous and other names nobody should ever call a child, things that stuck long after the pain faded.”  A rep for Kate didn’t respond to E! News’ request for comment. But her attorney previously told The Sun, “There’s always two sides to every story and when things take place in the past, it’s hard to determine because people have differing recollections and perspectives.” However, his take, he added, was “if Kate did the things that Collin is accusing Kate of, she would have been investigated by the authorities and prosecuted.”

    Amanda Edwards/Getty Images

    Collin Gosselin Recounts Being Physically Restrained and Sedated at a Mental Health ClinicAfter his escape attempt, Collin claims he was transported to Fairmount Behavioral Health System mere days before his 12th birthday. Throughout his 21-month stay in the mental health clinic—where most kids stayed just days or weeks, he claims—he was given daily medication. “My brain had started feeling soft and cloudy, like someone had turned a dimmer switch down,” he details. “I found myself zoning out, feeling like a zombie.”During one incident, 18 months into his stay, Collin alleges he was physically restrained and injected with a medication he dubbed “booty juice” after asking administrators why he was still there. After another, a staffer bent his wrist in such a way that “a violent, searing pain shot up my arm, so intense it made my knees buckle.” (E! News reached out to Fairmount Behavioral Health System, but has not heard back.)Throughout his nearly two-year stay, Collin says his mom visited once. 

    Instagram/Jon Gosselin

    Collin Gosselin Says He Smuggled a Letter to Dad Jon Gosselin to Get Out of the Mental Health ClinicWith his mom and siblings no longer taking his calls from Fairmount, said Collin, he hatched a plan to reconnect with his dad. After hitting it off with one of his roommates, Collin confided in him about his reality star past. Writing a letter to his father in crayon while hiding in a bathroom stall, Collin claimed he asked his roommate to find a way to deliver it. Soon after, he was discharged to a residential facility where he was able to once-again attend school and slowly weaned off his medications.It was there that he connected with his dad for the first time, Jon sharing in that initial phone call that he had plans to bring him home.As Jon later detailed to Collin—who ended up moving in with him, sister Hannah and Jon’s then-girlfriend Colleen Conrad—he had spent years trying to track him down. Then he received Collin’s letter and filed an emergency petition with the court to modify custody. 

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    Collin Gosselin Says He Hasn’t Seen Most of His Siblings Since He Was 15Other than Hannah, Collin has only seen his siblings once since leaving Kate’s home at age 11—a court-mandated visit just before his 15th birthday. “It was a way to keep the kids together, despite being split between two households,” Collin reasons, noting the meet-up started out awkwardly before they all teamed up to best the amusement center’s games. But, as Leah, Alexis, Joel and Aaden moved toward the exit, “No one turned back,” Collin recounts. “And I haven’t seen them since.” 

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