Collin Gosselin claims investigation sparked after mom Kate pulled his ear so hard his teacher noticed the injury

NEED TO KNOW

• Collin Gosselin alleges Kate Gosselin physically assaulted him and kept him isolated in the family basement

• He says child welfare workers visited him several times, but he was afraid to speak honestly about what was happening at home.

• Kate previously said the measures taken were recommended by specialists to protect the family.

Collin Gosselin looks back on the painful moments of his childhood.

In his new memoir, In the Shadow of Eight: Surviving the Reality of My Childhoodthe old Jon & Kate Plus 8 The star, 22, alleged that his mother, Kate Gosselin, abused him when he was a child.

“When my mother was angry, she would grab me by the ear,” Collin wrote. “Sometimes it stopped there. Sometimes it didn’t. A sharp pull could turn into a slap to the side of the head, like a punctuation mark.”

Collin – who rose to fame as one of the sextuplets featured on his family’s reality show, which premiered in 2007 – claimed Kate, 51, once pulled his ear so hard when he was 9 that it “hurt in a way I couldn’t ignore”.

“It felt hot and tight, like it was being pulled even though no one was touching it,” he said. “I remember holding the strap of my backpack with one hand and using the other to press on the side of my head, hoping that would make the swelling go down.”

When he arrived at school, he said his teacher noticed “almost right away” something was wrong. She asked him what happened to his ear, and after some hesitation, he told her that his mother “pulled my ear.”

Collin said his teacher then took him to the counselor’s office, where he said he told the truth about what happened. A Children and Youth Services investigation was launched and a month later workers came to Kate’s home. By then, Kate had already split from husband Jon Gosselin, 49, and Collin claimed his mother told him “your dad doesn’t want to see you anymore.” (He said Jon later told him he never said that.)

Collin said one of the workers asked to speak with him one-on-one, and even though Kate said yes, he could see her looking at them through the crack in the door as they talked. “I get it. It certainly wasn’t accidental,” he said.

When the worker asked him if there was anything going on “at home that was worrying you,” Collin thought, “If I say yes, I’m dead.” He told them everything was fine, for fear of “consequences.”

“I remained cautious,” he said. “In the end, I knew I had done what was expected. I had performed well enough to keep the peace.”

Collin said CYS came to their home “more than once over the next year,” but he only spoke to the workers once himself.

“Years later, I found out there had been many more complaints: documents, reports, concerns raised by people who had seen elements of what was happening,” he said. “My father received documents regarding fourteen complaints filed with CYS against my mother.”

Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE’s free daily newsletter to stay up to date with the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.

The day CYS spoke to him, Collin said he learned a lesson: “Telling the truth doesn’t always help. Sometimes it just teaches you how alone you really are.”

After the CYS visit, Collin alleged that his mother temporarily withdrew him from school “for my own good.” She also stopped letting him play with his Legos and had a wall built around his mattress in the basement to form what he called “a little holding cell.”

Collin said Kate installed two cameras connected to a device the size of a baby monitor to monitor him. Since the bedroom door was locked from the outside, he would have to “call my mother through the cameras so she could let me out if I needed to use the bathroom upstairs.”

Sometimes, when he wasn’t in the basement, he said Kate would “give orders around, make me clean, drag me around the house like I was her servant.”

“Sometimes she would slap me on the cheek, pull my ear or hit me on the head,” he said. “Other times it was just a constant stream of words meant to cut.”

Collin claimed this routine of being locked in the basement lasted for two years.

“Most of the time, I spent about 70 percent of my time locked in that room,” he said. “The rest was split between meeting my teacher, eating alone without my siblings, cleaning up after everyone, or pretending to be happy when the cameras came.”

After trying to run away, Collin said Kate called emergency services and had him hospitalized. He was then transferred to Fairmount Behavioral Health System, where he said he suffered more abuse.

After two years in Fairmount, Collin was transferred to a residential facility, George Junior Republic, where he began weaning himself off all the medications he said he was forced to take by both Kate and Fairmount. For months, Jon fought to get him released until he could come home with him, as Kate was initially granted custody of their eight children after their divorce.

Collin’s brief included a statement from Fairmount that they do not comment on specific patients and that “at Fairmount Behavioral Health System, our staff strives every day to maintain a total therapeutic environment through individualized treatment for each patient.”

Although Kate has not responded to the specific claims made in Collin’s memoir, she said in a statement on Instagram in 2023 that “all measures that were taken in our home were on the explicit recommendation of (Collin’s) pediatric psychiatrist and/or his team of specialists and were put in place to protect every member of our family, our friends as well as our pets.”

In 2024, Kate’s lawyer Richard Puleo said The Sun that he did not believe Kate did anything to “intentionally harm” his son and that “she did what she did to protect herself and her family” from what he called “troubled behavior.”

PEOPLE has contacted Puleo and Fairmount for comment.

During a recent interview with PEOPLE about his appearance on Season 5 of Special ForcesCollin said he would tell his younger self “that everything went well.”

“As a young child, I had a lot of doubts, a lot of worry, a lot of anxiety and a lot of fear,” he said. “I just want him to know that I’m grown up, that I’m an adult now, and that I have this passion to protect him and everyone else like him.”

In the shadow of eight is available now from Grand Central Publishing, wherever books are sold.

If you suspect child abuse, call the Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-4-A-Child or 1-800-422-4453, or go to www.childhelp.org. All calls are free and confidential. The hotline is available 24/7 in more than 170 languages.

Read the original article on People