Jon Gosselin publicly backed Collin Gosselin on Thursday, saying he was proud of his son’s memoir and warning that people who keep calling him mentally ill will be held accountable. He said repeated false claims about Collin’s mental health are damaging his reputation, credibility and future, and that the days of using mental health to silence his son are over.
The statement landed after Kate Gosselin wrote on TikTok earlier in the week that rational people, or anyone who has dealt with mental illness, would understand what was going on and that she had nothing to do with it. Jon, 49, responded by saying Collin has been evaluated by multiple independent psychiatrists and that the mental-illness narrative is categorically untrue. A representative for Jon, Adriane Schwartz, said he had stayed quiet so Collin could share his story in his own voice, while fully supporting him and being proud of him.
Collin, 22, grew up in the shadow of Jon & Kate Plus 8, which debuted on TLC in 2007 and ended after five seasons in 2009, the same year Jon and Kate Gosselin divorced and their custody battle became national news. Mady and Cara are now 26, while Leah, Alexis, Joel and Aaden are 22. Collin and Hannah chose to live with Jon after a series of alleged traumatic events for Collin, and the family dispute has remained tied to the claims he made in his memoir about what happened to him as a child.
That is where the conflict hardens. Collin has said Kate Gosselin sent him to a psychiatric hospital without telling Jon and that she was physically and emotionally abusive from a young age, especially after he rebelled against being on the TLC series. He also told Us that when he was 12, she stayed for about 20 minutes during one hospital visit and told him, “Collin, you destroyed our family.” Kate has denied wrongdoing before, but Jon’s latest comments turn the fight from a private family dispute into a public challenge over who gets to define Collin’s past.
Collin said Jon removed him from the hospital in 2018 after discovering his location, but the specific steps that led to his hospitalization and later removal have never been fully explained in the record available now. What is clear is that Jon has chosen this moment to draw a line around his son’s memoir and around the label that has followed him for years, and Kate has not publicly answered that latest warning.
