A woman who used to work as a nanny and housekeeper for the Gosselin family has claimed that she witnessed Kate Gosselin abuse her son Collin.
“She very much outwardly treated Collin different,” the woman, known only as Ashley H., told People in an interview published on Friday, October 23. “She 110 percent abused Collin. It’s hard to almost put into words the specific hate that she had towards Collin. You could just feel it. I saw her grab Collin many, many times.”
Ashley claimed that Kate, 51, often yanked Collin, 22, by the ear — an allegation that Collin himself also made against his mom in his memoir, In the Shadow of Eight: Surviving the Reality of My Childhood.
“She did all the time,” Ashley alleged. “All the time. She’d rip him right out of his chair in the kitchen.”
Ashley worked as a part-time nanny for the Gosselins while studying for her master’s degree in social work in her 20s in 2013, according to the outlet. She claimed to People that the reality of life inside Kate’s home was very different from the ones viewers saw on their TLC reality show, Jon & Kate Plus 8. (The series followed Kate and former husband Jon Gosselin as they raised sextuplets Collin, Hannah, Aaden, Joel, Alexis and Leah and older twins Mady and Cara. Following Jon and Kate’s 2009 divorce, the show was renamed Kate Plus 8.)
Recalling the strict way in which Kate allegedly ran her home, Ashley added, “She wouldn’t let the kids do anything. There was never toys out. There was never things out. They couldn’t live.”
“It was not loving,” she said of the relationships between Kate and her eight kids. “She very much made it known who was a favorite, who wasn’t, who’s annoying. Someone would come and pick the dog up for grooming, but she treated her kids basically worse than animals.”
Ashley claimed that she once stumbled on a red spoon in a drawer that seemed out of place, and one of the kids allegedly told her, “Oh, that’s the spoon mommy uses when she gets mad.” (In his memoir, Collin claimed that Kate hit her children with a red spoon as a form of discipline.)
Ashley said that moment led her to quit the job after just six months.
“I was like, “Oh, OK. I can’t work here anymore. This really is as bad as I think it is,’” she recalled. “That red spoon has haunted me for a long time.”
Before she left, Ashley said she called Children and Youth Services to report what she had learned. (Collin also claimed in his book that Jon, 49, has paperwork documenting 14 complaints made to CYS about Kate, which Collin discovered as an adult. He wrote that his mom was “untouchable” and knew “how to perform.”)
“I ended up getting sick because I started taking it home with me, because I didn’t have my own kids and I didn’t understand how somebody could be so nasty, downright evil and nasty to their own kids,” Ashley further alleged. “I know for a fact that I was not the only one who did that. I want to use this opportunity to not only back Collin that his mom was psychologically abusive to him, not to mention the physical.”
Kate has repeatedly denied Collin’s abuse allegations. In 2024, her attorney Richard Puleo told The Sun that he didn’t believe the former reality star had done anything to “intentionally harm” her son and that “she did what she did to protect herself and her family” from what he called “troubled behavior.” (Collin was sent away to a behavioral facility for two years as a pre-teen.)
On Thursday, October 22, Kate took to TikTok to respond to a fan who praised her for making “sacrifices that no mama should have had to make alone.”
“I know who I am and my kids know who I truly am and to me, that’s all that matters,” she wrote. In another comment, she added, “[People] have NO idea how lucky they are if they have no idea what it’s like having a child or relative with mental illness.”
