Former Gosselin Family Housekeeper and Nanny Claims She Saw Kate Abuse Collin and Reported It (Exclusive)

NEED TO KNOW

• A former house cleaner and part-time nanny for the Gosselin family is speaking out to PEOPLE

• The former employee, who worked for the family for six months, alleges strict household rules left the children unable to play freely at home

• Now a mother of twins, she hopes her account validates Collin Gosselin’s experiences

While Ashley H. was studying for her master’s degree in social work in her 20s in 2013, she’d watch TLC’s Kate Plus 8 and dream of having a big family of kids someday like matriarch Kate Gosselin’s.

Through the years, Kate had given her hope — as she, like Kate, struggled with years of infertility.

“I used to watch the show, like, ‘My gosh, this is actually real. You can have infertility issues and you can still have kids,'” Ashley, who prefers to not reveal her last name, recalls to PEOPLE.

At the time, Ashley, now 42, was also working as a nanny. She came across an online posting for a nannying job one day and was surprised to learn it was for Kate and her eight children: twins Mady and Cara and sextuplets Collin, Alexis, Joel, Leah, Aaden and Hannah.

“She didn’t say who she was [in the post], just that the nanny could live on the estate, and you could tell she was very, very wealthy,” she says. “So, I met her at Starbucks, and she showed up in her sports car.”

During their meeting, Ashley realized her class schedule would conflict with the schedule Kate needed a nanny for, so she took a job as her house cleaner and fill-in nanny instead.

When she got to Kate’s home in Wernersville, Pa., which was only about 20 minutes from where she studied at Alvernia University, she remembers the “big beautiful family pictures” hanging on the wall.

“I used to think, like, ‘Oh, I can’t wait to have this someday,'” she says. “Now, I have my nice little house, and I have my canvas pictures of my family up on my walls. But I promised my house would never look unlived-in like Kate’s.”

Ashley claims that the reality in Kate’s home was much different than what was portrayed on TV. She decided to speak out now to back the claims of physical and emotional abuse Collin made against his mom in his memoir, In The Shadow of Eight: Surviving the Reality of My Childhood.

“She very much outwardly treated Collin different,” Ashley says. “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 says Kate had a “house manual” of rules for staff, which included not being able to take pictures of the kids and keeping the family dog out of the house, except for the basement.

“The house was to look unlived-in at all times,” she says. “She would have weekly chores, biweekly chores, and they would include having a toothpick and going around the edges of the fridge.”

“She wouldn’t let the kids do anything,” she continues. “There was never toys out. There was never things out. They couldn’t live.”

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Ashley claims the kids were only allowed “either one or two school outfits per week because it would cause too much laundry” and that the interactions between Kate and the kids were “robotic.”

“It was not loving,” she says. “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.”

One day, Ashley says she opened up a drawer of school supplies and was surprised to find a big, red plastic spoon in it as “everything in the house was always so meticulous.”

She asked the kids why the spoon was in there, and “instantly, I’m pretty sure it was Alexis who said, ‘Oh, that’s the spoon mommy uses when she gets mad.'”

That pushed Ashley to leave the job after only six months.

“I was like, “Oh, okay. I can’t work here anymore. This really is as bad as I think it is,'” she says. “That red spoon has haunted me for a long time.”

Before leaving, Ashley says she called Children and Youth Services for Berks County on Kate. In his book, Collin claimed a CYS investigation was triggered when he showed up to school in pain after Kate yanked his ear, and he said he later learned multiple reports were made against her.

“She did all the time,” Ashley said of Kate’s behavior towards Collin. “All the time. She’d rip him right out of his chair in the kitchen.”

She says the reason she called CYS was because “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 adds, “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.”

By speaking out, Ashley, now a social worker, mental health advocate and mom to twins herself, hopes others will share their own experiences in the Gosselin family home.

“I really hope it will spark people to speak up, even if it’s been 15 years later,” she says. “I am so incredibly proud of Collin and hope he feels validated.”

In 2024, Kate’s attorney Richard Puleo told The Sun that he didn’t believe that Kate 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.”

Addressing Collin’s book on TikTok, Kate also liked a message from a user who claimed “he” would “regret all of this someday” and alleging that he’d been “encouraged and enabled by other dysfunctional and mentally ill people.” They apologized for her having to “relive this over and over” and called the situation “gross.”

“Exactly,” Kate wrote in the same thread. “I had nothing to do with it, except for consent because it was medically necessary.”

Kate and her attorney, Puleo, have not responded to requests for comment on Ashley and Collin’s allegations. Children and Youth Services for Berks County declined to comment due to “strict confidentiality laws.”

Collin’s book In the Shadow of Eight: Surviving the Reality of My Childhood is out now 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 toll-free and confidential. The hotline is available 24/7 in more than 170 languages.

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