Collin and Kate are estranged, and he claims she physically and emotionally abused him as a child.

Key Points

Collin Gosselin is not messing around in his new memoir, or while competing on Special Forces: World’s Toughest Test.

The Jon & Kate Plus 8 star is a contestant on season 5 of the FOX show, in which celebrities from all entertainment genres take on demanding training exercises led by an elite team of Special Forces operatives.

Gosselin has been surviving the environment as Directing Staff (DS) agents Rudy Reyes, Jason Fox, Mark Billingham, and Jovon Quarles train, torture, and break him and his fellow recruits down.

In an exclusive clip shared with Entertainment Weekly from the Thursday, Oct. 29, episode, Gosselin takes on the next task: the Red Man challenge. For the high-intensity drill, recruits compete in a combat exercise with one of the DS agents, who wears a protective red suit that allows trainees to strike with full speed and force without causing severe injury.

Ahead of his turn to fight, Collin explains he signed up for the show because of his estranged mom, Kate Gosselin, whom he accused of physically and emotionally abusing him in his new book, In the Shadow of Eight: Surviving the Reality of My Childhood. (He also shared the allegations during an interview for Vice TV’s Dark Side of the 2000s in 2023.)

Kate has denied all of Collin’s accusations, and insisted he was suffers from “multiple psychiatric diagnoses.”

Collin, however, has stated that he’s passed three independent psychiatric evaluations and does not suffer from any known mental illnesses.

“I’m here because my mother’s taken a lot of things away from me. But this course is something she can’t take away,” Collin, 22, says of Kate, 51, in the Special Forces clip, shared below.

“This is your chance for revenge,” staff sergeant Q tells him. “Use that anger. Use that rage. You target that at Big Red.”

In his confessional, Collin adds that Kate “took away my childhood” and “my freedom.”

“I have a lot of anger,” he continues.

As Q hypes him up for the drill, he asks Collin, “It still hurts today, don’t it?”

Collin agrees before Q orders him to “go crazy right now.”

“Yes, I will,” Collin promises.

“Come on! You see Red, that’s your mom. Go get it,” the agent adds before Collin runs off to the area where the Red Man (appearing to be sergeant Reyes) is waiting.

Collin screams as he runs and attacks Red. He punches the staff inside the suit over and over while screaming, with staff Billingham egging him on. Eventually, Billingham tells him to stop.

Collin first opened up about his estranged relationship with Kate on Special Forces on the Oct. 15 episode, revealing that he previously joined the Marines because he “wanted a sense of family I never had.” He was eventually discharged after it was discovered that he had been institutionalized at a mental health facility in his younger years.

“I never knew what that brotherhood was like until I enlisted in the Marines,” Collin said while being interrogated by the staff sergeants in the fourth episode of Special Forces. “I was 10 and a half weeks in, my mom made a statement on Instagram that I had all these crazy diagnoses and emotional disorders. It got back, man. Navy chain of command told me to go home and get a psych eval. And they dumped me off, man. It would be difficult to ever get me back there.”

He continued, “My only shot at a family was joining the Marines, literally. It sucks. That’s the life I want. It’s horrible. I’ll probably never get my chance again.”

Entertainment Weekly has reached out to Collin, as well as Kate’s legal team and representatives, for comment on his allegations.