The situation between Kyle Filipowski and his family has become one of the strangest and most talked about storylines of the 2024 NBA Draft, and now Kyle’s mother, Becky Filipowski, has broken her silence and is telling her side of the story.
Filipowski was selected 32nd overall by the Jazz despite being projected to be a first-round pick.
Then he had the awkward moment of sitting in the NBA Draft green room without hearing his name called.
The next day, ESPN reported that the team had become wary of the Duke University alumnus because he was in a relationship with a “much older” girlfriend and was estranged from his family.
This sparked a series of social media posts by Becky and Kyle’s brother, Daniel Filipovski, which raised further questions.
“It was like a dam gate had opened, and for nearly three years we’d been trying to hide it and get him out of our lives. [ended]”, “I was so happy,” Becky said in an interview with The Salt Lake City Tribune on Thursday..
“And when that happened, I was like, ‘Oh my God, it’s out in the open.’ And we’re now in a situation where no one is speaking truth to power and we’re just speculating about all this shit.”
At the heart of the rift between Filipovsky and his family is his relationship with a woman named Caitlin Hutchison, who is reportedly seven years older than him and whom he began dating in high school.
While there has been much speculation about the nature of their relationship, Becky confirmed that the Filipovskis and Hutchinsons are family friends and that elder members of the two clans played college basketball together at California State University, Long Beach.
For Becky, the warning signs started popping up in the winter of 2021, when she revealed that her son had started dating Hutchinson shortly after he turned 18. Her son had reunited with Hutchinson earlier that year at a high school basketball showcase, but her son was still 17 at the time and Becky had graduated from college.
Filipovski was attending Wilbraham and Monson Academy in Massachusetts for his senior year of high school and told his mother about it when he returned home over winter break.
Becky told the Tribune that when her son enrolled at Duke University, Hutchinson told her he would “protect him from other girls, drugs and alcohol,” but her mother was unfazed and began expressing concerns.
“I warned them about what was going on,” Becky said of conversations she had with Duke staff during her son’s recruiting, “and yet they were like, ‘Okay, well, you know, we figure it out.’
The rift between her and her son deepened, but despite allegations of “Mormon training” from Daniel, Becky did not believe there was a religious dimension to the control Hutchinson had over Kyle.
“This behavior is not good. [for Hutchison]”No matter what faith you have, that doesn’t change,” she said.
The rift continued to grow while Kyle was attending Duke University, and in February of last year, Kyle sent his brother an angry message saying he wanted him to “disparage my relationship with you.”
Then in April he apparently severed ties with his family via email over “emotional abuse” following their dissatisfaction with his relationship with Hutchinson.
“I have done everything I can to convince you to support me and my choices, but you choose not to,” Kyle wrote. “Because of the way you have treated me and the way you continue to do so, I do not want you in my life and I wanted to tell you that in person.”
Since then, Becky has questioned whether she applied too much pressure on Kyle over their relationship.
Becky said she also struggled with mental health issues following the deaths of her mother and grandmother, and then with Kyle, who attended Wilbraham and Monson Academy, being diagnosed with cancer during his senior year of high school.
She told the outlet that while she had issues with her other sons, Kyle “took it to a whole other level.”
“Kyle is thinking to himself, ‘I’m not going to say this to my mom because I know what she’ll say,’ but he’s missing out because his mom has changed. That’s my transformation,” she says. “I’m constantly fighting against my kids’ assumption that I’m the same person who raised them.”
