Kyle Filipowski's mother tells viral story about Utah Jazz rookie's estranged relationship

While Kyle Filipowski sat among the most promising basketball talents in the green room of the NBA Draft in Brooklyn, his mother spent that June night in her house in Westtown, NY

They were 75 miles and a world apart, both hoping for very different things.

As the minutes ticked by, Kyle waited for his name to be called and his professional career to begin.

Becky Filipowski, for her part, hoped, as always, for some consolation that she said she had not been able to find since the breakdown of her relationship with her son.

“It's like a loose cable in my brain,” she says. “Some days I can find some peace, and there are days that are quite painful.”

And as the biggest moment of her son's basketball career approached, in the hours before he was drafted 32nd overall by the Utah Jazz, she made her pain public, claiming on social media that her 20-year-old son's girlfriend, a 26-year-old he dated in his senior year of high school, had driven a wedge between the young basketball star and his family.

Families fall out for all sorts of reasons, but these allegations exploded and became a viral story without much context or coverage.

Now Becky Filipowski wants to explain her side of the story.

ESPN's Filipowski report goes viral

It all started with a report.

Kyle had been invited to the NBA Draft green room, an honor given to projected top picks, and after waiting uncomfortably that night without his name being called, people wondered why he had fallen out of the first round.

ESPN's Jonathan Givony offered a possible answer.

“NBA teams talk about how they had question marks because his girlfriend is so much older than him. Why is he estranged from his family because of this whole situation?” Givony said on the “NBA Today” podcast. “He doesn't seem to talk to his parents or his brother, and that's a very, very strange situation. … And when they asked him about the situation in interviews, the answers they got were not satisfactory to them.”

When Becky saw Givony's report circulating on the Internet, she intervened.

“You're bringing up a two year old topic… and she's 28 (sic) and had a goal of wearing a diamond ring on her hand three years ago when Kyle left Duke. He was still in high school,” she wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Daniel Filipowski, Kyle's brother, also posted on social media: “Look up and read about Mormon grooming and brainwashing. There you will find some introductory details to help you connect the dots of the story.”

The posts went viral. Becky's tweet received 250,000 views and was featured in articles from the New York Post to the Toronto Sun to the Mirror in the UK. If you type Filipowski's name into Google, you get 14 pages of results speculating about his family dynamics and his fiancée, Caitlin Hutchison.

A popular podcaster, Jack Parodi, received more than 5.3 million views while speculating about Kyle's situation. A Fox Sports employee received more than 7.6 million views for spreading a false claim that Kyle and his girlfriend were cousins.

Others focused on Becky.

“Stop blaming everyone else. If we're going to play this game, the main blame lies with you and your family,” wrote one person on X. Another said the mother “shouldn't have brought up this story on the most important day of his life.”

Becky has heard a lot about it.

“It was as if the floodgates had been opened. And for almost three years we tried to sweep it under the rug and banish it from our lives. [ended],” she said in an interview. “Then this happened and I was like, 'Oh my God. It's come out.' And it's just because nobody tells truth to power that they're just speculating about all this crap.”

A mother’s perspective

From Becky's perspective, the first element that needs to be clarified is the nature of the relationship between Kyle and Caitlin Hutchison.

The Hutchisons and Filipowskis were family friends. Caitlin's mother, Amanda, played college basketball with Becky at California State University, Long Beach.

In June 2016, the Filipowskis invited the Hutchisons to a barbecue in New York, where the younger Kyle was photographed with Caitlin—an image that has since been used online to spread false claims.

Five years later, Becky said, her son and Caitlin met again at the 2021 Peach Jam, one of the largest high school basketball competitions in the country.

Kyle was 17 and a high-ranking recruit. Caitlin had graduated from college, Becky said. After the introduction, Becky said, she asked her son about Caitlin and he said they weren't together.

Kyle was attending his senior year at a boarding school in Massachusetts, Wilbraham & Monson Academy. He turned 18 in November 2021. That winter, when he came home for the holidays, he said he and Caitlin were together, Becky recalls.

Mike Mannix, Kyle's high school basketball coach, said that was around the time he met Caitlin.

“I didn't hear of any talk of them being boyfriend and girlfriend until January at the earliest,” Mannix said.

According to Becky, her son said Caitlin would “protect him from other girls, drugs and alcohol” when he went to Duke College next year. In May 2022, Kyle posted a photo with Caitlin with the caption, “People will stare. Make it worth their while” and the hashtag #prom.

Caitlin declined to comment for this story.

Becky said she began to voice her concerns about the relationship more often. She said she told staff at Duke, where Kyle would play at the college level, about her fears during her son's recruitment.

“I warned them about the things that were going on,” she said. “And even then they just said, 'OK, you know, we've got it under control.'”

Meanwhile, Becky says, she feels the distance between her and her son growing for other reasons as well.

Becky said she has struggled with mental health since her mother and grandmother died within a month of each other several years ago, sending her into a depressive spiral. Then, she said, she was diagnosed with cancer during Kyle's senior year and had to undergo treatments that made it difficult for her to be involved in her son's life.

“I often had to reach out to the parents in the dorm for information,” Becky said. “But that winter, when everything got a little crazy, it was difficult. I couldn't talk to him half the time because he was traveling. … I knew I was missing out on all the things they were doing because I wasn't living with them.”

When Kyle went to Duke the next year, his mother said, their bond was strained even more. Becky said she went to see a Blue Devils game against Ohio State but wasn't allowed to see her son afterward. At some point, she said, he stopped leaving tickets for his family.

Becky said she tried to go to her son and “understand what she didn't understand” about their relationship, but she was never satisfied with the answers. She said she asked Duke's general manager to schedule counseling sessions.

Duke declined to comment for this story.

Becky began to get involved with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and was convinced for a time that her son had been a victim of what her family called “Mormon grooming.” But after being asked further about it, Becky said she didn't really believe that was the case.

“This behavior would be bad [for Hutchison],” she said, “regardless of their beliefs.”

In a text message sent in February 2023, Kyle expressed his frustration with his brother Daniel about his family's behavior.

“I don’t need you to make fun of me and my relationship because you don’t know anything [about] it,” says the message, which was obtained by the Salt Lake Tribune.

In an April 2023 email, Kyle said he suffered “emotional abuse” from a family that could not accept his relationship with Caitlin.

“I have done everything I can to convince you to support me and my choices and you have chosen not to,” he wrote. “… Because of the way you have treated me and the way you continue to treat me, I do not want you in my life. I wanted you to hear it from me.”

After the Utah Jazz drafted Kyle on June 27, the team stated that they had no concerns about his family situation.

“We do a very thorough job of vetting all of our draft prospects,” said Steven Schwartz, Jazz vice president of basketball strategy. “We're more than happy to have Kyle on the Jazz and we're happy with whatever's happening. We're really excited about his personality, so we're not worried about it at all.”

The Jazz declined to comment further for this story.

Last week Kyle signed his first professional contract.

A look into the future

When the pain becomes too much, Becky thinks of a cemetery in southern New York where her mother and grandmother are laid to rest. Her death shook her, she says, but the separation from her son caused her even deeper pain.

“The grieving process,” she added, “never ends.”

The fact that her family's story went viral on the Internet has caused new pain.

“We didn't ask for this. ESPN published the report and exposed the matter. We responded to it. This has been a painful issue for us for years before draft night,” Becky said, although her X profile includes posts about her feud with Kyle dating back to at least April.

But she added: “I see all these reports and they speculate without doing any research. … Sometimes I wish we had never talked about this.”

In a series of phone interviews since the draft, Becky acknowledged that “in hindsight, it was perhaps predictable” when it came to her relationship with her son. But the mother of four says, “The other three had problems like that too, and they're still there. He took it to a whole other level.”

Becky said she knows she is not innocent and wonders if she put too much pressure on her son because of his relationship with Caitlin.

Still, she said she felt hurt.

“I gave [my boys] everything I made,” Becky said, noting that she quit her teaching job early and put money into AAU so Kyle could play at the highest level. She added that her husband, David, retired when Kyle and his twin brother were freshmen in college, “because we thought we would travel everywhere and watch their games [at Duke and Harvard]. So he took early retirement to make things easier. We didn't get anywhere.”

But she believes she has changed over the years.

“Kyle thinks, 'Well, I'm not going to say this to Mommy because I know what she's going to say.' He's missing out because Mommy has changed. This is my metamorphosis,” she said. “…I'm constantly fighting her assumption that I'm still the same person she raised.”

And now she said she's trying to move on.

“That's what I've achieved now,” she said, “I'm trying to change my mindset.”