Jill Duggar was pressured to defend Josh to save family’s reality show: doc
An explosive new documentary about the controversial Duggar family is exposing more of its secrets.
Called “Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets,” the documentary explores the Duggar family — headed by Jim Bob Duggar, 57, and his wife, Michelle Duggar, 56 — who became reality TV stars thanks to their TLC series, “19 Kids and Counting.”
They became mired in scandal when the couple’s oldest offspring, Josh, 35, was accused of molesting five girls (including some of his sisters), which led to the show’s cancellation in 2015.
He was sentenced to 12 and a half years in prison last May in a separate case, for possessing and receiving child pornography.
His sister Jill Duggar Dillard, 32, who was one of his victims, speaks out in the doc.
“I don’t even like to talk about it because it’s not something that I’m proud of,” she said on-screen, referring to the infamous 2015 Megyn Kelly interview in which she and her sister Jessa confirmed that their brother had molested them but defended him from being labeled a “child molester, pedophile or rapist.”
She revealed that she felt “obligated to do it” and pressured by her father, for the sake of trying to save their family’s reality show.
“There was an urgency in trying to figure out how the show was going to be handled in the wake of the 2015 events,” she said.
“As far as recovery and damage control, you just feel like a burden and the weight falls on you to help.”
Her husband, Derick Dillard (whom she married in 2014) described her Megyn Kelly interview as a “suicide mission.”
He said, “I would not call it voluntary.
“Like, ‘You’re gonna destroy yourself, but we need you to take the fall so we can carry the show forward because the show cannot fail.’ [The Duggars] were gonna do whatever they could to get the return on their investment. If that meant collateral damage, that meant collateral damage.”
The documentary also revealed that Duggar family parents, Jim Bob and Michelle, knew about their son’s abuse for many years.
“He had apparently been doing it since he was 12, but we found out about it when he was 15,” said Jim Bob, later revealing that he was going to have Josh confess to his then-girlfriend, Kaeleigh Holt, after they got married. (The pair broke up and Josh married Anna Keller in 2008.)
Jill further detailed how she felt pressured by her family to appear on their TLC reality show for longer than she wanted to.
She said that, before her 2014 wedding, “I just saw the signature page. It was like on the end of the kitchen table — like, ‘Hey, I just needed you guys to sign these,’” Jill said. “We were literally running through the kitchen, and it was like whoever you could grab on the way through. I didn’t know what it was for.”
She went as far as to say she thought that “somebody forged my signature.”
When it was brought to her attention that she had unknowingly agreed to more appearances on “19 Kids and Counting,” she said, “That’s when we realized that I had signed this the day before we got married … That’s not what I thought I was signing.”
The new documentary also dives into how the “cultlike” Christian organization they belonged to — the Institute in Basic Life Principles, founded by minister Bill Gothard who was accused of sexually harassing and molesting women — was permeated with abusive behavior similar to Josh’s.
“Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets,” premieres Friday, June 2, on Amazon Prime Video.
