This Duggar documentary is confirming everyone’s worst fears about the faith-inspired family. And it has a secret weapon — Jill Duggar Dillard.
The fourth eldest daughter of the 19 Kids and Counting family teased many months ago that she had a lot more to say as she distanced herself from her kin. It turns out she’s chosen to do that in Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets, premiering on Prime Video later this week. One of the first big bombshells Jill has to drop? According to DailyMail.com, Jill spills all about that infamous Megyn Kelly interview.
OK, so for a refresher… long before Josh Duggar‘s child porn trial, there was the first time he got into serious trouble. When he was a teen, he confessed to his parents he had molested his little sisters. We found out much later it was worse than that. Family friends Jim and Bobye Holt testified he molested their daughters, too, including a 4-year-old. But patriarch Jim Bob Duggar swept the whole thing under the rug. A police report was filed, but a family friend state trooper let Josh off with a warning. Instead of juvenile detention or court-appointed counseling, he was sent to a Christian camp to talk about all this with another family friend. No one was told. The whole thing was kept quiet. Until 2015…
As our readers will know, the police report eventually got leaked, reportedly by someone who didn’t like seeing Josh Duggar getting away with all this — and the family’s coverup working so well. The scandal rocked the fam, especially the molested sisters who had to relive their trauma in the spotlight. They even had to do a painful interview with Megyn Kelly. It was a particularly harrowing sitdown in which Jill and Jessa Duggar, then in their early 20s, actually defended Josh and instead spoke out against the media covering the story. You might wonder why, if they were so intent on this staying private, they’d agree to such an interview. Well, it turns out that was — you guessed it — Jim Bob’s idea.
As you also might have guessed, it wasn’t about protecting the girls. Jim Bob was trying to protect the reputation of the family, who were still under contract with TLC. Jill recalls in the new doc:
“There was an urgency in trying to figure out how the show was going to be handled in the wake of the 2015 events.”
“How the show was going to be handled.” It was all about Jim Bob making that reality TV money. Keeping the gravy train running. Hey, we already know he was making all the money, not his daughters.
In the doc, Jill, now 32, explains how she was pressured by her father into defending Josh against those who called him a “child molester, pedophile, or rapist.” Not because it was true or right, but because of the money:
“As far as recovery and damage control, you just feel like a burden and the weight falls on you to help because you’re the only one who can .”
She admitted:
“In hindsight, I wouldn’t have done the Megyn Kelly show. I feel like I was bearing the burden and the weight of…”
Jill paused and began crying — a devastating mirror of the interview eight years ago. She finished:
“Me and Jessa just felt the weight of it. It fell on us.”
She admitted she technically “volunteered” to do the show — but only after being made to feel “obligated” by her father:
“I don’t even like to talk about it because it’s not something that I’m proud of. If I hadn’t felt obligated to one, do it for the sake of the show, and two, do it for the sake of my parents, I wouldn’t have done it.”
If you haven’t seen the interview, it’s a doozy. Like we said, the sisters were in full circle-the-wagons mode, defending Josh’s actions and their parents for how they handled it all. Even then it felt upsetting to watch two young women defend their molester. But obviously in retrospect it’s so much worse. Years after their defense, Josh was convicted of possession of horrific CSAM videos. How many other children was he free to be around in those years?
Jill’s husband was right by her side. And if you’ve ever followed the couple, you know Derick Dillard is a lot more frank. He disagreed with Jill, saying he “would not call it voluntary” what she had to do:
“They were basically called on to carry out a suicide mission. 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. were gonna do whatever they could to get the return on their investment. If that meant collateral damage, that meant collateral damage.”
Damn. That’s how we read it, too. But to hear it put like that. Yeah. We can’t wait to see what else everyone has to say about what was really going on with this supposedly devout fam.
Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets can be seen starting June 2 on Prime Video.
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