The Dark Truth Behind the Duggar Family: Jill Duggar Exposes Fractured Relationship With Parents Is Just the Tip of the Iceberg
The Dark Truth Behind the Duggar Family: Jill Duggar Exposes Fractured Relationship With Parents Is Just the Tip of the Iceberg
19 Kids and Counting alum Jill Duggar shared an update on where she and her parents Michelle Duggar and Jim Bob Duggar stand after growing distant in recent years.
Jill Duggar is getting honest.
The 19 Kids and Counting alum recently gave an update on where she stands with her parents Jim Bob Duggar and Michelle Duggar after leaving the show in 2017 and distancing herself from her family’s religious lifestyle in the years since.
So when asked by a follower about her relationship with her parents, Jill summed it up on her Nov. 2 Instagram Story as, “Complicated.”
“I feel like we are in a rebuilding phase now with healthy boundaries still in place,” she elaborated, alongside a pink heart emoji. “We try to hang out whenever it works well and we have the bandwidth to navigate things.”
The update comes after Jill shared in January that she and her husband Derick Dillard hadn’t seen her parents in over a year, since before she released her memoir Counting the Cost in Sept. 2023. The book—written with her husband and writer Craig Borlase—chronicles much of her upbringing, including her clash with Jim Bob about compensation from the show and the aftermath of her brother Josh Duggar’s molestation scandal.
Instagram/Jill Duggar Dillard“It’s kind of like when you get together at the holidays and there are just certain things that you don’t like want to just bring up,” Jill—who shares sons Israel David, 9, Samuel Scott, 6, and Frederick Michael, 21 months, with Derick—explained. “It’s probably a sore subject.”
The 33-year-old also noted that her parents would likely want to sit down with a therapist “and just hash it out,” but that Jill would prefer not to go down that road.
“We’ve tried that before and it just is not the healthiest way to go about it,” she explained. “So we’re still on the road to figuring things out.”
Duggar Family/InstagramAt the time of the memoir’s publication, while Jim Bob and Michelle did not respond to E! News’ request for comment, they did share in a statement with People, “We love all of our children very much. As with any family, few things are more painful than conflicts or problems among those you love. We’ve aimed to deal honorably with our children, our finances, and our other endeavors. While imperfect, it is our intent and desire to live a life that honors Christ.”
And while noting the couple do not feel the best way to resolve conflict is in public or through the media, they added, “As the future unfolds, we will continue to love our family, pray for them, and enjoy every moment gifted to us to be parents and grandparents.”
For more on the biggest revelations from Jill’s memoir Counting the Cost, keep reading.
D Dipasupil/Getty Images for ExtraThe Duggar Kids Didn’t Talk About Josh
Jill Duggar writes that she was 11 when dad Jim Bob Duggar told her that her big brother Josh Duggar had “‘confessed about some stuff that he’s done.'”
She doesn’t go into detail about that conversation with her parents or what Josh did, but the timing indicates this is when Josh told Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar that he had inappropriately touched several of his sisters, including Jill and Jessa Duggar, between 2002 and 2003 (as Jill and Jessa confirmed in 2015). Michelle told Springdale, Ark., police in 2006, per an offense report made public years later, that following Josh’s admission they sent him to stay with a family friend who worked in home remodeling.
While he was gone, mentioning Josh “wasn’t off-limits,” Jill writes, but they had all grown up “being constantly reminded not to ‘stir up contention among the brethren.'”
In Counting the Cost, Jill calls being discouraged from talking about sensitive subjects “a tool for silence, for control, for guilt.”
Jill Duggar Was at First More Scared of the Abuse Investigation Than Upset About the Abuse
When the Arkansas Department of Human Services started investigating the Duggars in 2006 after receiving a tip about possible abuse (as detailed in the Springdale police report), Jill writes that she was more worried than anything about saying the wrong thing and breaking up the family.
“So it was harder to bury the fear caused by the investigation,” she shares, “than the fear caused by the abuse that DHS was looking into.” (No charges were ever filed against any family member at this time.)
Jill was also admittedly angered by the idea of fellow churchgoers gossiping about her family, believing “others were jealous of our success with the television show and treated us with suspicion.”
InstagramJill and Derick Dillard Hurriedly Courted on Camera
Jill remembers being told that, if 19 Kids and Counting producers were going to send a crew to Nepal to film while she and her dad were there visiting her potential boyfriend Derrick Dillard, the footage was going to air whether the relationship worked out or not.
She agreed, Jill writes, but put her foot down at the idea of it being only a five-day shoot, insisting she needed two weeks.
This time, she got her way, though she says she regrets that the moment when she and Derick first laid eyes on each other in Nepal wasn’t just for them. But the extra time came in handy, and the couple married on June 21, 2014. (And they honeymooned in private.)
D Dipasupil/Getty Images for ExtraJill’s Pregnancy News Was Must-See TV
Michelle Duggar had six children after the family began their run on TV, while Josh’s wife, Anna Duggar, had three by the time Jill and Derick got married.
Jill writes in the book that producers expected her to tell them first when she got pregnant and then wait to tell her parents and in-laws on-camera.
She “bent the rules,” she notes, telling a couple of her sisters and friends, but she and Derick did wait to tell their parents.
www.dillardfamily.comJill Limited 19 Kids Birth Coverage
Jill has said she did not want cameras in the delivery room for the birth of her and Derick’s first child in 2015, though they ended up compromising and allowed family members to shoot some footage for the show.
Her mother “had learned how to manage the expectations of the show…allowing them access but being firm” about what they could use,” Jill writes in the book.
But with sister-in-law Anna, “the crew used footage from one of her births that she’d specifically told them she did not authorize.” The footage was cut out of reruns of that particular episode, Jill details, but was used in later flashback clips.
TLC did not response to E! News’ request for comment on Jill’s recollections of the production in her book.
InstagramJill Kept Family Planning to Herself
Jill originally wanted a home birth for her first child, she writes, but after little progress more than 40 hours after her water broke, they went to the hospital. Son Israel was delivered by C-section after 68 hours of labor.
After she needed an emergency C-section when her second son, Samuel, was born in 2017, Jill went on birth control to allow herself time to properly heal before trying to get pregnant again.
But sensing certain members of her family wouldn’t approve, she writes that she “kept it a secret from nearly everyone.”
Fox News InsiderThe Horror When Josh’s Molestation Scandal Went Public in 2015
Reading In Touch Weekly‘s shocking 2015 exposé on the 2006 police report that detailed the molestation allegations against Josh, Jill was “instantly engulfed by a deep, all encompassing, overwhelming sense of horror,” she writes. “They had published everything,” and in her view had highlighted the “most graphic, the most scandalous, the most painful parts of the story.”
Jill recalls getting a lot of public support, but also criticism for seemingly “blaming the wrong people,” i.e. the media and the police, rather than her parents. But, she adds, “I hold Josh responsible for his actions.”
In 2017, a federal judge dismissed Bauer Publishing as a defendant in breach-of-privacy lawsuits filed by Jill and several of her siblings, citing the publication’s First Amendment right to run the story. Their pending complaints against the city of Springdale, Ark., the Springdale Police Department and the Washington County Sheriff’s Office were dismissed in 2022, the judge writing in his ruling that authorities were “motivated by a belief that they were legally obligated” to release the documents to be in compliance with the Freedom of Information Act.
Kris Connor/Getty ImagesJosh’s Mood Suprised Jill After the Molestation Report Comes Out
The first time she saw Josh and his family at their parents’ house post-scandal, “I didn’t expect him to be quite as relaxed as he was,” Jill describes in the book. “And later in the day I didn’t expect him to start laughing—even though it was clearly nervous laughter—when he described being under siege by photographers.”
Jill recalls their mom scolding Josh for seeming too cheerful: “‘Josh,’ she barked. ‘It’s not your fault that this was released, but you need to know that you were behind all this. Don’t be so arrogant.'”
Kris Connor/Getty ImagesJosh Had No Comment for Jill After Cheating Allegations
When Josh’s name showed up on a leaked list of Ashley Madison subscribers (he denied using the extramarital hookup website but publicly admitted to being unfaithful to Anna), Jill writes that she confronted him over text, asking him if it was true.
“I got no reply,” she recalls.
D Dipasupil/Getty ImagesJim Bob Sent in the Siblings When Jill and Derick Distance Themselves
Jill recalls her father’s response when she and Derick told him to speak to their attorney after, she writes, Jim Bob refused Jill’s request to see the contract she signed on her wedding day regarding her compensation (or lack thereof) for her participation in 19 Kids and Counting.
Without naming names, Jill describes “a consolidated effort from several of my siblings” to reason with her. “They hit the phones, sending voicemails and texts all day long, each one pleading with us to get this resolved. When that didn’t work, some of my siblings started visiting. They’d want to spend hours talking it through, trying to figure out what our problem was and why we weren’t doing what Pops wanted.”
One of her siblings broke ranks, Jill adds, telling her that Jim Bob had warned all of them that “if we don’t stand against you both on this, then we’re standing against him.”
Jill writes that, once she and Derick questioned why they hadn’t been paid, Jim Bob and Michelle offered their grown kids a one-time payment of $80,000 to “start their lives.”
Eventually, Jill writes, she and Derick received $175,000 for their years on TV.
FacebookJill Had It Out With Her Father
Jill writes that she and Derick met with her parents (and a mediator) to try to work through their issues, and Jim Bob accused Jill of wrongfully accusing him in a text message of verbal abuse.
According to Jill, her dad said he was “offended” by such a claim and asked if she was going to apologize to him.
She started to cry, she writes, and her father told her she was crying because she was “guilty.”
But Jill recalls pushing back, writing that she accused Jim Bob of treating her “like I’m a prodigal who’s turned her back on you. You treat me worse than you treat my pedophile brother.”
Washington County Sheriff’s Office via Getty ImagesJosh Duggar’s Criminal Trial Jolted a Few of His Siblings
Josh is currently serving a nearly 13-year prison sentence after being convicted in December 2021 of receiving child pornography. He had pleaded not guilty.
Jill writes that, when it became apparent that Josh might end up in prison, “some of my siblings started to reach out. For the first time it was clear that some of them were beginning to be skeptical of the narrative they’d been hearing at home. As they looked for themselves at the Duggar family spectacle, they started to ask their own questions.”
When Josh was found guilty, Jill recalls telling Derick over the phone, “I think they got it right.”
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit denied Josh’s appeal for a new trial in August.
InstagramJill Embraced Counseling
Having grown up being warned “about talking to people outside the family,” Jill and Derick started counseling to help them process her upbringing and everything they’d been through together.
Their therapist is among the people thanked in the book, for giving them “so many tools we didn’t know we needed when we needed them most.”
In 2022, Jill and Derick moved to Oklahoma when he got a job as an assistant district attorney for the state’s 27th District.
And contrary to how Jill was homeschooled per the tenets of the Duggar family’s church, their sons Israel, 8, and Samuel, 6, are enrolled in public school.
Jill writes that she doesn’t spend time expressly with her father, but does see her parents. The book includes a photo of Jim Bob and Michelle with Jill and Derick’s youngest, now 14-month-old Frederick, shortly after he was born.
