Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar Don’t Like the “Duggar Family Secrets” Docuseries. a Relative Tells Them to “Stop Playing the Victim.”

By Deepak Grover On Jun 3, 2023

Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar are finally talking about the new docuseries that look into their lives and views. The couple, who became famous because of their TLC reality shows and later scandals involving their oldest son Josh, who is spending 12 years in prison on child porn charges, says that Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets, which they didn’t take part in, is “derogatory and sensationalized.

” The 19 Kids and Counting parents hid the fact that Josh molested five girls when he was a teen, including four of their own daughters, and didn’t get him to help, the documentary says. Their daughter Jill Duggar Dillard, who was one of the victims, was in the documentary and said that when the allegations came out, her parents put pressure on her to protect Josh.

“The recent ‘documentary’ about our family is sad because it shows the media and people with bad intentions hurting people we love,” the couple said in a statement posted on their website on Friday. “Like other families, ours has known both happiness and sadness, but in a very public way. This “documentary” paints so many and so many things in a bad light and tries to make them seem shocking because, sadly, that’s the way entertainment is going these days.

The statement went on to say, “We’ve always thought that love in a private setting is the best way to fix broken relationships or settle disagreements. We love everyone in our family and will keep doing everything we can to get along with them all. Through both victories and setbacks, we have clung to our faith and found that Jesus’ love and kindness give us strength, comfort, and a sense of purpose.

Amy Duggar King, who also comes out against her family in the documentary, criticized the statement made by her uncle and aunt. Amy said in an Instagram video, “News flash: If you had gotten Josh the real, true help he needed a long time ago, like actual therapy, we wouldn’t be in this mess.” “Those beautiful girls wouldn’t have had to go through so much to get better. You are not the one being hurt. Stop blaming others.”

Amy also didn’t agree with Jim Bob and Michelle when they said they’d rather “reconcile differences” in private. She wrote, “Anyone notices what seems to me like… gaslighting? We are speaking up about the “privacy settings.”

The four-part documentary looks at how the family’s longtime ministry, Institute in Basic Life Principles (IBLP), teaches that women should obey their husbands and that kids should follow patriarchal rules and not ask questions. Ex-IBLP members said that they were taught that when bad things happen, members should try to put it behind them or just ignore it instead of speaking up.

The documentary looks at how this teaching affected the molestation claims against Josh and how it also made the IBLP church a bad place to work. Bill Gothard started IBLP and pushed for “male superiority and female obedience.” More than 30 women, including some children, accused him of sexual harassment and molestation, which forced him to step down in 2014.

When Josh’s parents found out he had been molesting girls in 2003, they sent him to an IBLP center. There, instead of getting help for his mental health, he had to do physical work. Jim Bob got him early in the morning.

After Jim Bob and Michelle said bad things about the doc, Jill also shared a video on Instagram on Friday. In it, she thanked her friends for supporting her decision to speak out. She told them to get her new book, Counting the Cost, which she and her husband, Derick Dillard, wrote together.

Jill said that putting out the book would be hard, but she hoped that it would give other people a voice and help them understand that they are not alone. The couple promised that Counting the Cost will talk about the “greed, manipulation, and betrayal” as well as the “secrecy and lies” that they had to deal with.

In the documentary, Jill, the fourth Duggar child, talked about that. She said she had to do the interview with Megyn Kelly in 2015 to protect Josh after his claims that he was molested became public. She said that she didn’t make any money from the reality shows, which ran from 2008 to 2020, even when she was an adult and had her own show, Counting On. At one point, she had to go to a food bank to feed her family. She also said that Counting On told her she had to film the birth of her first child even though she didn’t want to.

Jim Bob’s sister, Deanna, and Jim and Bobye Holt, who used to be Jim Bob and Michelle’s best friends and talked about how they covered up Josh’s abuse as a child, were also in the documentary.

Shiny Happy People: The Duggar Family executive producer Blye Pagon Faus told Yahoo before that she hopes Jim Bob and Michelle watch the docuseries “and maybe there’s some kind of reflection and changes.”

The docuseries is part of a long-running story about the TV family, whose shows were about their strict faith and way of life. After Josh’s abuse claims came to light in 2015, the show 19 Kids and Counting was canceled. After Josh, who was now a father of seven, was caught on “worst of the worst” child porn charges in 2021, the spin-off show Counting On was canceled. Jinger Duggar Vuolo, the sixth Duggar, wrote a book about her childhood in the cult-like ministry earlier this year. In the book, she said, “Fear was a big part of my childhood.”