Jill Duggar to Jim Bob: ‘You Treat Me Worse Than You Treat My Pedophile Brother’
The quote comes from her new memoir, Counting the Cost, in which Jill describes the time she went to meditation with her parents, Jim Bob and Michelle.
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There are quotes and then there are quotes. I’d say the one in the headline qualifies very much in the latter category. It’s from Duggar family defector Jill Duggar’s memoir, Counting the Cost, which is out today. For years, Jill was featured on the Duggar family’s various TLC specials and shows, including 19 Kids and Counting, which was canceled in 2015 after news broke that the humongous family’s eldest son, Josh Duggar, had molested five underage girls, including some of his sisters (Jill was one of them). The show was rebranded as Counting On and ran for a few more years. Josh Duggar was eventually convicted of receiving child sex abuse material and is currently serving a 12-year sentence in prison.
Jill, having been the sole child of patriarch Jim Bob Duggar and Michelle Duggar to appear in the documentary Shiny Happy People, is one of the more vocal members of the clan to have broken with it. The doc, which streamed on Prime Video earlier this year, interrogated not just the dark side of the Duggars but of the Institute of Basic Life Principles, the religious organization that the Duggars evangelized on their show. In it, Jill described her upbringing as a “cult-like environment” and said that Jim Bob’s condition after being approached by TLC was: “We will do this documentary as long as you don’t edit out our faith.” She also alleged that she was screwed out of money for her years of participating in all the TLC shows.