As far as publicity goes, reality tv star Jim Bob Duggar is not having a great year. First, daughter Jinger Duggar Vuolo’s memoir got a lot of press for criticizing the legalistic fundamentalist brand of Christianity in which they were raised. Then, the Amazon documentary Shiny Happy People raked the Duggars and their affiliation with Bill Gothard’s Institute for Basic Life Priniciples over the coals. And finally, a new, scathing memoir by daughter Jill Duggar Dillard released this week, and an excerpt published in People Magazine shows that it does not portray Jim Bob Duggar in a positive light at all.
As a matter of fact, during an argument over Jim Bob’s refusal to pay Jill and her husband Derick Dillard for their participation in the reality show Jill and Jessa: Counting On (a show, which I will point out, was literally named after Jill), she says she told him “You treat me worse than my pedophile brother!”
She is referring of course, to her brother Josh Duggar, who sexually molested Jill and some of her sisters when she was young, and is currently serving a prison sentence for downloading child sex abuse material. Jill says both in her book and in the Shiny Happy People documentary that she was devastated when Josh’s abuse of her came to light. She says it was something she had hoped would always stay private, and she still does not like to talk about it. She intentionally leaves those painful details of what her brother did to her out of her book, but does say that she was sickened and could barely eat for weeks when the abuse became known to the world.
Among other accusations that Jill makes against her father, whom she says she “no longer sees one-on-one” is that he paid Josh to be on the reality show 19 Kids and Counting but refused to pay the Duggar daughters, and that he has threatened to lower her inheritance because she has asked to be paid for work she and her husband have done on the show. Eventually, Jim Bob Duggar offered his older children a one-time payment of $80,000 each as compensation, but Jill and Derick turned it down, knowing it was not enough. They later found out that Jim Bob had made $8 million for the reality shows.