- Jill Duggar Dillard said she felt "obligated" to do a 2015 interview in which she defended her brother Josh Duggar.
- Josh admitted to sexually abusing four of his sisters as a teen, per a police report.
In Prime Video's new four-part docuseries "Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets," former TLC star Jill Duggar Dillard said she felt "obligated" to participate in an interview with Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly in which she said she forgave her brother Josh Duggar for allegedly sexually abusing her.
Dillard said in an interview for "Shiny Happy People" that her father's PR representative, Chad Gallagher, set up an interview with Kelly so that TLC might decide to keep the family's reality series "19 Kids and Counting" on the air in the aftermath of Josh's molestation scandal.
In the 2015 interview on Kelly's show "The Kelly File," Dillard and her sister, Jessa Duggar Seewald, claimed that many of the headlines about Josh were "lies," though they did believe what he did was "wrong."
"We didn't even know about it until he went and confessed it to my parents and they shared it with us," a 24-year-old Dillard told Kelly at the time.
Seewald, who was 22 at the time of the interview with Kelly, called Josh's behavior "mild, inappropriate touching."
But in "Shiny Happy People," Dillard's husband Derick said that Dillard and Seewald didn't do the interview with Kelly voluntarily. He said his wife and sister-in-law were chosen by Jim Bob and others to "carry out a suicide mission," and theorized that Jim Bob thought his daughters needed to "take the fall" so that the show could continue.
Dillard said in the new docuseries that she wouldn't have done the interview if given the choice again. Though she was a victim, she said she was "bearing the burden and the weight" of her family's financial future and she felt "obligated" to "help."
Josh Duggar's molestation scandal became public in 2015, and the Dillards have distanced themselves from the Duggar family in the years since
In 2015, InTouch acquired a police report made in 2006, which can now be viewed on hosting site Imgur, that shows statements provided by Jim Bob, the patriarch of the Duggar family. Per the report, Jim Bob first found out about Josh's alleged molestation in 2002, when one of the girls said the eldest Duggar brother was touching her breasts and genitals as she slept.
The police report alleges that Josh sexually abused four of his sisters while they slept, and at times while they were awake. The police report did not specify which sisters Josh allegedly abused, though Gawker has reported that there were five sisters, who ranged in age from five to 12, living in the Duggar house at the time the alleged abuse took place.
No charges were ever filed against Josh by the police officer who took the report in 2006. Instead, Josh was sent home with a warning because Jim Bob was friends with the officer, according to former friends of Jim Bob's who spoke in the new Prime Video docuseries.
The original Duggar reality show, "19 Kids and Counting," was canceled in July 2015, two months after InTouch Weekly's report. "Jill & Jessa: Counting On," eventually renamed "Counting On," premiered as a spinoff in early 2016.
Though the spinoff didn't feature Jim Bob and Michelle in its first few seasons, Dillard said in the docuseries her father was the person who made the deal with TLC through his production company, Mad Family Inc. The network paid Jim Bob, Dillard said, and Dillard claimed she "never saw any payout" from her TV appearances as an adult.
She said in "Shiny Happy People" that she "didn't want to" do the new show, but had never said no to her family before. In the docuseries, Dillards said they quit "Counting On" in 2017 when they realized that Jim Bob had manipulated them under false pretenses into signing a contract for filming the show on the day before their wedding. Their departure also came on the heels of Derick Dillard's homophobic and transphobic tweets.
Jim Bob later agreed to pay some of his children a minimum-wage lump sum in order to appear on the series, Dillard said in "Shiny Happy People." But if she wanted to receive payment, she said, she had to agree to give her father's production company the right to film her life in perpetuity.
"We were automatically like, 'we're done,'" she said of her reaction to seeing the terms of the contract her father expected her to sign.
Dillard had not gone into detail about the restrictive terms of the contract she said she was offered in the past, though she told People in 2020 that she wasn't compensated for her time on the TLC reality shows until after she left "Counting On" in 2017. People reported that Jim Bob was the "primary payee" for both shows, which came with "an estimated $25,000 to $45,000 per episode paycheck."
Dillard told People she had to get a lawyer involved to recover some of the money she felt she was owed. "It was a process," she said. (At the time, TLC declined to comment when reached by People.) According to People, Derick said in a video on the Dillard family's YouTube channel that the amount of money they were able to get "ended up being a little more than minimum wage."
TLC confirmed that "Counting On" was canceled in June 2021, following Josh Duggar's April 2021 arrest on child-pornography charges and widespread petitions from fans. Josh was convicted on the charges and is currently serving a 12.5 year prison sentence.
Representatives for Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar, Jill and Derick Dillard, and TLC didn't immediately respond to Insider's requests for comment.
"Shiny Happy People" is available to stream now on Prime Video.