- Jill Duggar Dillard revealed new details about the aftermath of Josh Duggar's molestation scandal.
- In her new book, she says that when she read the police report about it, she wished she were dead.
In her new book "Counting the Cost," Jill Duggar Dillard reveals heartbreaking details about the aftermath of her brother Josh Duggar's molestation allegations being made public.
In May 2015, InTouch Weekly acquired a 2006 police report, which can now be viewed on the photo-hosting site Imgur, that shows statements provided by Jim Bob Duggar, the patriarch of the Duggar family. The police report alleges that Josh molested four of his sisters while they slept, and at times while they were awake. The alleged abuse occurred between March 2002 and March 2003, per the report, when Josh was 14 and 15 years old. At the time, his sisters ranged in age from 5 to 11 years old.
According to the police report, Jim Bob said he first found out about Josh's behavior in 2002, when one of the sisters said Josh was touching her breasts and genitals as she slept. Jim Bob didn't report his son to the police when he first learned about the alleged molestation, but said in his statement that he instead disciplined Josh and tried to prevent the alleged molestation from happening again. However, when he realized the incidents were ongoing, he said he took his son to a "church elder" and then sent Josh away to a program from March to July 2003.
When he got home, Josh was taken to speak to a police trooper who Jim Bob knew, but no charges were filed against him. It was only in December 2006 — when "The Oprah Winfrey Show" employees were alerted to the molestation accusations ahead of the Duggar family's scheduled appearance on the talk show and contacted the Department of Human Services — that a police report about the alleged abuse was made.
In "Counting the Cost," released Tuesday, Dillard opens up about her reaction to InTouch Weekly's 2015 story about the alleged abuse, which was released nearly a decade after the police report was filed and seven years after "19 Kids and Counting" first premiered on TLC in 2008.
"All the details of the investigation — details that we had shared in hushed whispers with tear-filled eyes — were now splashed across the screen," she writes, calling the report "tabloid journalism at its worst."
Dillard says she felt like InTouch's report was written for entertainment value, because it focused on the most scandalous and painful details of the alleged incidents.
"I wish I were dead," Dillard recalls telling her husband Derick Dillard in her book, when he asked her how she was feeling the day InTouch's story was released.
Dillard has spoken out about the immediate aftermath of the 2015 molestation scandal before
After InTouch published its report, Dillard and her sister Jessa Duggar Seewald appeared on Megyn Kelly's show "The Kelly File" in June 2015. In the interview, Dillard and Seewald said that they were two of the girls Josh had molested. But the sisters insisted that many of the headlines about Josh were inaccurate, 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.
But in her book and in "Shiny Happy People" — a Prime Video docuseries about the victims of the Institute of Basic Life Principles (IBLP), the ultra-conservative, controversial Christian organization to which the Duggar family belongs — Dillard said she felt obligated to go on Kelly's show in order to save her family's reality TV empire. Dillard said in "Shiny Happy People" that she now regrets doing the interview.
The Duggars' original show "19 Kids and Counting" was canceled by TLC in July 2015, two months after the molestation allegations were made public. The network premiered a spinoff show, "Jill & Jessa: Counting On," ostensibly focusing on the Duggar sisters but featuring most members of the family, in December 2015.
Josh was later convicted on separate charges related to receiving child pornography and was sentenced to 151 months, or about 12.5 years, in prison in 2022.
Dillard details her estranged relationship with Jim Bob Duggar in 'Counting the Cost'
Dillard says she became increasingly estranged from Jim Bob over her parents' support of Josh as well as contract and monetary disputes related to the Dillards' appearances on the family's TLC shows. When Dillard began questioning her family's strict Christian beliefs based on the IBLP, got a nose ring, and started wearing pants, her relationship with her father got worse.
She didn't speak to her parents for months at a time and sought out mediation for them via a church. According to her book, the tension between Dillard and her father reached a boiling point at mediation. At one point during the meeting, Dillard writes, she began crying and curled herself up into a fetal position as her father berated her while her stunned husband and the mediator looked on.
She eventually explained to her father why she was crying. "You treat me like I'm a prodigal who's turned her back on you," Dillard recalls telling her father in the book. "You treat me worse than you treat my pedophile brother."