- Jill Duggar Dillard said she's not in touch with her sister-in-law Anna Duggar.
- She said she doesn't know why Anna hasn't left her brother after his child pornography conviction.
Jill Duggar Dillard, formerly of TLC's "19 Kids and Counting," opened up about her distant relationship with her sister-in-law in the wake of her brother Josh Duggar's child-pornography conviction.
While promoting her new book "Counting the Cost" on Access Hollywood, Dillard said that she hasn't been in contact with Josh's wife Anna Duggar because the mother of seven asked for space.
"I think when you're learning to set boundaries in your own life you also learn to respect other people's boundaries," Dillard said.
Asked why she thinks Anna hasn't split up with Duggar after he was convicted of such a serious crime, Dillard said she had "no idea why" Anna had decided to stay with him.
"I'm just, I guess, watching with everybody else kind of just what unfolds there," Dillard said.
Duggar, who had pleaded not guilty to the charges and has maintained his innocence even after his conviction, was sentenced to 151 months, or just over 12.5 years, in prison in May 2022.
Dillard reflected on her older brother's conviction in her memoir, which is available now. In the book, Dillard said that thinking about her brother's actions and how they had escalated over the years — from accusations he'd molested her and some of her sisters as a teen in the early 2000s, to looking at adult porn, to being unfaithful to Anna via the extramarital affair site Ashley Madison, to the child-pornography charges — made her feel "sick to my core."
Dillard was pregnant with her third child at the time of her brother's child-pornography trial in 2021 and didn't need to testify, so she skipped the final day of the trial.
But she recalled how she felt when her husband, Derick Dillard, called to tell her Duggar had been found guilty.
"For a moment I didn't know what to say. After so many words, so many secrets and so many lies, it was hard to put what I felt into syllables. In the end all I could manage was, 'I think they got it right,'" she wrote in the book.