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Jill Duggar was pressured to defend Josh to save family’s reality show: doc
the documentary explores the Duggar family — headed by Jim Bob Duggar, 57, and his wife, Michelle Duggar, 56 — who became reality TV stars thanks to their TLC series, “19 Kids and Counting.” They became mired in scandal when the couple’s oldest offspring, Josh, 35, was accused of molesting five girls (including some of his sisters), which led to the show’s cancellation in 2015. He was sentenced to 12 and a half years in prison last May, in a separate case, for possessing and receiving child pornography. His sister Jill Duggar Dillard, 32, who was one of his victims, speaks out in the doc. “I don’t even like to talk about it because it’s not something that I’m proud of,” she said on-screen, referring to the infamous 2015 Megyn Kelly interview in which she and her sister Jessa confirmed that their brother had molested them but defended him from being labeled a “child molester, pedophile or rapist.” She revealed that she felt “obligated to do it” and pressured by her father, for the sake of trying to save their family’s reality show. “There was an urgency in trying to figure out how the show was going to be handled in the wake of the 2015 events,” she said. “As far as recovery and damage control, you just feel like a burden and the weight falls on you to help.”Her husband, Derick Dillard (whom she married in 2014) described her Megyn Kelly interview as a “suicide mission.” He said, “I would not call it voluntary.“Like, ‘You’re gonna destroy yourself, but we need you to take the fall so we can carry the show forward because the show cannot fail.’ [The Duggars] were gonna do whatever they could to get the return on their investment.
