The Duggars (Part I): A Quiverfull of BS

They were Christian royalty on American reality tv. Now, the Duggars are a stain on the evangelical movement.

How did a backwoods family from Arkansas become one of the most recognizable household names in the country? How did they climb from free housing to a $25M a year empire that fueled a political campaign? 

In this episode, we're talking the history of the infamous Duggar clan. Where they came from, who they are, and how they produced two monsters among their brood of 19 children (and counting). 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:21

Hello, hello, hello, my lovelies, and welcome back to another deep dive episode of Scandal Queens. Oh yes, we are back, back, back, back again this week. And if it is your first time here, I am your host, EB, the D influencer, that helps you unpack the shade and the delusions of Hollywood and the entertainment industry. And um, I'll be totally honest about this one this week. Uh, it's been a challenge working on this one. It's definitely been a challenge. This is one of the, I would say, probably like on the mental and emotional side, the most taxing that I've done so far. Um, not just because it contains about 200,000 different people, not literally. Um, that's definitely part of what makes it messy. Um, but part of what makes this deep dive so difficult is that so much of it involves children, right? Uh that that's a that's a big, big part of it. Uh, because today we're talking about one of America's most notorious families. Those long-haired, long-skirted evangelicals that shocked the world more than 20 years ago when they first took to the airwaves to flaunt their mega child family. That's right, folks. For the next two episodes, you and I are gonna be talking about none other than the Duggars, the family of 19 kids and counting fame who produced not one, but two pedophiles that we know of among their ranks. Now, I've been dabbling with this family for a while. I was around in the very, very beginning. My mother watched the show. Uh, I had other female family members that watched the show. I watched the show in and out here and there just for the pure shock value, for the freak show value of it, as it were. And uh thinking about this episode, I really had to think about and wonder what I was going to say. But, you know, uh, as we have kind of wild down the whole of American evangelicalism in Hollywood, like we saw with the Kardashians, as we've seen with Katy Perry and Lou Taylor, uh, you can't really help but pit stop at the reality TV royalty that is the Duggars, okay? Uh, because while the Duggars have uh been propped up across the decades to represent a kind of wholesome Americana, the truth, as we've all discovered in the last 10 years, is a lot deeper and darker than anyone was led to believe. Because the Duggars don't really represent Americana, do they? Not in the way they're supposed to, not in the way they were advertised, does not do what's advertised. Uh, in truth, if you actually look at the Duggar family, at the religion they take part in, the crimes members of them have engaged in, even the show they've led for years, you can't help but to see one common pattern that kind of underlines every single thing. Exploitation. The exploitation of children, the exploitation of women, the exploitation of harm, pain, suffering, political beliefs, emotions, yada, yada, yada. Exploitation is the true legacy that defines the Duggar family, not their wholesome Christian values, but rather their willingness to objectify and exploit even the most vulnerable people. Duggars have built not only their family on these principles of greed, objectification, and exploitation, they've built their wealth on it. Jim Bob Duggar has built a failed political career on it, and Michelle Duggar has been awarded Mother of the Year awards on it. Josh and Joseph Duggar use it to abuse children, used it as a cover to abuse children over the course of years. This is the real legacy of the Duggar family, not one of uplifting Christ, but one of exploiting and harming children, being a part of a network that abuses and exploits children. And that's the journey that we're gonna be taking today. And that's why I've been wondering, what am I gonna say? How am I gonna say it? How am I going to not just rant and rage for an hour and a half? So we're gonna do it. We're gonna get through it today together. Uh, we're gonna look at the Duggars. Who are the Duggars? How did they build a $25 million a year empire on the backs of their children? And who are the powerful organizations behind them that empowered them to do it? It's all here in this deep dive. But first, let's do a quick temperature check and see what the rest of corrupt and incorrigible Hollywood is getting up to these days. Deby Chase has passed away at the age of 35. It was announced Thursday, June 18th that 35-year-old Davey Chase had passed away from meningitis and sepsis. Chase was the child star behind the movie The Ring and Lilo and Stitch. But if you're anything like me, one of those kids, you probably know her from her absolutely freaking bone-chilling performance as this abused teenage sociopath in HBO's hit series Big Love, which also starred uh Bill Paxton, um, not Maggie Gyllenhaal, Jennifer Goodwin, um, the who's the other one, the fashionista, the New York socialite. You know, go and look it up. It's absolutely excellent. But Davy Chase was in that. And she's her performance as this like cult leader's teenage bride is absolutely harrowing. Um, but it turns out that after the blooming of her career, Chase endured some pretty severe trauma and ended up falling into the addiction cycle that so many child celebrities fall into. When she passed, it was revealed that she was living on the streets in Skid Row, Los Angeles, after falling out with her family and succumbing to an alleged fentanyl addiction. Chase was admitted to the hospital the week before her passing for malnutrition. It is an incredibly horrific ending that has opened up a sea of questions, like specifically what happened to Chase. She was this incredible, I mean, she was, she was an incredible child actor. You know how um people look at those old performances of Drew Barrymores and they're like, ooh, wow, ah, ooh, oh my god. Go and watch Davy Chase in Big Love, and it's that kind of a performance. It's chilling. It's it's an adult's performance, and she's a kid. Um, but there's there's a lot of rumors going on now because this kid had big, big things in front of her and she seemed to be going up, up, up, up, up, boom, wall. Now there's lots of rumors. There have always been rumors surrounding her because there were some weird, and I remember this when this happened, there were some weird MTV appearances and some weird comments from P. Diddy about bringing her to the after party and stuff. And there's been rumors about that for a long, long, long, long time, but we don't know how true any of that is. Um, you know, but I I've never met someone in that severe level of addiction who had a certain level of access to, you know, fame and education and all these other kinds of things, um, who wasn't a victim of something, right? Who didn't have some major, major, major trauma. So for me, I'm just kind of wondering what kind of led to her addiction and death, what led her down that path. Who was responsible for that portion of her life, the trauma portion of her life? Um, because again, usually it's yeah. So um incredibly sad story. Hopefully, someone who knew Chase will have the guts to come forward if there was something untoward that was done to her that that led to this in the long run. Um, and I just hope she's finally at peace. Next up, Jelly Roll and Bunny XO have announced their divorce. That's right. Hollywood Power Couple, Jelly Roll and Bunny XO have announced their divorce. I'll be totally honest with you. Um, I have I don't have a lot, I don't have a lot going here. I've I have a very sparse idea of who these two people are. I know he's obviously a music star. No idea what kind of music he sings or does. I have never listened to him, honestly. Um I I know you just can't help but keep some close, close, problematic ties to some pretty close people and organizations. And Bunny, um I know she has a thing for animals. That's pretty much that's pretty much the extent of my knowledge of the two. I've always just assumed they were right wingers, so I've just kind of kept them at arm's length. Um, but now they're getting divorced, and it seems to be getting nasty. According to page six, the split comes on the back of Jelly Roll's growing faith. I'm not that that that's literally it. That's literally, that's literally the story. Now that he's lost a lot of fat and apparently his brain, he wants to embrace a more evangelical way of living. You know, the same way his buddy, the president, tounts himself as an evangelical while he raped children. Jelly Roll's newfound belief in Jesus is allegedly the reason behind the split, and the couple are doing anything but separating on friendly terms. I suppose we'll see what happens in the coming weeks. I expect that Bunny will go on the same press tour that um Olivia Plath did after she left the Plath family. Uh, and Jelly Roll will probably just go deeper and deeper with the NAR and the Seven Mountain scumbags that he's rubbing elbows with until he's inevitably arrested for a child porn 10 years from now. Uh, when he gets thrown under the bus with all the other low-level scumbags. So while all the people he's rubbing elbows with now go and hide in their bunkers with their palantir sex dolls. Um, but yeah, divorce, divorce. Uh, you should go and follow Waffle House music on TikTok. Absolutely hilarious. She's having the time of her life right now. Really funny memes about the divorce. And uh make sure you're following her if you want updates on who's gonna get the ski dude. And last but not least, Colin Gosslin has announced his upcoming memoirs. That's right, little Colin Gosslin of John and Kate Plus Eight Fame is all grown up now and set to release a memoir in the Shadow of Eight, which will release this October. In the memoir, Colin is expected to tell the story of his life and what it was like growing up in the public eye under the thumb of a woman like Kate Gosslin. I not only poured my heart into this book for my younger self, Colin said in a caption of photos on Instagram, I did it for all who have faced outright heinous acts as children. I am your voice, I stand with you, CG. Colin also said that this is not a story for entertainment, but rather to instill a responsibility in everyone when it comes to, and I quote, abuse, injustice, and the exploitation of children, end quote. Colin's publisher says this book will tell the never before told story of how Colin escaped and found his way back from the dark. The publisher claims that the book will be a reckoning with the dark side of fame, as well as the systems and the entourages that allowed for him to be abused, neglected, and ultimately erased from the John and Kate Plus 8 story. Colin Gosslin, of course, is one of the famous Gosslin sex tuplets that were featured as a part of the hit family lifestyle series John and Kate Plus 8, which was kind of the show that made TLC. Over the years, he has outlined a terror list of abuses, abuses he alleged came at the hands of Kate Gosslin during his childhood. This included allegations of being zip tied and locked in a basement and the eventual factual institutionalization of Colin when he was just like 11 or 12 years old. She literally threw him in a mental institution and just forgot about him. No one came to visit him. He was just, he was just like dead to them. Colin was ultimately abandoned in the institution where he was eventually reunited with his father, John, who took him out of the institution and assumed full custody of Colin and eventually his sister Hannah. It is a tragic story, but one that seems to have a happy ending, and that Colin has thrived in the years since his father's recovery of him and seems to have become a well-rounded human being who has done a lot of work on himself. So kudos to Colin. I will be in the first in line to buy his book, and I hope that the rest of his life is nothing but peace and love and success in every good endeavor he tries to achieve. All right, all right, it's that time. The Duggars, the number one sideshow spectacle when it comes to American religious families, they were a powerhouse of reality television for close to a decade. But no matter how perfect they tried to appear on television or in political polls they just couldn't keep the rot and the current corruption beneath their family hidden for long. Since the release of their first TLC special in 2004, the Duggars have been plagued by controversies, which only picked up once again this year in 2026, when yet another one of their sons, Joseph Duggar, was arrested for the sexual abuse of children. So, you know, just go ahead and trigger warning. There's going to be a lot of that towards the end of this episode. How did America's number one Christian family, seeming beacons of alleged virtue and wholesomeness, produce not one but two pedophilic child abusers in their family? Well, it's not a hard pattern to suss out when you see the Duggar family for what they really are: Christian narcissists exploiting children for wealth and personal aggrandizement. So, for those who aren't familiar with the grift, the Duggar family have been around for years, okay, just plastered across American televisions and tabloids. But grandiose as Jim Bob, Michelle, and their crew seem now, they come from completely nondescript beginnings in the poor country dirt of Arkansas. Jim Bob Duggar was born July 18th, 1965, in the town that he would call home for most of his life, Springdale, Arkansas. To James, Jimmy Lee Duggar, and his wife, Mary Duggar. Far from the glitz and the glamour of the Hollywood world we've been discussing the last few weeks, Springdale in the 1960s was known as the chicken capital of the world when Jim Bob Duggar came screaming into this brave new world in 1965. Tyson Foods, now one of the largest and most corrupt food monopolies in America, was expanding into the area and Georgia's wasn't far behind. It brought a lot of money into the center of Springdale, triggering a boom of new shops and restaurants, along with an urban renewal project that sought to bring Springdale up into the flashy, chrome-aged modern world. Jim Bob Duggar, however, was not a part of that. While the big, wide, wonderful new world grew around him, while the poultry industry boomed and men moved into town with big money and big flashy cars driving down Main Street. They were not a part of that. They were dirt poor and living in a home on the edge of Springdale. And Jim Bob was, it's just no, there's no long or short of it. He seems to have come from a family that struggled. His father, Jimmy Lee, was described as a man who struggled to provide. Stories about the details differ, but Jim Bob describes his father as a man who wasn't godly and who wasn't good with money. In his later memoirs, Jim Bob would tell a story about his mother cooking decorative rice because it was the only thing in the house for any of them to eat. JB had only one sister, an older sister, named Deanna Duggar. The two were raised in a strict fundamentalism, with Deanna rarely allowed to wear pants and never allowed to take part in physical activity like cheerleading or sports. There doesn't seem to be a lot more to Jim Bob's childhood. I looked, I dug around, your girls got real acquainted with newspaper archives. And the only thing I could ever find around here was just a lot of boring stuff about duggers and meat trades and visiting each other and traveling to neighbors' houses. So literally like nothing, nothing there. But also, Jim Bob's really kind of vague about his childhood pre the age of 19. And you know, there's always, there's always a reason for that. As a poor kid, Jim Bob leaned into the church, becoming an active and evangelical participant by the time he was 19 years old. It makes a lot of sense if you think about it. A failure of a father and mother leads you into poverty. You don't have money for nice clothes, nice shoes, tickets to the movies, or a car. You can't do anything though other normal kids in the 70s and 80s are doing. So what are you gonna do in a small rural town in the south? Well, you go to church as a poor kid living where you live in like a rural farming community. Um, there's always a ride to church. There's always other kids at church. It's an easy access to a social ladder. If you're a kid with no money and devoutly religious parents, it's one of the rare, one of the few places that you kind of just get free access to, right? Even though horrible stuff goes on with kids in churches, like horrible stuff. So Jim Bob basically leaned hard into what can be described publicly as this like independent Baptist church, which as a southerner who grew up around these things, let me tell you what that is, right? An uh quote unquote independent Baptist church. That is a cult. It is a tiny wood-paneled, red carpeted shack on a hill. I guarantee I didn't even, I didn't even need to look this church up, right? With this, like what it would have looked like during this time in the 60s, because I know it's just this tiny ramshackle two by four cross staked out in the front, probably with some purple cloth hanging over it. If it's got windows, you can't see through them. It's almost like a Masonic temple, but probably slanted and the woods rotting. The people pull up around it, probably park in a gravel lot, stay there all day for hours at a time, and everybody else in town drives by and is like, oh, there's those weirdos that go to church for like fucking 18 hours a day. And I can also tell you someone who was dragged to one of these independent Baptist churches as a child, because yeah, I had some family members that went through a little phase and they took me to one of these types of Baptist churches. Let me tell you some of the things that these Baptist churches believe in. Uh, women can't eat with men or eat until after the men. Uh, children are to be seen and not heard. And if children break that rule, you smack them around. Uh, minority people are essentially made of sin. I sat in a Baptist sermon one day as a child, and they said that black people were black because they were full of sin and that they were all just gonna go to hell. And that's what it was. Like it was the most horrible thing I'd ever heard in my life. Even as a kid, I came home crying and told my mother who had not gone. She had sent me with these family members. I was like, they said black people are gonna go to hell, and she was rightfully upset. Um, and they also basically believe that any deviance from being a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant is a sin, perversion, deviance. They hate gay people, they hate trans people, they hate anything that's not Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar, essentially. I also think it's important, um, before we kind of like go back into the storyline, um, to bring us back around to the NAR at this point, too, while we're talking about this kind of fundamentalist Baptist environment that uh Jim Bob grew up in. If you want to know more about this, go watch Shiny Happy People and you hear a little bit more about how they grew up. Um, but we got to talk about the NAR here because as we've discussed in past episodes, labeling a Protestant Christian church as independent is usually a pretty big red flag that the actual Christian scripture um has been deviated from, right? Otherwise, they would just be a Baptist church, they would just be a Methodist church, they would just be a, you know, whatever it is, church. When it's got that independent in front of it, it's a big red flag. It's a big red flag. Um they that's a that's a big cover for these NAR churches. Um, and it usually means that the the scripture has been deviated from to suit the personal interpretations of a quote unquote prophet or a guru or some kind of charismatic leader, right? So be very, very careful when you see these quote unquote independent churches. And that's the kind of environment that Jim Bob grew up in. Powerless outside in the real world, right? Where the other kids moved up and around with the money their parents gave them, even if it was pocket change. Meanwhile, the only upwardly mobile power Jim Bob had was in the church, in a pattern of submission in order to achieve oppression. It was a system that would become the foundation of his entire life and the lives of his family. It'd be the core of the values that he taught his own kids. And you can see that kind of personality this would form, right? And how someone like that would sit at odds with the normal mainstream world around them. Jim Bob was nothing compared to the jocks and the cheerleaders. He couldn't compete, he couldn't be in that realm. He didn't, he had that option taken away from him by parents who unfortunately had failed him in a way that didn't allow him to engage in the system. But that all changed when he met the woman who allowed him to conquer the world that he could not actively be a part of. This is the point in the story in which we enter Michelle. Michelle Duggar was born Michelle Ruirk in 1966, a little over a year after Jim Bob, not quite two years, almost, in a small town in Ohio. She was the last of seven children born to Emery Ruirk and Mary Frances King. And just a few years after she was born, the family picked up sticks and moved to Springdale, Arkansas. Now, again, the details are a little bit obscured here, perhaps on purpose. Michelle's backstory is one that has been vague at times and one which has changed with the seeming need of the Duggar family to maintain specific narratives. Whatever the truth is, we know that Michelle Ruirk moved to Springdale after she was four years old and there experienced the growing pains that seemingly come natural to a child in a highly conservative environment. I mean, Michelle here and there has described herself as this kind of wild child up until the age of 15. Like when she told the story, when I first heard her tell the story, she basically is like, I wore short skirts and I was out driving around with boys and dating boys and all these boys. And the way she tells it, you think that she was like a wild college freshman, and then you find out this was all supposed to be happening before the age of 15. Uh, in an episode of their now canceled television show, she once described an incident. Uh, I don't, I didn't remember this, but I found it online. I found someone talking about it. No one could find the clip, but there was an incident where she was talking about mowing the lawn in a bikini and the neighbor calling the police, and she's telling it like it's this really controversial, oh my slutty former life. And it's like, well, no, it was probably because you were a child. If this was under the age of 15 and you were doing this, you know, they were probably worried that you were being sold or something. But, anyways, according to Michelle, she was a hotshot cheerleader swinging around in her short skirts with a series of boyfriends she could flip one by one. Again, the story seems to change and it seems to bend and flex with age and. With need. Personally, to me, 14 years old seems pretty young for some of the behaviors Michelle kind of hints at. Let's just listen to a clip of Michelle describing her quote-unquote wild child years before settling down and becoming a good Christian mother.

SPEAKER_01 22:16

What would you say to her? I would say, really, I could go back through my own life before I knew Christ at the age of 15, remembering all the baggage that I brought to the table and how Christ forgave me and set me free.

SPEAKER_00 22:32

Whatever the truth of the story is, by the time Michelle was 15 years old, it had all turned around because that was the year that she allegedly found God and became a Christian. But what's really going on here? There's there's there's a couple, there's a there's a couple of things I want to take note of. Um we gotta pause. There are a few details to me that speak just in that little that little block, right? Some patterns that I think it is important to kind of acknowledge once again, because Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar, I don't personally believe have ever been totally honest about their families, how they grew up, or their religious links and ties. I really don't. Uh and there's some things that I think point more to a truth right here than anything else they've ever told us. Number one, the Rurk family, which is the one Michelle comes from, have seven children. She was the youngest of seven children, and they moved from Ohio and moved out to a rural community with fewer opportunities but more churches. That's a red flag to me. Uh to me, it's uh it I think there might be some potential ties to a larger fundamentalist group than the Rurks uh have let on, something they may have already been a part of, the same church that they may have already been a part of or kind of in the gravity of. They didn't support Michelle having a million kids, but they did support her becoming a fundamentalist Baptist who got married at 17, as we'll see later. Um, so there's there's some perspectives there to consider. Another thing that kind of stood out to me at this point in the story is the intentional obscurity of Jim Bob's background. That speaks volumes to me, and even the kind of just, oh, I was born, I was a little slutty, I grew up, and then tons of detail after that with Michelle. I I assume that this also probably has some ties to the church organizations or the political organizations that we're gonna get deeper into in the second part of this series, but it's it's a bit odd. It's a bit odd. Now, the stories of these two lovebirds merged somewhere around 1983 when Jim Bob and Michelle finally crossed paths. By this time, Michelle was 16 or so and Jim Bob was 18 or so. The two met during a church visitation. As the story goes, Michelle had recently converted to the church, and Jim Bob and his friend decided to go and visit her as messengers slash promoters of the church. Think about like those Mormon holy rollers and their white shirts and their slacks. Jim Bob claimed it was love at first sight, but Michelle, whenever the story gets told, claims she didn't remember meeting him like at all. The two would cross paths again that summer when Michelle started working for Jim Bob's mother in the local yogurt shop. And I hate this, this whole story grosses me out. Jim Bob, upon hearing that Michelle, this 16, 17-year-old, had applied, told his mother to hire her. A few days later, he asked her on a date while he was quote unquote fixing the sink in the shop after their first date. And get this, this is so gross. This this, I read this and I went, This man also needs to have his hard drives checked. Um, after their first date, according to Jim Bob himself, I'm not kidding you. He literally wrote this in a book. He went home and prayed to God, saying, Here's the quote Lord, I would love to be her spiritual leader. Can I have her? Like a woman is a fucking possession. Like a kid praying for a furry or to keep the cat they just found in a garbage can. Like, I kid you not. Michelle, who was 17 at the time, also claims that she knew Jim Bob was the one after their first date, but she didn't go home and pray to own him like he did. Like, to me, that just shows he objectifies women. She was a possession, she was an accessory, she was a thing that he wanted, not a person. And he went for a young, vulnerable person. Like, it's just it's insane. It wasn't long until the two were engaged. Christmas of that same year, 1983, Jim Bob proposed to Michelle in the living room of her parents, presumably, again, with the consent, with their consent for their 17-year-old child to get married to this older kid. Uh, what's interesting is that according to a story published by Radar Online, and which is still online right now to this day, which says there's some credibility there, uh, the two got physical at this point in their relationship, despite their strong, strong Christian values, um, which seemed to be super flexible whenever they need to be and were right from the beginning. Jim Bob and Michelle were married on July 21st, 1984, just a couple of months after Michelle's graduation from high school, while she was still 17 years old. Jim Bob was 19. They got married at the Cross Church in Rogers, Arkansas, which is the same church that provided them with a three-bed, one-bath home that the couple would live in with their first 16 children for 14 years. The house would be condemned after they moved out. Isn't that always the story somehow? Uh, we'll come back to that church later, as well as its potential affiliations and links and a deep dive into the horrific the horrific religious leader that they follow. But for now, we're let's just keep focusing on the happy couple and the family to come. 19-year-old Jim Bob and his 17-year-old wife were officially married and ready to start their lives out as a spectacularly successful husband and wife. And I mean, the magic started as soon as they said I do, as it always does for couples like that. I mean, Jesus fairies descended from the heavens, they touched the teenagers on the shoulders with their magic wands, and they instantly granted both Jim Bob and Michelle instant fame, success, and tons of money, everything they would need to have a huge family, everything they touched turned to gold. And both husband and wife became wildly popular academics with an array of talents that they could display to the world. Just kidding, just kidding. Uh, what really happened is that 19-year-old Jim Bob started flipping cars while his 17-year-old bride started clipping coupons just to keep the TV dinners in the icebox. I'm kidding again, Michelle was terrified of microwaves. They had to flip used cars to keep tubed beef on the table. The early years were tough for Bob and Michelle by choice, right? This is we're not talking about now, this is by choice. Um, as they are for any teenage couple with nothing but a Jesus education under their belts. Jim Bob, at a true cliche of his name, bought junked-out cars, got them running again, then sold them on for little profit. When that got quote unquote successful enough, he eventually bought a tow truck and his own used car lot, truly a match for his evangelical personality. Now, Michelle, not allowed by their religion to do anything of substance outside of the home, did her best to get on, and that didn't start after the wedding. It started at the wedding. My friends, it started at the wedding. As soon as she was married, she settled into a domicile future of clipping coupons to get the best prices. Now, what's interesting is that despite their deeply held fundamentalist beliefs, Jim Bob and Michelle didn't start procreating right away. Quite the opposite, according to them. Right after their marriage, Michelle was on the pill, the actual pill, oral contraceptive to avoid pregnancy, which honestly, that's a responsible decision. You are both kids who don't have enough money to support yourselves. You're struggling to support yourselves. Correct. Take the pill. Do not have children. That's a responsible decision. Okay, right? Right? It's surprising. It's a surprising fact, um, but one that would become the backbone of their ministry in the nearest future in the worst possible way. By 1988, Jim Bob and Michelle had decided, though, that they were stable enough to bring a new life into the world. Remember, they got married in 1984, so it's been five years. Fine, that's respectable. Okay, fine. I've no complaints so far. So they decide to have their first child. Joshua Josh James Duggar was born on March 3rd, 1988, and he would immediately become the golden child. You can you can already tell where this kind of a family is gonna go, right? It takes a certain personality to want to have 20 children and a television show. Um, and Josh, the golden child, the first boy, the heir, most beloved, more beloved than the girl children for sure, uh, came into the world in 1988. After having Josh, Michelle goes back on the pill. Again, another surprise, but a responsible decision, seemingly, so that they can manage the pace at which their family is growing. But that choice is going to be a sticking point later. In 1989, a year after Josh's birth, while Michelle is still on the pill, she gets pregnant with baby number two. This one they name Caleb, but the pregnancy doesn't last. Michelle loses the baby, and this becomes a turning point for the Duggar couple. They decide suddenly it's a sign from God. He made Michelle get pregnant on the pill to show them that his plan for them was to pump out as many children as possible. That's that's why he that's why he killed a baby inside of her when she was on the pill. So when Michelle miscarries the imagined Caleb, it becomes all the more real for them. God is definitely talking to them, they decide, and he wants Michelle to get off the pill. So that's what they do. They decide that that is their their mission from the Lord, and they're going to carry it into the future. Now, I there's a lot of debate at this part in the story. There are people that claim that it was during this time, after this first miscarriage, that uh Jim Bob and Michelle were introduced to um certain religious organizations like the IBLP, um, which we're gonna talk about a lot in the next episode, but I'm not so sure. What I am sure of is how many of these so-called beliefs and prophecies the Duggars are claiming to have coincide, once again, with the patterns of the NAR. Um, and what we've talked about with that like apostolic Pentecostal evangelism, or they think that God is literally talking to them because they're so special and important, and it uh turns into prosperity gospel and all this other shit. It's incredibly dangerous, it's incredibly narcissistic, and it gives people this power to justify horrific things, as we're going to see. The Duggars are about to do, but I digress. By the end of 1989, Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar had what they believed to be their mission from God: fill Michelle with as much sperm as possible, no matter how dangerous it might be, no matter how risky it might be for her or the baby or their children, and make sure that the Duggars had as many children to tithe to the church and the government as possible. Jim Bob and Michelle met the challenge with the exuberance they would not show toward parenting or the protection of their children from sexual predators. The twins, Janna Marie and John David, were born in 1990, just 22 months after the eldest son, Josh. And remember, Michelle had also had a miscarriage in that time. The birth was given via emergency C-section because Michelle had severe preeclampsia, and a lot of women traditionally stop after that because future pregnancies are gonna be high risk. But what does Michelle do? She keeps going in 1991. Jim, Bob, and Michelle welcomed their fourth child, Jill Michelle, who was born, and this blows my fucking mind. She was born just 16 months after the twins. Okay, not conceived 16 months after the last birth. She was born 16 months after Michelle gave birth to twins. Yeah. Uh-huh. In 1992, Jim Bob and Michelle settled into a free home provided by the church. And this is when they allegedly really got into the basic seminar with the IBLP, the Institute of Basic Life Principles, which will become especially important in the next episode because this is all that weird fundamentalist bullshit. Um, this was the same year that Michelle would have her fifth child. A girl named Jessa Lauren, who was born just 18 months after Jill, with five children at home. Jim Bob and Michelle decided it was time to keep the children home and focus on a strict moral Christian homeschooling routine. They all needed to be shut up together with less access to the outside world. Not a red flag at all, folks. Um, a choice which might indicate care. Again, if it weren't for the later truths that we're going to be talking about that were going on while this was happening. Um, another child, number six, Ginger Nicole, was born in 1993, just 13 months after her previous sister. No, not a pregnancy. Ginger was born 13 months after her sister. And again, remember a pregnancy is 10 months long, right? So do that, math. Uh, the same basically follows year after year after year. The seventh child, Joseph Garrett, came along in 1994, just 13 months after Ginger. Josiah Matthew, number eight, came along in 1995, a lengthy 20 months after Joe. In 1997, Anna Joy the ninth child came along only 14 months after Josiah. And in 1998, the Duggars welcomed twins again. This time Jedediah Robert and Jeremiah Robert, the 10th and 11th Duggar children, who joined the family only 14 months after their sister Joy. By this point in the story, as America nears the new millennium, Jim Bob is crawling up in the world. And I mean crawling up in the world. Okay. In 1994, he sold his used car business and made the move into real estate. It was an interesting move, especially in light of just a few years later, Jim Bob throwing his hat into the ring as a Republican politician. Jim Bob got his shot in 1999, 11 children deep by this point, when he made the jump to the Arkansas State House of Representatives. Woo-hoo we elected to District 6 in 1998, Jim Bob started his term in 1999 in the Arkansas State House of Representatives for the Republican Party. Republican Party. He would serve two total terms in the House, um, and he would serve as a vice chair of corrections and criminal law, kind of ironic. Um, and as well as sitting on the insurance, commerce, and judiciary committees. Again, real ironic considering the family's rap sheet with criminal sons that's incoming. It looked like the Podunk country boy from Springdale was finally making good. So good that in 2002, Jim Bob decided this, this house, this house stuff, that's not for me. This whole just working for the state, that's not for me. I'm going to the US Senate, boy. I'm going national. So Jim Bob launched his campaign in 2002, running on the back of a bill, ironically, that Jim Bob had written himself. And get it. Get this. Jim Bob, when he ran in 2002 to try to get into the U.S. Senate as a Republican, his big thing was he wrote this bill about how anybody who gets found guilty of rape or incest should be killed. Isn't that interesting? Isn't that the isn't that really interesting coming from a Duggar? Uh, it was an ironic platform to run on, as we'll soon find out, um, because there was plenty of that going on in Jim Bob's own home. Still, the curtains hadn't been drawn back yet for the public, even with zero knowledge of the darkness carrying on in the Duggar home. By the early 2000s, the public proved it still had a lack of faith in Jim Bob Duggar. He lost his senatorial run to incumbent Tim Hutchinson by more than 50,000 votes. And that would kind of be his pattern when it came to politics. With his political dreams dashed to the toilet for now, Jim Bob turned his attention back to his growing family. But in his absence, hell, even in his presence, evil had started to bloom. In 2000, Michelle gave birth to her 12th child, Jason Michael, and the family began construction on a 7,000 square foot home that would one day feature in the show and would one day hilariously be called 10 Mansion. If you go and read the Duggar Snark page, they call it 10 Mansion, and that cracks me up. It's like calling Taylor Swift long pack. It just makes me laugh. It's so funny. Uh in 2001, Michelle gave birth again, this time to another boy, James Andrew, number 13, who came along just 15 months after the previous child. By 2002, while Jim Bob was running for the Senate and Michelle was cooking her 14th child, soon to be Justin Samuel, the real trouble in the Duggar family came to a head. Josh Duggar, the eldest boy, who by this time was 14 or 15, confessed to his father, Jim Bob, that he had committed a series of molestations. The confessions happen over a course of two to three times. In these confessions to his father, Josh reveals that he has been fondling young girls, including his sisters and other victims. According to the original story, Josh Duggar confessed at that time to at least seven incidents of molesting these young girls. Now, Josh is allegedly punished by Jim Bob for this incident within the family. There's no details of what that punishment was. No one will talk about it, but he was allegedly, quote unquote, punished. He was punished. Um, whatever they did, it was not enough. Just 16 months later, in 2003, two to three more incidents of molestation are revealed. Of course, at the hands of the now 15 to 16-year-old Josh Duggar. The family panics, rightfully so, right? Wouldn't you be panicked? Would you not be panicked if you found out there was a ton of child abuse, child sex abuse happening in your home? I'd be panicked. Uh, because, and you know, Jim Bob's got his eyes on this 7,000 square foot 10 mansion. So he, you know, he's like, I can't have this. So with dozens now of incidences at their knowledge, the Duggars, Michelle and Jim Bob, rush to the church elders. That's where they go. No, no, no. I no, I know, I know. I thought you, you also thought they were gonna go to the police. No, no, they went to their church elders, um, who do what all church elders in America seem to do. Uh, whether you're in the Mormon church or just another one of these of these NAR apostolic uh Reformation churches, you know, they they covered it up. They told everyone to be quiet. They sent Josh away to one of their church camps for troubled boys, because that also always ends really well, doesn't it? Uh Josh was away for three months at the IBLP. Remember, that's the uh Institute for Basic Life Principles church camp before returning and being completely integrated back into the family. So he's been molesting little girls for years, multiple years now, that we know of that he's confessed to. And they say three months at a church camp autophyxia, buddy. So this is the point at which the Duggars finally got the authorities involved after all of this happens. Okay. After he's after he's confessed, they don't do anything for 16 months. Then he confesses to more. They send him away for three months. And then when he comes back, Jim Bob takes his teenage son down to the sheriff's office, where they're met by Tim Hutchen of all people, um, a police officer who would later be arrested and imprisoned for 56 years uh for the uh distribution and receipt of child sex abuse material. Yeah, yeah. The the Jim Bob takes his son, who's been molesting little girls as a teenager, to this man, Tim Hutchin, and they sit down at the police station, and uh Josh has to tell the police officer everything that he's done, and then the police officer gives him a really stern talking to Tim Hutchin, who again would in the future be arrested for child pornography for having it, for in for indulging in it. Um, he lectures Josh and says, You better straighten up, you better get it right, or we're gonna bring the full force of the law down on you. And they record all of this stuff that he's done, right? But it's just as a warning. Uh, that warning doesn't sink in, okay? It doesn't sink in. But what this whole scene does make one wonder, which again, you can go and watch that shiny happy people documentary on Amazon if you want. They also talk about this whole little scene. Um, it makes you wonder why, of all people did Jim Bob have someone else who was like this huge, prolific child sex abuse material distributor and downloader talk to his son about molesting children, right? It's a weird question. And as you'll see when we get to Josh's future crimes, it's really interesting that it was Tim Hutchins specifically that had this significant moment with him, considering what Josh was going to get in trouble for in the future. But with Josh properly scolded, the Duggars decided, you know what? That's it. This is solved, he's fixed. No need to, no need to go further down this road. We sent him to church camp for three months and we had a sex abuse predator cop talk to him. It's all fixed now. We don't have to do anything else. So Josh Duggar was considered a healed boy, completely fixed and clear psychopathologically, um, to just go back out into the world as a totally healed person around all his minor siblings. While the Duggars scrambled to hide the ongoing crimes and abuses of their son, crimes that were being perpetrated against their own daughters, by the way, uh the Duggars got the chance of a lifetime and they took it. In 2004, the Duggars were officially introduced to the world when the show 14 Kids in Counting aired as a one-hour special on TLC, which at this point still was the learning channel, and you could go and watch like open brain surgeries on it and stuff. Uh the special featured the full lineup of the 13 Duggar children, but it also followed the 14th pregnancy of Michelle, a pregnancy which came to fruition when the 14th Duggar child Jackson Levi was born, just 18 months after the previous child. The world obviously went nuts for it, right? It's a shot, it's a sideshow spectacle. It's a freak show. It's an absolute freak show, and people Don't want to pretend that that's what it is, but it is, right? It's the same thing as paying your quarter to go and look in it. It's exploitation. It's a spectacle. I can still remember the show airing in my house when it came on. My mother and my sister-in-law practically rabid to see it, right? Because they were like, Jesus, what is this? Because they were moms. So they were like, what is this woman doing? Why would she have this many kids? This is like absolute buffoonery with all these children. And I remember them watching it in horror. It was a horror movie to them. But there was also this fascination to emotions, which kind of quickly descended into this disgust, at least for my mother, who rightly at the time, like, my mom got a lot of shit wrong, but she did not get the Duggers wrong because I remember watching the first episode, like that first special. And I remember my mom saying, Dad, this is wrong. You just can't take care of all those children. It's impossible. Two people cannot take care of all those children. The big ones are raising the little ones, and that's not fair. And she was, she was completely right about that. And she did even, I remember her hinting at the fact that something's not right. Something's not right. Those boys shouldn't be around. Like I remember her hinting that there's something wrong going on. Little did the audience know that the airtight system of obedience and color-coded organization that Duggers displayed with their children was actually a system plagued by physical, emotional, and sexual abuse. In 2005, Michelle gave birth to her 16th child, Joanna Faith. And by the next year, they were finally moving into their big tin mansion on the hill. In 2006, TLC gave the Duggars yet another special: 16 kids and moving in, which was every bit as chaotic as one would imagine it to be. And again, people tuned in in horror and fascination. The opportunities just kept rolling in for the Duggars at this point. They're the most popular carnival attraction. Having a million kids that all had to raise each other was a real game changer for reality television. The Duggars got yet another special that same year, 2006. It was called Raising 16 Kids. And Jim Bob even got another crack at running for the Senate, which was a crack he would lose again. Again, that's his pattern. Losing politics is something that Jim Bob is really, really good at doing. By the summer of 2006, the Duggars had their own cross-country special, and the TV viewers of America were hooked. They wanted more of this odd family with their odd evangelical beliefs and outfits and the endless access to khaki skirts. They were the perfect family. Or were they? Because that same year, and I didn't even know this, this blew my mind, right? In 2006, the Oprah Winfrey show got a tip that was so disturbing, they called the police, and it was about Josh molesting children. The Oprah Winfrey show in 2006 got warned that Josh Duggar was a fucking teenage predator. And Oprah Winfrey was so freaked out that they called the police, and the police had to sit down and interview Jim Bob Duggar. The police in Arkansas had to go, hey, Jim Bob, uh, we've been called by the Oprah show and told that your son is touching little girls. So what's going on? So Jim Bob was forced to sit down and tell the police about Josh's quote unquote past molestations. But once again, nothing seemed to come of it. They filed like a 33-page report, but nothing happens. In 2007, a source known only as Alice went nuclear, posting a slew of intimate details about the family all over the internet that included a detailed outline of the abuse that was being covered up for the sake of the golden child Josh Duggar and the television benefits that the Duggars were trying to reap the rewards of. Even though the source was credible, nothing came of it. That same year, 2007, Michelle Duggar gave birth to her 17th child, Jennifer Danielle, and TLC decided, you know what? We we we need to give you another another special. So there it was, the Duggars Big Family Album came out in 2007. This finally ended up being their big break. In 2008, the Duggars finally got the keys to the kingdom when TLC announced the launch of their own show, 16 Kids and Counting. It was primetime gold that immediately launched the family into the upper echelons of reality TV super stardom. The show was an instant hit and it gave a new level of power and credibility to what had just been this odd mega Christian sideshow. Jim Bob and Michelle now had a national platform on which to espouse their evangelical beliefs, the same beliefs that were hiding a predator in their home while their female children were being abused. Jim Bob and Michelle became parenting icons. They endorsed Mike Huckabee in his presidential race. Yuck. Then later that year, Michelle gave birth to her 18th child, of course, all caught on film, Jordan Grace Micaiah. Micaiah? Anyway, that was a big year for Josh Duggar too, who has allegedly, by this point, allegedly stopped molesting children in order to get married to his girlfriend, Anna, who was now a Duggar and soon to become his long-suffering wife. The next decade or so ended up being a whirlwind for the Duggars. From 2009 to 2015, they more or less operated as an evangelical baby factory. Jim Bob kept pumping babies into Michelle, and she kept dragging the family onto the Today show to announce the next edition to their clan. In 2009, just 12 months after her last birth, Michelle gave birth to number 19, Josie Brooklyn. This daughter was born at 25 weeks due to Michelle having pre-eclampsia again. Both the mother and child almost died. The 19th Duggar child was in the NICU unit for four months. Four months. Then was immediately returned to NICU only days after her release. The audience was outraged at the whole affair. Why was Michelle continuing to get pregnant if it could take the life of the baby and leave her other 18 children without a mother? Michelle didn't care. That's the thing. These Christian narcissists, they always use their Christian whatever bullshit, their fake ideologies to justify these egotistical, delusional, grandiose plots schemes they come up with, like having a million children. And then they tell themselves, well, what's more important is that I have the million children. That's more important to God than actually being here for the 18 other fucking kids that I made, right? That's the kind of like selfish justifications that they're able to give themselves through this warped, twisted, bastardized, fake Christian ideology. Now, by 2010, Jim Bob was getting serious about a political run again. So the family moved to Little Rock, the capital of Arkansas. The Duggar parents traveled back and forth to visit their youngest child in the NICU. Hugely stressful time on the whole entire family. That same year, Michelle, despite being one of the most fundamentally selfish human beings on the planet, who would rather die as long as she's getting the attention of having more kids than everyone else, than actually being a present force in the life of her already existing living children who are being sexually abused by their other siblings, right? She gets Mother of the Year award in 2010 at this like big crazy right-wing evangelical, it's called like baby conference, celebrating the force of life over a culture of death. Like it's just, it's just like anti-abortion, bullshit, nonsense. It it would be laughable if it wasn't so sad, right? The whole thing. It would be laughable if it wasn't so sad because, like, again, fundamentally a selfish, ego-dreaming, breeding kink, weird, like she's she's an awful human being. She and Jim Bob just awful, awful humans. But the Duggars were starting to figure it all out by 2011. They were really starting to um find the flow that fit with their natural personalities. They had all but buried the stories about their child molesting son, and they had a wildly popular reality television show on one of the biggest networks in the country. At the time, it turns out the Duggars were allegedly making $25,000 to $45,000 per episode. And remember, there's like 22 to 25 episodes in a season during this time, right? It was time to expand their empire now. And that's exactly what the Duggars did. In 2011, they released their first book, A Love That Multiplies, which was just another jumbled-up delusion of their incredibly harmful beliefs, packaged in an ooey-gooey evangelical package. September of that year was also when TLC sent the family on a world tour, which instead of actually visiting the world, read more like a white supremacist list of approved vacation spots. England, Ireland, Scotland, Israel. That was their world tour. Okay? I kid you fucking not. In November of 2011, the Duggars shocked the world again when they once again slopped all the kids onto the Today Show to announce the coming arrival of their 20th child. Yes, that's right. Michelle was pregnant again in 2011, this time with little Jubilee. She was gonna be Jubilee. Uh the pregnancy was not to be. Michelle miscarried on December 8th, and the family held a memorial service, which was, of course, showcased on an episode of the show. By this time, the oldest children were beginning to age into themselves. Ginger had dreams of going to an Ivy League college, and Jenna, Jessa, Jill, John David, and the rest were beginning to set out on careers and missionary journeys of their own. It all seemed like it was going to settle into a normal, evangelical set of pace. Between 2012 and 2015, 19 kids in counting, as it was now called, was a showcase of the various sons and daughters getting married, moving out, going to college, having kids, and starting lives of their own. It was big ratings for TLC as they seemed to have a new courtship, a new pregnancy, or a new wedding or birth to announce every year, every quarter, every month, every other episode. But all climbs to fame eventually come to an end, and many of them are accompanied by a catastrophic fall. By 2015, it seemed like the Duggars had it all, and that they had gotten away with it all. Their eldest, Josh, was set out on a career of his own now. He had joined a right-wing lobbying group, which we'll talk about more in the next episode, that was all about getting evangelicals into the halls of power. Sound familiar? So that they could do away with all the gay people in abortions. He had children of his own now, Josh did, several, and Josh and his wife Anna were even given their own show. Anna's having a dot dot dot. This first spin-off special aired on May 12th, 2015. And then on May 19th, the real story broke. Josh Duggar was a child molester, and his family had helped cover up the story. The news hit the media like an absolute typhoon. People went crazy. After all, this is the oh so perfect Christian family, right? Parents of the year. Jim Bob wants to be a senator. These are people who had spent almost a decade lecturing people on how to raise their children like little abuse units. The perfect Christian family image was destroyed overnight as the details were released by In Touch magazine, who had gotten their hands on the police reports that Jim Bob thought he had gotten buried after that whole Oprah debacle. Josh had molested at least five children, girls, including his own family, between the ages of 14 and 15. He was between the ages of 14 and 15. He confessed to his father about the molestation, not just once, three freaking times. And Jim Bob had ultimately done nothing until the last confession. Eventually, after that last confession, going to church elders after 16 months and then sending Josh to the camp that we talked about before covering it up like it never happened. While Josh's child-molesting face was flashed across every TV and tabloid in the world, it was also revealed that he had a ravenous sexual history that included strippers, lap dances, and nearly a thousand dollars spent on the adultery website Ashley Madison, where Josh Duggar had actively maintained a subscription and an account until 2015 when the allegations of his molestation charges were finally made public. It was a bombshell, made worse by the fact that he was also sued at this time by a stripper who alleged that he had sexually assaulted her and terrorized her, which I tend to believe. By July 16th of 2015, TLC had canceled the show. How could they not? Episodes started disappearing off early streaming services and some DVDs. Book deals with the family were canceled, as were endorsements, music deals, and appearance contracts the family had already agreed to and in some instances been paid some money for. In all, it was estimated that the Duggars, after the cancellation of everything in 2015, lost an income of $25 million per year after the revelation of Josh Duggar's criminal history was finally revealed. On August 25th, Josh Duggar checked into a treatment facility for what the family claimed was going to be quote unquote long-term treatment. It wasn't. Josh was back out in no time and not languishing in a prison cell as he should have been and would be soon enough. The family would undergo a few more controversies in the year before the final explosions. In 2017, Dr. Jill Duggar's husband, who featured in the Amazon documentary Shiny Happy People, was suspended from the show for homophobic social media posts he made towards the LGBTQ community at large. TLC dropped him from the show and announced he was no longer invited to participate. Jill left with him, and Derek melted down very publicly on Twitter a short while later. You can still find records of that. It's pretty bad. The Eldest Girls released an album, a music album in 2018, a project called the Happy Heart Album. But before this, absolutely epic litany of bangers was able to take hold of the Swifty market. The biggest Duggar bombshell ever dropped. Josh Duggar's car lot was being rated for CSAM. It went down on November 19th. The wholesale motor lot in Springdale, Arkansas, where Josh primarily worked by this time. It was raided by the Department of Homeland Security. The Department of Homeland Security was responding to graphic CSAM that had been downloaded between the dates of 14th and 15th of May. Upon tracing that material, the DHS discovered that they had been downloaded to Josh Duggar's IP address. Agents seized Josh's laptop, on which they discovered, hidden behind a password-protected partition, like a real creep that he is, a plethora of graphic, extremely graphic and sadistic. That's the word they use specifically, sadistic CSAM. The worst, according to the investigators, they tend to always say this, but the investigators said it is the worst they'd ever seen. Some guy allegedly quit after this. The age ranges of the victims in the material was between, my god, this makes me sick. Uh, the victims in the material were between 18 months old and 12 years old. Okay. So all of that happens in 2019, the end of 2019. Finally, Josh Duggar is arrested, and he's he's he's arrested without bail on April 29th, 2021, over a year after the material was seized from his computer on his car lot. He was charged with two counts of receiving and possessing CSAM. He was found guilty of those charges on December 9th, 2021. In May of 2022, he was sentenced to 151 months in prison or 12 and a half years with no parole. After his sentence, he will be on 20 years of supervised probation, along with registering himself on the National Sex Offenders Registry, and he will be fined $50,000, which again, that is not enough. Some questionable people complained after he was charged. They're like, you've given him two counts of do you just had like pictures and videos? It seems like too much for a man who didn't actually engage in the acts themselves. Um, if any of you siccos who think that, who feel that way are listening, I would like to remind you that some of the material that Josh Duggar was watching involved the sadistic, and that's not my word. That is a word that was used by the investigator from the Department of Homeland Security. These videos involve the sadistic sexual abuse of 18-month-old children, okay, which could be lethal, right? That that could kill, that can kill an 18-month-old child. So uh he could have been watching videos of children that were being killed, all right, while being sexually tortured. So let's let's let's just go ahead and say that that's not enough. It's not enough. But what is good news is that he's gone through a ton of appeals so far as we stand here today in 2026, and they've denied all of them. And it looks like he's going to serve his full sentence in prison, where I'm sure he's very unhappy. What's very disturbing is Anna Duggar still had another child with Josh after his arrest. She gave birth just before his conviction in December to their seventh child. Mike Huckabee and a slew of other evangelicals that you could tie a straight line to Jeffrey Epstein through rushed to Josh's defense. Huckabee himself being quoted as saying that sometimes good people do bad things. Just unbelievably disgusting. Unbelievably disgusting. Their defense of the golden Duggar Boy, no good. It's it's it's served no good, no purpose. All his appeals have been denied. He's sitting in prison right now, with the whole world knowing exactly who and what he is, and we all know how someone like him tends to fare in that environment, and they can't keep him completely isolated forever, no matter how much they try. In 2023, Amazon released their searing expose on the Duggars under a five-part series aptly titled Shiny Happy People, which we'll talk about more in the next episode. It laid the Duggars' cover-ups and shams bare and started a new conversation around the family and their allegedly Christian beliefs. But as they sank into the background of their sad, regressive lives and quiet settled over the world of public opinion once more. On March 19th of this year, 2026, Joseph Duggar was arrested in the small town of Tonytown, Arkansas, or Taunton, Tonytown, Arkansas, where he lived with his wife and his children. The arrest came on the back of a months-long investigation by the Bay County Sheriff's Office in Florida, which happens to be the sheriff's office that has jurisdiction over the popular uh holiday vacation destination, Panama City Beach. Now, according to the Bay County Sheriffs, they were investigating claims that a nine-year-old girl had been sexually assaulted in 2020 during a family vacation with the Duggars. According to the girl, it was Joseph Duggar, the seventh Duggar child, who had committed the abuse at the time. The victim, 14 by the time she reported the abuse to police, described several incidents in enough detail to spark an immediate investigation. Police, finding enough credible evidence to arrest Joe Duggar, did so. And while in custody, Joe confessed to the molestation of the child when she was just nine years old. He would lure the child into his lap, then fondle her while they were watching television. According to police, the victim's father even confronted Duggar about the abuse the day before his arrest, after which Duggar also admitted to the abuse then and apologized for it, believing that would be the end of the matter. Shortly after his arrest, Joe's wife, Kendra, was also arrested and charged with an unrelated charge of two counts of endangering the welfare of a minor and two counts of false imprisonment. Charges which came after police, who were investigating Joe Duggar, went into the home to find that Joe and Kendra Duggar's children had padlocks on the outside of their bedroom doors, which means those children were being locked in their rooms by Kendra and Joe Duggar. Kendra was released on a $1,400 bond, and Joseph was also later released on a $600,000 bond. Neither parent was obviously granted custody of their children. As a matter of fact, the terms of Joseph's bond require that he doesn't even come in contact with any minor children anywhere ever at all, ever again, until this whole thing is settled. What's also kind of interesting is that now in subsequent months, since this whole thing's blown up and he definitely is probably gonna end up where his brother is, uh Joe has now changed his plea. He is not admitting to anything, he's not apologizing for anything. He is now saying he is not guilty as he battles these charges against him. And Kendra, as well, for her abuse of her own children, is also pleading not guilty. Their trials are scheduled for July of this year. I think Joseph's is supposed to start July 14th. And uh not sure when Kendra's is gonna, it'll be right around that time if it hasn't already happened by the time this episode comes out. Oh, what a sordid tale, huh? It's funny how that happens, how this ultra, how these these like super, super, we're so much morally and ethically better than everyone. So we're gonna like control and punish gay people and minorities. It's interesting how it's always these families. It's like not always, but always, always, always these family, these people who turn out to be the cesspools of corruption and damage and violence of every sort. Uh, I remember when the news broke about Josh Duggar, I still remember that. And I wasn't surprised. Not because I'd been an avid watcher of the show. I hadn't watched the show in years and years and years. I hadn't heard anything about it. I didn't know anything about it. But the second I heard, oh, Josh Duggar has touched kids, I went, Well, yeah, of course he has. Of course he has. It's always that type. It is always that type, and of course he has. You have 20 kids in a house with two parents. You can't look out for all of them. That's just facts. You cannot. 20 kids cannot be married, can't sorry, cannot be managed by two parents. It cannot happen. That means the older kids have to parent the younger kids, right? They admitted that on the show. They showed that that was literally part of what they did. They had a whole system that was about the younger, the older kids being parents to the younger kids. Two people just can't give 20 children the attention and love that they need. They can't. And that means that kids fall through the cracks straight up in a million different ways. There are so many ways. Oh my God, there are so many ways for kids to fall prey to predators, to fall through the cracks, ways for them to just completely get lost, to completely get harmed, hurt, killed, maimed emotionally, physically. You name it. You name it. The more you have, the more children you have, the easier that gets. And let's just be honest, it's not a surprise that Josh ended up being a predator. He was a young, mostly unsupervised male who was given charge over vulnerable children who were taught to obey and keep their mouths shut in a culture that taught him that he was this golden, amazing child. He was this prophet and like head of his family. Every man's a priest and a king in his own kingdom. Bullshit. Jim Bob and Michelle, in their ultimate wisdom, created an environment in which children became tyrants over their own siblings. So what happens? What happens? What happens when tyrants are put over vulnerable people? We know what happens. And as a child grows, ages, changes, matures sexually, that can come with some serious dangers when it's left unsupervised and unchecked. And that's really what I think so much of what the Duggars, all this horrible stuff that we're gonna really get into in the next episode. Because this is just really like background, right? We're gonna get into the darks. This is, I mean, this has been pretty bad, um, but it gets it's gonna get, you know, even darker. Um, unchecked, unchecked, right? Where did Josh Duggar learn this behavior? I mean, the statistics are pretty clear. I've talked about this a lot, I've talked about this a lot on my TikTok. The vast majority of sexual abusers are victims of sexual abuse themselves, right? It's very rare for a child to just be a sex abuser, okay? They they usually have had it done to them. Did Josh pick up this unearthly, deviant, evil behavior from someone else? Was he taught this behavior by one of the many laps that he was inevitably dumped into? You know, because remember, the Duggars were basically destitute at the beginning. And we all know, like, just think about the logistics of that. Think about a destitute couple who are living in a fucking slum house that's been given to them for free. They have 16 children. There's just kids are easy to pick off, and predators know that, and predators sense that, and predators will come in and say, Oh, you need help? Let me help you. And predators gravitate towards these environments where these kinds of destitute, I need help, vulnerable people live. And there it is. Easy pickings. Josh would have been easy pickings for any predator who was in the church that wanted to get their hands on him for any predator who was like, Hey, I'll give you a hand. I'll watch these kids for you for a little bit. Did he, is that where he got it? Is that where he got it? It's not hard to imagine things happening to a kid when they're dumped on a church baby service or left to their own devices while new pregnancies are cooked down the hall. I'm sure that's also another part of it. Whatever happened in that house, Jim, Bob, and Michelle ultimately failed as parents. They ultimately failed as parents. They have two sons that are predators, they failed. Even having one son that's a predator, you fucking failed. But here's what makes that worse. They believe that they are wild successes in the parenting world. Again, narcissism. They they think that they are the parents who should tell other parents how to parent. And for that, we have one thing and one thing only to thank. Really, honestly, that's confirmed all of these delusions for them. The Institute of Basic Life Principles, an evangelical cult closely tied to the NAR and some even scarier 1960s alphabet elements. A cult led by a man named Gothard. Okay, every bit as sinister as William Branham, who we have spoken about at length. This guy is even worse than Branham. I really do. I think he's even worse than Branham. When it comes to the Duggars, you cannot see their actions, their choices in a vacuum. The IBLP covers everything, it taints everything, it permeates into every corner of their life, including the abusive, shadowy parts. It is this evangelical cult that empowered the Duggars to build an empire on the exploitation of children. And it was this same evangelical cult that empowered Josh and Joe Duggar to see female children as objects to be abused for sexual gratification. And that's what we will be talking about in the next episode. The Duggars, the IBLP, and insane political ties that run through it all, all the way back to the divisive age of the 60s. Right back here to the present day. The Duggars aren't shiny, happy people. They're a part of the same sinister cult that we've been talking about episode after episode after episode. It all ties together. It all connects together. The same sinister beliefs and stuff that Lou Taylor pushes. This is the same thing. It's all the same thing. Welcome to Plathville, one of the most sinister shows that's ever, ever, ever been on television. Same thing, same people, same beliefs. And we're going to be breaking that all down in the Duggars part two. So make sure you're here for the conclusion to this incredibly fucked up story. Thank you so much for being here for this first part today. If you want more of the Scandal Queens podcast, then head over to patreon.com slash scandalqueens, where you can get updates, essays, early releases, and bonus episodes that no one else gets to listen to. It's all over on Patreon. So head over there if you'd like to support me and get even more out of the Scandal Queens podcast experience. If you're not so into pop culture and you still want to get somewhat of a psychological POV instead, head over to Substack where I post weekly guides, essays, and articles about life, relationships, friendships, narcissism, mental health, all the things that make the human psyche so fascinating. You can get that on therebjohnson.substack.com. If you just want to get little clips of me yapping, follow me at the Real EB Johnson on all social media channels. I just talk about things that interest me in one five-minute clip. So if you're into that kind of thing, go over there and get yourself some of that. If you love this episode, why not leave me a five-star review and please help me come back against the Swifties who tried to tank my ratings on Spotify? It's totally free, it takes only a few minutes, and it means the absolute world to me. So please, if you have the time, um just leave a quick quick review, say what you like over on Apple and Spotify. For everyone else, thank you so much for listening. I hope you'll be back with me next week so we can close out this incredibly twisted and sad story. Uh, but until then, keep your secrets close, your receipts closer, and stay scandalous, Queens. Bye bye.