After months of anticipation, Jill Duggar’s long-awaited memoir finally hit stores this week.
And as expected, the book is generating quite a lot of controversy, most of it having to do with Jill’s portrayal of her parents and their devotion to cult leader Bill Gothard.
Until he was ousted amid sexual harassment allegations, Gothard was the leader of the Institute in Basic Life Principles.
Viewers of the recent Amazon Prime documentary Shiny Happy People were shocked to learn that Gothard’s predilection for very young women was basically an open secret within the IBLP.
And according to Jill’s book, Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar used their eldest daughter Jana as currency to try and purchase Gothard’s favor.
“We were new to the inner workings of IBLP, but we knew enough already to understand why it was only Jana who was invited,” Jill recalled in her book.
“She was the only elder Duggar girl who was blond, and everybody knew that Mr. Gothard liked blond girls.”
“We’d joke about it, calling Jana one of ‘Gothard’s Girls.’ It didn’t occur to me at all how strange, unsafe, and unwise it was.”
Jill went on to say that even if she had recognized the danger of the situation, she doubts she “would have been able to speak out against it.”
“I was still terrified of conflict and would do anything to avoid it,” the mother of three wrote in her memoir.
It’s worth noting that when Jill describes Jana as an “elder” Duggar daughter, she means in relation to the younger girls in the family.
Jana was only in her teens when this nauseating transaction took place, and this is the first time that anyone in her family has spoken about it publicly.
Jill doesn’t go so far as to accuse Gothard of abusing Jana, but it’s clear that she still believes her parents were in the wrong for placing their daughter in such a vulnerable position.’
Jill has mostly cut ties with Jim Bob and Michelle, but Jana still lives at home with her scandal-plagued parents.
At 33, she’s the only adult Duggar woman who has never married.
In a recent interview, Jill made it clear that she still believes the IBLP is a dangerous organization, despite the removal of Gothard.
“I really do think that IBLP is a form of a cult. I think that even if you remove the person in leadership, a lot of those same values and principles are still being taught, so it doesn’t fix the problem,” she told People magazine this week.
“I think that’s what some people think like, ‘Oh, we’ve removed Bill Gothard from the situation. It makes everything better,’” she continued.
“No, it changes and maybe adds a nice storefront to the picture, but it doesn’t change the overall principles that are still being taught and held to.”
Jill went on to reveal that her parents are still devoted to Gothard and his teachings.
“My dad even said somewhat recently on a family group text, he was like, ‘You owe your life to Mr. Gothard.’ I’m like, ‘No,’ I think that you just have to not look at the sugarcoating, or whatever,” she revealed.
“They try and gloss it up and repackage it. But you have to look at the long haul, how it really flushed out. What do these principles look like.”
Needless to say, it sounds like Jill made the right call when she decided to distance herself from her parents.
