HaveUHeard

Amy King still remembers confronting her cousin Josh Duggar when he was accused of abusing four of his sisters.

King’s colossal extended family became nationally known in 2008, when the TLC reality series “17 Kids and Counting” premiered ― but the show was canceled in 2015 following the accusations against Duggar. King, who learned about the allegations on the news “like the rest of the world,” was shocked.

“He was staying in a trailer and I went in there and I said, ‘How could you do this?’ … I was very bold about that,” King told Vanity Fair in an interview published Wednesday. She claimed that Duggar said he hadn’t targeted her because “he knew better.”

Duggar was raised under a strict interpretation of the Institute in Basic Life Principles, a fundamentalist Christian movement espoused by his parents, Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar. Meanwhile, King, the daughter of Jim Bob’s sister Deanna, grew up outside that environment (meaning that, among other things, she was allowed to listen to the radio).

King said her conservative uncle “had control” over “what happened” on the show, which she appeared in for more than 100 episodes. She now believes she received so much focus on the show in the hopes that her quirks would distract from Josh.

“I was pissed,” King told Vanity Fair, about having to learn about the scandal on the news. “I felt like I wasn’t worth telling … that they didn’t want to protect me. They didn’t want anyone to know, they wanted to keep it inside their little bubble. Secrets breed in the IBLP. Things are hidden.”

In 2015, Duggar publicly apologized for what he described as “wrongdoing” and what his parents referred to as “some very bad mistakes.” He was sent to a religious camp instead of being criminally charged.

Years later, in 2021, Duggar was arrested on charges of receiving and possessing child sexual abuse material. The father of seven was ultimately found guilty of “receiving and possessing material depicting minors engaged in sexually explicit content.” He was sentenced in 2022 to 12 and a half years in prison ― a sentence that King has called unsatisfactory.

King has since channeled her frustration into a four-part Amazon Prime documentary, “Shiny Happy People,” where only one of Jim Bob and Michelle’s children, Jill Duggar Dillard, speaks out against them. King’s trust in the rest of the family, meanwhile, is gone.

“I’m not going to sit there at a family dinner at Thanksgiving and pretend we’re a loving family,” she told Vanity Fair. “No, I’m scared to death of my child being around them.”

Need help? Visit RAINN’s National Sexual Assault Online Hotline or the National Sexual Violence Resource Center’s website.