It hasn’t been a great year for the Duggars, huh?
Which is fine, because so many of them are truly terrible people.
But the biggest issue the family has faced this year has, of course, been Josh Duggar’s arrest.
This spring, Josh was charged with two counts of receiving and possessing child pornography, and apparently the specific materials he was in possession of were so extremely disturbing that one of the Homeland Security agents who’d been investigating him called them “in the top five of the worst of the worst that I’ve ever had to examine.”
Things have been moving pretty slowly since the arrest — he spent a few days in jail before a judge agreed to let him stay at a family friend’s home with the stipulation that he not be allowed unsupervised around any minors.
In June, the trial was postponed at the request of Josh’s legal team, who asked for more time to prove that Josh is innocent and had actually been framed.
That’s ridiculous, of course, but the judge agreed, and so for the past few months we’ve just been hearing about evidence, things the judge will and won’t allow to be part of the trial, that sort of thing.
But at long last, Josh’s trial is all set to start next week, so there’s been quite a bit of renewed interest in the whole sordid story.
And we assume that’s why Amy Duggar, cousin of Josh and niece of Jim Bob, has decided to speak out about the situation once again.
Amy’s mother is Jim Bob’s sister, and her immediate family never shared the extreme beliefs of her uncle and cousins. Because of that, she was never very close to them.
She’s pretty friendly with some of the older girls, especially Jill, but over the past few years she’s been distancing herself more and more from Jim Bob and the family’s more problematic beliefs.
Ever since Josh’s arrest, she’s been more clear about cutting ties with several members of her family, stating the importance of cutting out toxic people, even relatives, and how important it is to protect children from abuse.
Another reason that she’s done with Jim Bob his clan, she explained in a series of tweets she shared earlier this week, is that they’re a bunch of rotten liars.
She began her tweets by referencing the fact that Josh molested five young girls, including four of his own sisters, several years ago, writing “I did nothing about it … BECAUSE I DIDN’T KNOW.”
“When we asked where a certain individual was years ago — we were told that he was a camp helping an organization build homes.”
“I want to explain that I simply was kept away from what was happening,” she continued. “I never knew about any abuse taking place.”
“I thought he went to this camp and wanted to help people simply because he just wanted to do a good deed.”
But he didn’t — the family has confirmed multiple times that when they learned about what Josh had been doing, they didn’t get him any actual help but instead sent him off to do construction with a family friend.
Amy used the hashtags “fooled” and “lied to again and again,” showing that apparently honesty isn’t one of the Duggars’ strong suits.
She said that she was “just setting another record straight,” and that she “felt like my followers deserve the truth and I’ll continue to be honest with all of y’all.”
She also said “My mom was lied to as well, and was never told the truth over and over again.”
“The division taking place that you currently see was a long time coming, it was not an abrupt decision,” she finished.
We can’t imagine anyone wouldn’t agree with Amy’s decision to step back from that rotten branch of her family tree, and it’s also not even remotely a surprise that Jim Bob and Michelle would lie about anything pertaining to Josh’s deviant ways.
Still, it’s good to see her taking such a strong stand against them, right?