Just a few days ago, Josh Duggar was arrested in Arkansas for receiving and possessing child pornography.
It was horrific news, but unfortunately it wasn’t exactly shocking.
All the way back in 2015, the world learned that Josh had molested five young girls when he was a teenager, including four of his own sisters.
The family was just starting to get some attention around this time, and so Jim Bob and Michelle did all they could to sweep everything under the rug.
They sent Josh off to work construction for a few months instead of getting him any real help, and then they had him speak with a state trooper who was a friend of the family — and who is coincidentally currently serving time in prison on his own child porn charges.
That’s it. That’s how they handled it.
And then, several years later when In Touch did their investigation and discovered what had happened, Jim Bob and Michelle downplayed the molestations in a major way, essentially saying that Josh had just been curious about girls.
They claimed that the girls had been asleep when Josh had touched him, that he was super sorry and would never do anything like that again … basically anything to write off what had happened as a teenage boy making an understandable mistake instead of what it was.
Which, again, was child molestation.
A little while after this, Josh was outed for having an Ashley Madison account — Ashley Madison, in case you forgot, was a website for specifically married men to find women for hook ups.
He released a statement apologizing and admitting to having both a sex addiction and a porn addiction and went off for more “treatment.”
A few years later, in the fall of 2019, Homeland Security raided Josh’s home.
At the time, it was unclear what they were looking for, and it wasn’t until Friday that we learned the troubling details.
Right now, Josh is still being detained on one count of possessing child pornography and one count of receiving it.
In the coming days it will be decided if he can be released on bond, what the bond will be, and where he will go if he is released — a judge has already ordered that he not be allowed to stay in a residence with minors, meaning he can’t go home or to his parents’ house.
His trial is set for early July — he’s facing up to 40 years in prison and hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines.
So far, a few family members have made statements about the charges.
Jim Bob and Michelle vaguely implied that Josh is innocent and declared that they still love him, Jessa said she was “saddened,” and Jinger said she was “disturbed.”
But there’s one person being harsher than anyone else right now, and that is Derick Dillard.
Derick and Jill have been a bit estranged from the rest of the Duggar family for a while now, and Derick in particular has been very outspoken about his issues with them.
So it makes sense that he really didn’t mince words when talking about Josh’s arrest.
He started out by liking some statements on Twitter calling for the cancellation of Counting On, the family’s reality show.
Someone told him that it wouldn’t be fair to cancel it because “Josh and his parents have nothing to do” with it, and it wouldn’t be fair to the other family members that do appear on the show.
“It’s the parents’ show, you know that, right?” Derick responded.
His issue seems to be that Jim Bob and Michelle are partially responsible for all of this because of the remarkably poor way they handled the molestations, so Counting On should be cancelled just like 19 Kids and Counting was.
He said that the “rebranding” from one show to the other was “not handled well,” and that “The public was deceived. Their plan worked. And we were told to keep filming and keep our mouths shut.”
This is the issue he’s always had with how Jim Bob controls everything about the show — when Counting On started, it was supposed to be about the older daughters, specifically Jill and Jessa, with Josh and the parents nowhere in sight.
As time has gone on, Jim Bob and Michelle have started appearing more and more, and it’s not a great look.
One of Derick’s followers said that the other kids don’t want to leave the show like he and Jill did so he should leave it alone, but he asked “How do you know they’re not trying to leave?”
“They didn’t know what we knew when we knew it. As I’ve said before, we were told to not talk to the others about what we learned. And based on our history, I don’t know what scare tactics are used on the others to keep them compliant.”
“We pushed back for a long time & pretended like there was nothing wrong on the outside before we finally got to the place where we quit,” he continued.
“Everyone has their own context, including timeline, incentives, fears/threats, information, etc. that they must operate within, so it will play out and look different as each individual behaves & responds differently within their unique context.”
He summarized all this cryptic talk with “My main message at this point is just for people to evaluate critically and not just assume things are as they appear on the surface. Thank you.”
He also added that “Needless to say, the last 3 years of law school have been very eye-opening, albeit triggering in more ways than one.”
If you’re not sure what he means by any of this, you’re not alone — it’s all pretty vague.
But he definitely has a major issue with Josh, Jim Bob, Michelle, and even TLC.
Derick said in his rant that he’d be sharing more information “later in a different context,” and he also liked a tweet asking him to talk about Josh’s arrest and his thoughts, so we’ll probably be hearing more from him soon.
And for once, we can’t wait to hear what Derick has to say.