14 DAY TRIAL // Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar, stars of TLC’s 19 Kids and Counting hit reality series, have finally broken their silence on the scandal that could mean the end of their TV career and good reputation. They discuss with Megyn Kelly for Fox News the fact that their son Josh molested 5 minor girls, some of whom were his sisters, when he was 14 and 15.
The full segment that aired some hours ago is available below. More footage will also be included in a Kelly File special airing tomorrow, Friday, June 5, 2015.
Nothing was as bad as it was made out to be in the press
Much like daughters Jill and Jessa, who have stepped forward to identify themselves as victims, Jim Bob and Michelle blame the media for the scandal, saying the magazine that published the police report on the “incidents” had no right to do so.
They also go to great lengths to minimize what happened, saying it was just a case of a teenager being curious, so curious that he even touched his sisters on their privates, both when they were asleep and awake, over their clothes and under them. “It wasn’t like rape or anything,” Jim Bob tells Kelly.
It’s Jim Bob who does most of the talking, as you can see in the video below. He stresses that, as parents, their duty was not to turn Josh in because he was a minor and because they wanted everyone to come out of this ok.
That’s also the reason they didn’t send him to specialized counseling, he says, having heard that the rate of success in a center of this type is very low.
The tipping point came when they found out, almost 2 years after the first incident, that Josh had touched one of his very young sisters. She was 5 at the time, as the police report has revealed.
They “sent him out of the house” to a friend who ran a Christian-based camp that was basically a construction company, and there he “broke” and found God and was brought on the right path.
As parents, the Duggars believe they did right by the victims
Most of the interview is focused on Josh, with the Duggars barely mentioning his victims, save to say that either they weren’t aware of what had happened (because they were sleeping) or they hadn’t realized that what had happened was wrong, having no concept at the time of “right touching” and “wrong touching.”
They also stress that “as parents,” they did everything they could to protect all their children, including Josh. It was not their job to report the incidents to authorities, seeing how they’re parents and they get to decide what is in the best interest of their children, they say.
Ultimately, the decisions they made were prompted by the realization that Josh knew what he was doing was wrong, because he was the one that came to them.
“I think, as parents, we felt, ‘We're failures’,” Michelle says at one point in the interview. “We've tried to raise our kids to do what's right - to know what's right - and yet one of our children made some really bad choices and I think, as a parent, just… we were devastated.”
