14 DAY TRIAL // One week after putting Jill and Jessa Duggar on their cover with a still very Duggar-friendly story about how the now-disgraced TLC family was coping after Josh Duggar’s molestation scandal, People Magazine is turning on the Duggars. This week’s issue lifts the lid on the can of worms dubbed “Duggarville,” the family where patriarch Jim Bob Duggar is the supreme dictator.
That this story comes in People is of major importance because, as of last week, it was the only celebrity publication to which the Duggars still gave exclusives. Rumors has it that, for their Jill and Jessa coverstory, People couldn’t get the Duggars to work with them, as they tried to dictate the terms of the interview.
Basically, Jim Bob and Michelle asked People to not include questions about the Josh Duggar molestation scandal. The Magazine played hard ball and refused to do the interview on their terms, so they ran the story with quotes from sources instead. This latest coverstory is People’s way of letting the Duggars know they’re no longer buying into their goody-two-shoes fake act.
Jim Bob is a dictator
The full coverstory hasn’t been released yet, but People put out online 3 previews. They will probably turn out to be the final blow to the once-spotless reputation of the family that rose to fame on TLC’s now-defunct series 19 Kids and Counting.
Sources close to the family describe the Duggars as having a cult mentality, with Jim Bob as their supreme leader. His favorite word is “No,” which he uses whenever he deems it fit, and he expects everyone around to listen.
One source recalls an incident when a boy asked him why it was wrong for boys and girls to kiss before marriage, since there was no passage in the Bible prohibiting it. Jim Bob’s response was along the lines of “because I said so,” on the premise that no one ever went against his word when he said no.
The Duggarville is a closed community where Jim Bob holds all the reins. Right now, another source says, Anna Duggar, Josh’s wife, is cut off from all contact with her own family, which probably explains why she won’t divorce him, even after finding out that he’s a child molester and a cheater.
Josh Duggar was always “odd”
“We all knew that something had happened, but it definitely wasn’t portrayed in its entirety,” the tipster tells the publication of Josh’s child molesting days, back when he was a teen.
Anna too knew that something had happened, but since Josh’s parents never spoke of it, she assumed it was nothing serious. Her parents found out the whole story before the marriage, but they still let her marry him.
“There was always something a bit odd about Josh,” adds the insider, but he always went out of his way to hide all his dark secrets from the world. He put on a good game of deceit, so no wonder Anna believed every word that came out of his mouth.
Anna Duggar is in a terrible place
People makes it sound as if Anna is trapped in a very bad place right now: on the other hand, she’s just found out that the man for whom she did everything she was told to do was nothing like she’d imagined; on the other, she couldn’t leave him even if she wanted to.
Her only contact is limited to members of the Duggar family, the report notes. She’s been so brain-washed by their way of behaving that she didn’t even “get mad” with Josh when his name came up among the millions to have set up paid accounts on cheating website Ashley Madison.
It’s not “godly” to get mad, she was taught to believe. Instead of looking for solutions for herself and her 4 children with Josh, she’s turning into her mother-in-law, down to the way she speaks: only in whispers, as if she’s afraid she might bother someone by actually having something to say.