As Amy Duggar prepares for the release of her upcoming memoir, Holy Disruptor, she’s opening up about parts of her upbringing in a famous family that she’s never spoken about until now. In a new interview with People, Amy revealed that her grandfather — uncle Jim Bob Duggar‘s father — was “abusive,” and as a child, measures were taken to ensure that she would never be alone with him.
Amy didn’t know the truth about her grandfather until after he died.
Amy said that she and her mom, Deanna (Jim Bob’s sister), didn’t talk about grandfather Jimmy Lee Duggar’s past abuse until after he died in 2009.
“But I obviously assumed. I always had assumptions as to why, but it was never spoken about,” she said. “It was a little difficult, but I’m one of those people that when I was little, I asked questions, sure. But if something was told to me, I just believed it.”
The adults in her life were careful to protect her around him.
Though Amy still spent time with her grandparents and was especially close to grandmother Mary Duggar while she was still alive, everyone in her family took extra care to make sure that she and her grandfather were never alone together, and her grandmother would make sure that the door to her bedroom was always locked at night.
“I knew grandpa couldn’t go to the trampoline with me. I knew grandpa couldn’t sit and watch a movie with me. I knew grandpa couldn’t be in a car with me. I knew grandpa couldn’t take me to school,” she said. “There were so many things, and I just knew that that’s how it was.”
He was occasionally seen in early episodes of 19 Kids & Counting.
Since Jimmy Lee, who was known as J.L., died just a year into filming of the family’s TLC reality show, he didn’t appear very often, but toward the end of his life, he appeared to be living at Jim Bob and Michelle’s house with his wife, Mary, as he suffered from cancer.
Knowing the truth about her grandfather “changes so much” for Amy.
“My mom and I sat there and cried, and I just held her, and she held me,” Amy told People. “It was like this insane bonding moment that we’ve been needing for our entire life, that we finally were allowed to just be really vulnerable with each other and share.
Growing up in the Duggar family has affected the way Amy raises her own son.
Amy also told People that witnessing her cousins’ upbringing has impacted the way she’s raising her own son, Dax, who she shares with husband Dillon King.
“I saw my cousins all being homeschooled and it was rigorous. It was scheduled, it was blocked time. It was very much like that way,” Amy said. “And I thought, ‘How can I do things differently? I would love to spend more time with [Dax]. Obviously, he can go to school if he wants. But if he wants to stay home and do homeschool with me, how can I make it different?'”
She added, “I saw how kids were spoken to, I saw how kids were treated, I saw all of that, and I’m like, ‘Hey, let’s do things differently.’ And so I’m just taking the good parts that I remember and adding to it.”
