Years before his conviction, Josh Duggar was involved in a scandal at home, and apparently, it didn't change the freedom his parents gave him when they weren't around. Reportedly, Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar left Josh alone with their younger children to babysit multiple times after his molestation scandal, including overnight trips.
Josh was reported to police in 2006 by a member of their church.
At the time, Josh confessed to molesting some of his younger sisters, and the family chose to handle the situation themselves, with Jim Bob reportedly attempting to cover up the whole thing.
The scandal didn't come out until years later, when the family was starring on 19 Kids & Counting. That swiftly brought an end to the series, and in 2021, Josh would be convicted on charges of possessing and receiving child sexual assault material, leading to him spending more than a decade behind bars in a federal prison.
Now, it seems that Josh was still left alone with his victims.
According to what Duggar critic Katie Joy of Without a Crystal Ball has shared in a new Instagram post, multiple sources close to the family have said that Jim Bob and Michelle left for a marriage retreat in 2007, leaving Josh in charge of his siblings.
Reportedly, this happened often, with oldest daughters Jana, Jessa, Jill, and Jinger doing the work of caring for the younger kids.
It didn't give their oldest daughters much of a childhood, either.
"This was not a normal childhood for the girls. They had so much work to do for their parents," one of the sources said. "The girls were often withdrawn and quiet in social settings and struggled to connect with the other kids."
In the meantime, Josh would "brag that while his parents were gone that his sisters did all the work. He would just laugh, and didn’t care."
Their grandparents would pop in and out as needed, because they were living with the family at the time, but it sounds like the bulk of the responsibility was left on the girls' shoulders.
This eventually caused a big rift in their church.
Katie Joy claims that certain members of their church thought that fame and wealth were becoming more important to him than his children, and the source says their religion, the Institute in Basic Life Principles, isn't the only thing to blame for the "fear" any of them felt while growing up.
This is so sad to hear.
It's always been clear that Jim Bob and Michelle's kids have always had a ton of responsibility.
And that goes double for their daughters, who were grouped with younger siblings as more and more children were born into their family through what Michelle called "the buddy system."
Maybe now that many of the kids are older and out of the house, they're finally getting the chance to heal.
