By Mark Gray
8:16am PST, Jan 12, 2024
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Jill Duggar Dillard and her husband, Derick Dillard, aren't on speaking terms with her father.
While appearing on "The Unplanned Podcast" in January 2024, the former "19 Kids and Counting" and "Counting On" stars said they haven't seen Jim Bob Duggar in "over a year." In fact, it's been so long that the couple can't actually remember the date or the event where they last saw him, although Jill suspects it was a "wedding or birthday thing."
Clearly, the ice between Jill and the Duggar family patriarch hasn't thawed. The same issues don't necessarily apply to matriarch Michelle Duggar, whom Jill sees once a year.
Keep clicking for more on the Duggar family dynamic and how Jill's book, "Counting The Cost," changed things…
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Jill Duggar Dillard is certain that her book wasn't received well by some of her family, but she doesn't plan to "create more controversy" by speaking to them about it, she's said.
"It's kind of like when you get together at the holidays, and there are just certain things that you don't just want to bring up," Jill said on "The Unplanned Podcast" in January 2024. "It's probably a sore subject."
Family therapy, she added, is also not an option for healing the divide.
"We tried that before. It just is not the healthiest way to go about it," she stated. "So we're still on the road to figuring things out."
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The Duggar family, led by patriarch Jim Bob Duggar and his wife, Michelle Duggar, welcomed reality TV cameras into their daily lives in Tontitown, Arkansas, for seven seasons on what became "19 Kids and Counting." The popular TLC series underwent title changes as the family's brood grew to 19 over the course of those years before it was canceled amid a molestation scandal involving eldest son Josh Duggar.
The show focused on their ultra-conservative patriarchal Christian faith that follows the Institute in Basic Life Principles (IBLP), which holds that wives answer to their husbands and husbands answer to God.
Jim Bob, 58, and Michelle, 57, share 19 kids. They've encouraged all their children to populate the earth with many, many children.
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In a November 2023 joint interview, Jill Duggar Dillard's husband Derick Dillard said that in the IBLP's "toxic culture," the family "hierarchy" values those who have more children above those who have fewer. According to Derick, Jill's parents, Jim Bob Duggar and Michelle Duggar, have gone as far as saying, "whoever has the most kids gets the house."
Surprisingly, Jill revealed in her 2023 book that she used birth control after welcoming her second child, Samuel. The reason: She nearly died in labor. After an emergency C-section, Jill suffered a uterine rupture that could have killed her.
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In her memoir, "Counting the Cost," Jill Duggar Dillard often brings up the family financial coffer that her dad, Jim Bob Duggar, controlled. As she got older, Jill began realizing that the family was likely making a boatload of money from TLC for "19 Kids and Counting" and its spinoff, "Counting On." She soon wondered why money wasn't filtering down to her. Her husband, Derick Dillard, who was also featured on the show, wondered the same.
Jim Bob balked when Jill asked to be paid for the show and said the series was an opportunity to "share with the world that children are a blessing," she writes in her book. Jill and Derick stood firm, only to be told that Jim Bob had previously paid her eldest sibling, Josh Duggar. "You treat me worse than you treat my pedophile brother," Jill recalled shouting at her father.
After that conversation, Jim Bob and his wife, Michelle Duggar, sat down with the older children to offer them a one-time payment of $80,000. Jill claimed that her siblings were thrilled, but she and Derick were suspicious of her father and later discovered that Jim Bob made $8 million from the reality show.
She was eventually given $175,000.
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Over the years, Jill Duggar Dillard hasn't held back while discussing the fractured relationship she has with her parents, particularly her father, Jim Bob Duggar.
In her book, "Counting The Cost," Jill recalls how her father threatened to lower her inheritance if she "continued to attack" him and her mother, Michelle Duggar. The mom of two says the conversation came about after she and husband Derick Dillard received a tax bill for $130,000 of earnings (money they say they never saw). Jill asked her dad for the money that the government claimed they'd earned. Instead, Jim Bob said, "$20,000 is a one-time offer, take it or leave it, please let me know by Monday night, or the amount will be zero."
