Many members of the Duggar family are speaking out in light of Josh Duggar's latest scandal. The 33-year-old has been charged with possessing and receiving graphic porn featuring children, after previously having been accused of molesting several of his sisters and his former babysitter.
Jinger Duggar Vuolo and her husband, Jeremy Vuolo, released a book together, The Hope We Hold, about their lives prior to the most recent allegations against Josh, but the book does cover the 2015 scandal that engulfed the entire Duggar family.
In Chapter 8, Jinger dives into what it was like to grow up on the family's show and to contend with media attention following the accusations against Josh.
She writes that the entire experience was disorienting, and it happened fast: "My brain hadn't quite caught up to the reality of what had happened in a few short hours. Intimate details about our lives were splashed across a magazine page and all over the Internet for anyone and everyone to read. I felt shell-shocked, as if a bomb had exploded."
Jinger also reveals that obviously the family knew what Josh had done, and they believed it was behind them until the allegations were made public: "One of my siblings had made some sinful choices, but it had all been years ago. It had been awful, but we had dealt with it as a family."
Jinger believed the family's emphasis on prayer had been enough: "We'd sought the Lord, took the necessary steps to move toward healing, and offered up our forgiveness. Now that it was out in the public, the old wound was open again, raw, painful."
The family was soon inundated with reporters and photographers, and her parents hatched a plan to hide out for a few days: "We were getting away for a few days until this all died down, they said, to a place with plenty of land to run around outside without anyone seeing us."
It makes sense that the parents would want to shield their children from the fallout surrounding their oldest brother. "It would be the perfect place to escape the cameras without being cooped up inside for the foreseeable future."
Jinger's father, Jim Bob, pulled up a bus to the family's front door so they could escape: "By the time we left, the photographers were asleep, and nobody noticed when the bus pulled out of the driveway and headed down the road in the dark of night."
She recalls feeling confused and lost: "The bus engine rumbled and my brothers and sisters chattered noisily, but I barely noticed. My mind raced with questions I couldn't answer. How do we go forward? I thought."
She also reveals that she never realized how public a life really could be: "People outside my close circle now knew details about my life that I had never chosen to share. Details that I had never wanted to share. And there would be fallout. That goes without saying when you lead a public life. I just didn't know how far it would go."
