The Double Life Of These Duggar Family Members

If you thought keeping up with the Kardashians was hard, try keeping up with the Duggars. The family, who rose to fame on TLC's 19 Kids and Counting, are seemingly always embroiled in some sort of bizarre drama. That's saying a lot, considering the family subscribes to the type of religious values that forbid holding hands until engagement, and hugging people from the front. In fact, much like the world of Footloose, even dancing is forbidden because it encourages "sensual" feelings. 

With so many rules — from banning beach holidays to CCing their parents on texts — it's not surprising that a few of these hyper-religious reality stars are living a double life. At best, they're faking their kitchen skills, and catfishing online. At worse, they're engaging in the much-forbidden act of premarital sex, grappling with porn addiction, and committing the grave sin of adultery. The Duggars apparently have a lot to hide.

Josh Duggar, the oldest of Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar's children, was hiding a dark side throughout his run on 19 Kids and Counting. In 2015, it was revealed that the star, who is married with five children and has a baby on the way, as of this writing, had two accounts on Ashley Madison. They came to light during the infidelity website's infamous hack.

According to Gawker, Josh spent $986.76 between two monthly accounts on the website, which caters to users seeking extramarital affairs. Part of his money reportedly went towards an "affair guarantee," which ensured that any user who spent $250 on 1,000 credits could get a refund if they didn't have an affair within three months (there's no word on if he needed to snag a refund or not). If that wasn't a big enough scandal, the accounts linked to Josh listed interests like "experimenting with sex toys" and "one-night stands." 

Josh owned up to his transgressions in a statement published by People. "I have been the biggest hypocrite ever," he admitted. "While espousing faith and family values, I have secretly over the last several years been viewing pornography on the internet and this became a secret addiction and I became unfaithful to my wife. I am so ashamed of the double life that I have been living..."

Jill Duggar isn't hiding an affair or addiction like her older brother — that we know of — but she's still had her fair share of scandal, at least in the world of food blogging. The doting mother of two might not be as skilled in the kitchen as we're led to believe, which is, honestly, a travesty that's pretty relatable, though there's never an excuse for straight-up plagiarism.

According to Inquisitr, the Counting On star has been accused of plagiarizing recipes and posting them on her own blog. The saga began when Jill posted a stuffed zucchini recipe and claimed, "Our neighbors gave us a bunch of big zucchini right after we got married, and in trying different recipes, I adapted them into my own and this one became a fave!" Of course, adapting means you're actually changing something, which Duggar seemed to have only done in a very minimal way when compared to a recipe on Allrecipes.com. The photo, however, was exactly the same, which she later swapped out.

That's not the only recipe the Duggar sister allegedly stole. Inquisitr also claimed that Jill admitted to lifting a recipe for slow cooker chicken mole from Chowhound. She also possibly lifted a recipe for Riguas from Salvadorian Recipes and a recipe for Nepali Momo and Sauce from SlideShare. Her website now has a disclaimer that says her recipes "may have not originated on our site and/or have been adapted from other sites."

It's hard to pinpoint if Joy-Anna Duggar is a family rule breaker, although her 2017 pregnancy raised a lot of questions among fans. As it turns out, the Quiverfull Christian might not have been so fearful when it came to the act of premarital sex. 

According to the Daily Mail, Duggar didn't help the rumors of a shotgun wedding to fiance Austin Forsyth when the pair moved their nuptials to four months earlier than the original October 2017 date. InTouch reported that the speculation continued when fans accused the star of posting old photos on Instagram to hide the fact that her baby bump was suspiciously large. Some people speculated that Duggar might be having twins, but People reported that she welcomed just one baby boy in February 2018.

That's when the due date math skeptics came out. The star gave birth on February 23 — just a day after her expected due date, according to OK! — but she got married in late May. Even if she had conceived on her wedding day, that would have cut it pretty close for what WebMD deems is the average 39 week pregnancy. However, a reverse due date calculator from February 22 puts Duggar's conception date at June 1, so can someone explain what happened there? Or maybe a healthy dose of minding our own business is in order. 

Derick Dillard might not be the reality star everyone thinks he was. The Counting On husband was allegedly fired from TLC after making a series of transphobic comments. Though he managed to take his wife, Jill Duggar, with him in his breakup with the network, Dillard still claims he was never fired.

According to Fox News, Dillard was given the boot in November 2017 after lobbing transphobic comments at fellow TLC star Jazz Jennings. Earlier in the summer, Dillard directed an ill-advised tweet at Jennings' series I Am Jazz. He wrote, "What an oxymoron ... a 'reality' show which follows a non-reality. 'Transgender' is a myth. Gender is not fluid; it's ordained by God." The final straw came months later when Dillard, who continuously misgendered Jennings, claimed to pity the transgender star. TLC quickly addressed the comments and claimed the network had "no plans to feature [Dillard] in the future," that his "personal statements do not reflect the views of the network," and the network was "proud" to share Jennings' story.

Though it sure sounds like Dillard was fired, the scorned TV husband took to — where else? — Twitter (via InTouch) to explain his reality TV exile. Replying to "a confused fan," Dillard wrote, "They won't tell you that I was ever fired because I wasn't. We wanted to leave and they didn't want us to. That's the truth." Whatever you say, man.

Aside from reality TV fame, Jill Duggar makes her money as a midwife, but allegations outlined in Radar Online claim that the star's personal beliefs outweigh her profession. According to the tabloid, Jill's parents, Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar, forbade the Counting On star from helping her relative, Susanna Keller, give birth to her first child in 2013. Why? Keller was unmarried and pregnant.

Keller, the younger sister of Josh Duggar's wife Anna Duggar, was allegedly a close family friend of the Duggars before falling pregnant. She reportedly even traveled for two months with the family when she was a teenager, but apparently everything gets erased if you get knocked up out of wedlock. According to Radar Online, Susanna was ousted from her parents' house for being "rebellious" (in this instance, that meant wanting to go to college and get a job). Though she eventually smoothed things over with her mom and dad, the Duggar family never grew to respect her new lifestyle. 

According to the source, Jill was "excited" to help Susanna give birth, but Jim Bob and Michelle didn't want their daughter "exposed to an unmarried mother in that condition." Susanna gave birth to a baby girl named Noelle in 2013 — without Jill's help — and reportedly scandalized the reality TV family nearly two years later when she had the audacity to let Noelle dance at a family gathering.

Jill Duggar and Derick Dillard probably needed a vacation. What young mother doesn't? Most of us just don't really expect people to take a vacation away from mission work. According to Entertainment Tonight, the controversial Counting On couple came "under fire" in 2015 when fans questioned whether or not they used mission donations to take a family holiday. 

In July 2015, the Dillards shipped off to Central America with their then-five-month-old baby to do mission work. They first solicited donations to their tax-exempt organization, Dillard Family Ministries, and claimed, "God has put a desire in our hearts to serve Him internationally for longer than the typical short-term mission trip." Unfortunately, it didn't really seem like the Dillards were doing as much mission work as everyone thought. It most certainly didn't seem as long-term as advertised. Radar Online reported that the pair took a month-long break just two months into their trip, which started to anger fans, who questioned what the donations were being used for. 

Jill and Derick eventually relented to the backlash, and put up information about obtaining refunds on their donation page.

All of the Duggar children were homeschooled, but it wasn't just traditional homeschooling. The TV family followed the teachings of Bill Gothard at the Advanced Training Institute (ATI). According to Gawker, this particular program's hallmark was working religion into the daily curriculum, but the organization has been dubbed a "cult" by a number of former students. ATI has also come under fire for its teachings about sexual abuse, and Gothard was the subject of various harassment and abuse allegations.

Former ATI student Jenna Tracy, who followed the same Quiverfull movement as the Duggars, opened up about her experience with ATI, which she dubbed a "cult" in a op-ed for The Guardian. Tracy admitted her parents found Gothard's "charisma and sense of moral certainty" irresistible, but the program taught a hierarchy where women and children fell towards bottom rungs of society. She claimed the church had an "emphasis on controlling every aspect of a woman's physical appearance."

Similarly, Micah J. Murray, who joined ATI when he was six years old, wrote about his experience in HuffPost. "The worst thing about brainwashing is that you can't see it for what it is. You never think you're in a cult when you're in a cult. Until the day you can't deny the reality of what you've seen, what you lived," he wrote.

As of 2014, Gothard was on leave following abuse allegations, according to The Washington Post.

Josh Duggar might have been leading more than one double life. The former reality TV star didn't just have two profiles on Ashley Madison. According to the Daily News, Duggar had a secret Facebook account with a made-up alias. In other words: Duggar was a total catfish. 

Duggar reportedly used the name "Joe Smithson" as his alias on his secret online dating profiles, and he allegedly created a Facebook account to match. Instead of using his own picture, the disgraced TLC star used a snap of Jonathan Blankfein, a former employee of Goldman Sachs. The account had around 30 friends which included a stripper, a lingerie photographer, and a number of married women around Arkansas. The Daily News couldn't confirm this Facebook explicitly belonged to Josh, but he did use joesmithsonwa@gmail as his Ashley Madison login. And it's also not the only time Josh was accused of being a catfish.

According to the Daily Mail, the former reality star was sued by California-based DJ Matthew McCarthy, who claimed Josh used his image for profiles on Twitter, OkCupid, and Ashley Madison. It's unclear exactly how Duggar was linked to these accounts, other than references made to trips Duggar had taken to California, which is probably why the 19 Kids and Counting star reportedly demanded the lawsuit be dismissed.

Clearly, these allegations that should be taken with a grain of salt, however, given Duggar's shady past, it's not hard to see why scandal continues to find him.  

As Christians, no matter how evangelical, it'd make sense that the Duggars preach love and compassion, but this apparently only extends so far. According to someone who allegedly worked on the show, Michelle once got a gay crew member fired after discovering his true sexuality.

The entire charade reportedly went down in 2008. The crew member told Gawker that the Duggars had such a limited — almost cartoonish — worldview that they were told to only have limited conversations with the family so as to not "upset them" or "taint their version of the world." It was apparently "very much like being told to not tell your little sister about Santa Claus."

This only lasted until the family began preparations for its first trip to the Today Show in New York City, when a crew member who wasn't tuned into the rules accidentally outed a gay member of the crew dubbed "Jimmy." Michelle reportedly approached producers to find out if New York was "scary for kids" because she heard it was "overrun by ... gays" who might have been "causing problems." The new crew member turned to "Jimmy" and jokingly asked if he was causing any problems. Michelle ended up pulling a producer over to the side, yelling, and demanding to know if "Jimmy" was really gay. After "Jimmy" joked, "Well, darling, depends on who's asking," he was allegedly "fired due to causing conflicts with the talent."

You wouldn't expect any member of such an outwardly conservative family to have a wild romp in the bedroom, but such is the case for Amy Duggar. Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar's beloved niece tied the knot with her husband Dillon King in September 2015, and she's been experimenting with her sexuality ever since.

In a TMI interview with People, Amy admitted she gets down and dirty with her husband "all the time." They are, after all, trying to plan a family. To stave off the boredom that comes with having so much sex you can't "hide" it, King claimed the pair likes to "keep it fresh, keep it wild." We're not sure exactly what that means, but it has something to with massage beds, firelight, candles and "the whole shebang." Amy certainly enjoys a sensual massage or two from her hubs.

Though Amy and Dillon appeared on Marriage Boot Camp: Reality Stars, it's pretty clear they've worked issues.