The stars of “19 Kids and Counting” are writing off their eldest son’s molestation of underage girls — including two of his sisters — as “bad choices.”
Michelle and Jim Bob Duggar sat down with Fox News’ Megyn Kelly on Wednesday night to defend their son’s sordid past as a serial molester.
During the interview, Michelle Duggar, 48, said there was “so much grief in our hearts” when their son confessed. “I think, as parents, we felt, ‘We’re failures.'”
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But the Duggar clan matriarch and her husband defended their son — now 27 — and their failure to report the incidents to authorities for years.
“We’ve tried to raise our kids to do what’s right – to know what’s right – and yet one of our children made some really bad choices and I think, as a parent, just . . . we were devastated,” she said.
Jim Bob Duggar, 49, argued that his son told him the incidents “only lasted a few seconds” and were “over the clothes.”
Duggar’s sisters will back their sibling in a “The Kelly File” segment set to air on Fox News Friday. “I do want to speak up in his defense against people who are calling him a child molester or a pedophile or a rapist, some people are saying,” sister and victim Jessa Seewald said.
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“I’m like that is so overboard and a lie really, I mean people get mad at me for saying that but I can say this because I was one of the victims.”
A 15-year-old Josh Duggar inappropriately touched his sisters Jessa and Jill and a family friend at least seven times — and then told his dad about it at least three times, according to a 2006 report obtained by In Touch Weekly.
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The conservative family didn’t report the eldest son’s serial gropings — which happened between 2002 and 2003 — until he had completed a Christian counseling program, more than a year after the first alleged incident.
Josh Duggar had just turned 14 the first time he confessed to fondling his sisters’ breasts and genitals, the report said.
The teen said he snuck into his sisters’ room at least four or five times and touched the girls “on the breasts and vaginal areas” as they slept. Arkansas deputies interviewed the Duggar family in 2006 when a family friend called the state’s abuse hotline after discovering an old letter detailing the allegations.
But by 2006, the statute of limitations on the 2002 and 2003 allegations had expired.
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Josh Duggar, now 27 and expecting his fourth child with his wife, admitted to “acting inexcusably” and “hurting others” last month in the wake of the allegation.
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