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If the Duggar family hadn’t been on TV, Josh Duggar would have gotten away with it.
That’s the unavoidable conclusion from episode 3 of “Shiny Happy People”. The ideology preached by Bill Gothard is a predator’s dream. It treats men as infallible authorities appointed by the will of God, while demanding that women live in submission and silence. It leaves no recourse for survivors of assault to speak out or seek justice. It’s only the media attention lavished on the Duggar family that made a path for the truth to come out. There’s no doubt that similar or worse evils are going unchecked in other IBLP families, away from the spotlight.
Sitcom dad syndrome
When the news broke in 2015 of Josh molesting his sisters, TLC canceled 19 Kids and Counting. However, they moved ahead with the spinoff show, Counting On, which focused on the older daughters Jill and Jessa. This made them the breadwinners: the ones who earned the money and kept the family brand alive.
The documentary points out something important about the show: although the Duggars’ theology gives all power and authority to men, the women and girls were always the main draw. The episodes about weddings and births were consistently the most popular. Jill Duggar’s wedding to Derick Dillard got the highest viewership that TLC ever had. This is a pattern seen in many patriarchal religions: men hold the wealth and the power, while women do all the thankless labor that keeps the church running.
Perhaps in recognition of this, the show presented Jim Bob as a classic sitcom dad, bumbling and clueless but good-hearted. The reality was very different. He was and is an iron-fisted tyrant who controls and exploits his own children for personal benefit. This goes well beyond physical abuse as a means of discipline, or the “courtship” arrangement where the father chooses who—or whether—his daughters are permitted to marry.
TLC never paid Jill or her husband for starring in their own popular reality show for seven years.
The day before her wedding, Jill says, her father put a piece of paper in front of her and told her to sign. She didn’t know what it was for, and signed it without reading it or asking any questions. Only later did she find out it was a contract that obliged her to commit the next five years of her life to the show.
This is all par for the course in misogynist, male-dominated religions. The shocking part is that the Discovery network played along with this arrangement. TLC never approached Jill about signing the contract; they never negotiated with her, consulted with her or even spoke with her. Her only contact with the network was through her father, and the show’s producers acted as if he had the authority to make decisions on her behalf, even after she was a legal adult.
Over the next several years, this contract was like a leash around her neck. When Jill and her husband Derick went to El Salvador on a missionary trip, TLC forced them to cut it short and come home for more filming. A few weeks before the birth of her first child, the network told her they wanted to put a cameraman in the delivery room. Remembering Josh’s wife, Anna Duggar—who was filmed giving birth at home in the bathtub, a gross intrusion of privacy at an intimate and vulnerable moment—Jill refused, but the network kept hounding her. She and Derick finally agreed, under duress, to take handheld cameras to the hospital so they could film themselves.
The biggest bombshell is that TLC never paid her or her husband for starring in their own popular reality show for seven years. Even when they merely asked for money to cover her out-of-pocket costs for the birth, the network ignored them. According to Jill, TLC said that they had paid her father—and told her to take it up with him. At one point, they were so cash-strapped that they were relying on food banks to eat.
Rights are meaningless unless you assert them
When they pressed Jim Bob, he offered to pay them a lump sum. But in exchange, he demanded they sign another contract, one that would bind them forever. It was this point that Jill decided she’d had enough.
When they publicly broke with the rest of the family, Jill and Derick started receiving threatening, anonymous text messages. These messages accused her of dishonoring her father and demanded that she repent and return to his authority on pain of eternal torture. To this day, she doesn’t know if it was her father who sent them.
I want to be clear that I’m not blaming the victim. Jill Duggar was raised in a culture that hammers the importance of female submission, passivity and unquestioning obedience virtually from birth. Even though she could have fought back much earlier, I fully understand why she didn’t.
When they publicly broke with the rest of the family, Jill and Derick started receiving threatening, anonymous text messages.
However, while Jim Bob unquestionably exploited her, most of it happened with her acquiescence. After all, if Jill and her husband felt coerced into starring in a show they didn’t want to be on, there were countless ways for them to sabotage the production.
The documentary never goes into detail about what, exactly, the contract said. Whatever Jill obligated herself to do, you can’t sign yourself into slavery. I’m skeptical that the contract allowed TLC to pay her father and not her, or that such a contract would be upheld in court even if it did.
A bedrock principle of contract law is “consideration“—the idea that both parties have to receive something valuable. You can’t obligate yourself to perform on a TV show while receiving nothing in return. There’s no way that would stand if she’d sought out a lawyer. If she never received the compensation she was due, that can only be because she didn’t pursue it.
The downfall of Bill Gothard
Like the Standard Oil octopus, Bill Gothard dreamed of creating an empire whose tentacles would coil all over the world. His organization, IBLP, set up “training centers” all over the U.S., and some in other countries as well. These were pitched as college equivalents for homeschooled kids, but in reality they were indoctrination camps which also exploited their students for unpaid labor. Kids who broke the rules or disobeyed their superiors were subjected to solitary confinement, locked in empty rooms for days on end.
According to testimony from survivors, abuse—both physical and sexual—was rampant at the training centers. One of the predators, according to those same testimonies, was Bill Gothard’s brother Steve Gothard, who used his position of power to harass and coerce women into sex.
Another of those predators was Bill Gothard himself.
Start with the fact that Gothard, who made his career giving prescriptions for marriage and family life, wasn’t married and had no children. No one in the Christian evangelical community seemed to find this unusual. Nor did anyone comment on the fact that Gothard had a habit of surrounding himself with young girls who fit a specific description.
Gothard, who made his career giving prescriptions for marriage and family life, wasn’t married and had no children. No one in the Christian evangelical community seemed to find this unusual.
Like a rock star going on tour, Gothard would travel from one training center to the next, to make personal appearances. Girls who caught his eye were invited to IBLP headquarters for one-on-one “counseling” sessions. Most of them, starstruck by the man they believed to be God’s representative on earth, jumped at the opportunity.
When they got to Gothard’s home office, where they could be isolated, that was when the grooming started. The documentary introduces multiple witnesses who were recruited by Gothard and knew him personally. All of them said that they experienced uninvited sexual talk, touching, caressing and groping (all of which flouted IBLP’s own rules). One of the women said that he told her her father had lost his authority over her and that he, Gothard, was now the higher power she answered to.
The girls who suffered this abuse were paralyzed by guilt and shame. Like all women in misogynist religions, they were in a double bind: The biblical “law of crying out” meant that if they didn’t speak up immediately, the abuse inflicted on them would be considered consensual and they’d be blamed for it. On the other hand, they knew full well that if they spoke up, they’d be blamed for tempting godly men into sin. Gothard also instituted a “Matthew 18” rule which supposedly forbade gossip, but which meant in practice that it was forbidden to make allegations against IBLP leaders.
However, try as he might, Gothard failed to silence his victims forever. They found each other, and shared their stories, through an online community called Recovering Grace. Eventually, IBLP’s own board of directors was forced to fire their founder. They kept using all the material he wrote, but he was no longer allowed at IBLP training centers and at conferences they hosted.
Bill Gothard joins the ranks of other famous Christians, like Ravi Zacharias or Roy Moore or, yes, Josh Duggar, who turned out to be sinister predators hiding under a cloak of religion. It’s always welcome to see the exposure of yet another of these pious hypocrites.
However, the documentary presents his downfall almost as an afterthought. I would’ve liked the filmmakers to spend more time on how it came about. I have to imagine that these women’s testimonies were fiercely disbelieved at first. What was the tipping point that forced IBLP to act? Was it the sheer number of people who came forward, or was there some other evidence that ultimately swayed them? And how did those who remained faithful to IBLP take the news of Gothard being dethroned?