In her new memoir, Amy Duggar King recalls just how close she was with cousin Josh Duggar before his scandals made headlines — but she doesn’t recognize the person he is now.
“Growing up … we had so much fun,” Amy, 38, exclusively told Us Weekly before the release of her book, Holy Disruptor: Shattering the Shiny Facade by Getting Louder With the Truth. “He was such a fun kid. There [were] all kinds of pranks he pulled and jokes. … We just had this connection.”
Amy went on to reveal that she and Josh, 37, “very much kept in touch” through the years. “He texted me two weeks before he was arrested, sending me memes,” she said.
Josh was arrested in 2021 for receiving and possessing child pornography, later earning a prison sentence of more than 12 years. He has attempted to appeal his sentence multiple times, to no avail. TLC — which aired the Duggar-centered shows 19 Kids and Counting and Counting On — cut ties with the family entirely in the wake of Josh’s arrest.
“I don’t know that person,” Amy told Us of her cousin. “So I do not miss that person. … That is the scariest thing, to know that you’ve known someone your whole life, and yet, you don’t know them at all.”
Years before his arrest, news broke in 2015 that Josh had molested several girls when he was a teenager. It was later revealed that four of his sisters were among the victims. Amy admitted that it was “really hard” for her to move forward following Josh’s first scandal.
“But then … it felt like everyone was [trying to] apologize. Everything was so healthy and good. And so I was like, ‘Why am I holding this against this person?’ You know, everyone’s human,” Amy told Us. “And so I reconciled in my mind, like, ‘OK, if everyone else can forgive, I can, too.’ … I still loved him, regardless of the crap he did.”
Forgiveness doesn’t seem to be on the table this time around, however. When asked whether she’s been in touch with Josh at all since he’s been in prison, Amy gave Us a firm no.
“That’s a boundary that I will never cross,” she said, citing her son, Daxton, 5, whom she shares with husband Dillon King, as the reason why. “Now that I have a child, now that I know the beauty of it and the innocence of them, I will do everything in my power to speak on how to protect children, and that’s a boundary I will never cross.”
Amy did reach out to Josh’s wife, Anna Duggar, “when all of that was going on,” to say, “I’m here for you if you ever need anything,” but she “never heard back.”
While Daxton is still too young to learn the details of his extended family’s history, Amy noted that she’s not against him reading her memoir when he’s a little older.
“I would love for him to read it, if he’s interested in that,” she told Us. “You know, I think as you get older, you start to question, like, ‘Who are my parents? Where have they come from?’ And so, I will have all the answers when he’s older.”
She continued, “I don’t want to keep the truth from him. I think it’s something that as parents, we have the opportunity to really, like, speak life and truth into our kids. And so eventually I’m going to tell him all of that … [but] I want to protect his innocence for as long as I can.”
