Amy Duggar didn’t always hate her widely reviled cousin.
As we previously reported, Amy’s memoir will soon be upon us.
She is one of disgraced cousin Josh Duggar’s most outspoken critics.
But, bizarrely, that was not always the case. They remained close right up until his arrest.
‘Growing up’ with Josh was ‘so much fun’ for Amy Duggar
On Wednesday, October 1, Amy Duggar King spoke to Us Weekly about how her childhood memories of Josh are so different from the man that he chose to be as an adult.
“Growing up … we had so much fun,” the 39-year-old recalled of her incarcerated cousin.
“He was such a fun kid,” Amy characterized.
“There [were] all kinds of pranks he pulled and jokes. We just had this connection.”
Elaborating, Amy shared that she and Josh “very much kept in touch” as adults.
“He texted me two weeks before he was arrested, sending me memes,” she revealed.
It is unnerving to think of monsters who communicate with friends and family the same way that the rest of us do.
But that’s the reality.
Does she ‘miss’ her evil cousin, in light of his crimes?
“I don’t know that person,” Amy Duggar said of Josh and his crimes of receiving and possessing child sex-abuse material (CSAM).
“So I do not miss that person,” she reasoned.
“That is the scariest thing,” Amy observed.
“To know that you’ve known someone your whole life, and yet, you don’t know them at all.”
Of course, many outside of the Duggar family did not feel surprised at Josh’s CSAM arrest and conviction.
Why? Because he had molested five young girls as a teenager.
That because public knowledge several years before Homeland Security raided his workplace.
How did Amy feel about that horror?
‘Everything was so healthy and good’ after the 2015 revelations about Josh
Amy Duggar admitted that it felt “really hard” to move forward after she learned what Josh had done to four of his own sisters.
“But then … it felt like everyone was [trying to] apologize. Everything was so healthy and good,” she shared.
(Remember, Amy grew up in an extreme lifestyle and belief system, even if she was not a cultist like her cousins)
“And so I was like, ‘Why am I holding this against this person?’ You know, everyone’s human,” Amy confessed.
“And so I reconciled in my mind,” she explained. “Like, ‘OK, if everyone else can forgive, I can, too.’”
Amy concluded: “I still loved him, regardless of the crap he did.”
Thankfully, that no longer seems to be the case. And she has no interest in making nice with Josh ever again.