People Magazine has a series of articles and interviews with Jill Dillard (nee Duggar), 29, the first of the 19 Kids and Counting daughters to get married. (Jill’s abusive brother, Josh, was the first son to marry.) Jill told People that she had to fight to get paid for her work on the spinoff reality show, Counting On, which shows the Duggar kids’ family and is surprisingly still airing. Despite the fact that Jill and her husband did seven seasons of that show there were not paid for it. Her dad, Jim-Bob, pocketed the money. I bet he’s doing that to the other kids who are still on, but they’re keeping quiet. Jill and her husband, Derick, had to use lawyers to recover some money, which Jill says ended up being around minimum wage. What’s more is that Jill is using barrier birth control, which goes against her family’s wacky belief system that women should be vessels to pump out as many babies as possible for God’s army.

“Growing up, it was ingrained in me that if you don’t have as many kids as you’re able to, that there’s something wrong with that,” Jill, 29, tells PEOPLE in this week’s issue. “But there was a shift in me where I felt like it wasn’t wrong if you decide as a couple that it’s best for you to wait.”

Jill shares sons Israel David, 5, and Samuel Scott, 3, with husband Derick Dillard, whom she wed in 2014. After giving birth to her first child via C-section in 2015, her doctor recommended she wait 18 months to get pregnant again.

“Children are a blessing, but that doesn’t mean that at all costs you should have as many kids as possible,” she says.

“I think you need to do what’s healthiest and best for your family,” says Jill, adding that she and Derick, 31, rely on “non-hormonal birth control” such as various barrier methods.

Jim Bob, 55, was reportedly the primary payee for 19 Kids and then for Counting On, which came with an estimated $25,000 to $45,000 per episode paycheck, yet Jill tells PEOPLE that she didn’t receive any compensation until she quit the show in 2017.

“That’s when we got an attorney involved and finally recovered some of the money,” she says, adding, “It was a process.” (TLC declined to comment.)

Even then, the amount was nowhere near what she feels she was due. “It probably ended up being a little more than minimum wage,” her husband Derick Dillard, 31, revealed in a video on their Dillard Family Official YouTube page. “But we were able to recover at least something.”
Jill says that in recent years, she and Derick have distanced themselves from her family, adding that it’s been “difficult.” Still, her hope is to one day reconcile with her loved ones.

“I never expected this to happen or for it to get to this point,” Jill says. “But I’m realizing I can’t put a timeline on healing. I love my family and they love me. I really just have to follow God’s lead and take it one day at a time.”

When reached by PEOPLE, Jim Bob and Michelle, 54, provided the following statement: “Every family has differences of opinion and perspective at times, but families work things out. We all love Jill, Derick, and their boys very much. It is our prayer that our relationship is healed and fully restored quickly!”

[From two articles on People]

It’s notable how utterly careful Jill is being. She is still very much a conservative Christian (her husband is particularly problematic), she’s just saying that it’s her decision to use barrier birth control at her doctor’s orders. She’s not even using oral birth control and she’s likely specifying the method because she knows her family considers hormonal birth control an abortifacient. (It is absolutely not.)I also think there’s so much more she’s not saying about the money issue and how hard she had to fight her family to get paid. In another article on People, Jill and Derick state that they were told they couldn’t pursue specific careers while filming the show – again which they didn’t get paid for. Jim-Bob was absolutely still trying to control his family, particularly his daughters, through that reality show, and TLC is complicit by continuing to air it. There’s probably so much more dark secrets about the Duggars, and we’ve only heard a fraction of what’s happening.

Also, Jill got a nose ring and cut her hair. That had to have chapped her parents’ asses.

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