Writer Has Regrets After Introducing The Duggar Family To The World

It was almost two decades ago when writer Andrea Cooper wrote an article about the Duggar family for a national magazine. And now, she says that she regrets that decision. In fact, she feels partly responsible for making them famous. She said that she never expected anything like this to happen.

Cooper explained to HuffPost how she ended up writing the article about the Duggar family. According to Cooper, it was her editor who suggested the story. And when she called Michelle Duggar about it she said that “Michelle Duggar cheerfully agreed.”

At the time, there were 14 children in the Duggar family. And when Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar found out that Joshua Duggar had abused five girls, including his own sisters, they did not tell Cooper about this.

According to Cooper, at the time of the photoshoot for the article, Joshua was the only Duggar who wasn’t present. His parents said that he was at a “Christian program.” What they did not tell her was that they were the ones who sent him there after they discovered that he had molested five young girls, including some of his sisters.

She added, “Of course, I had no idea about any of this when I wrote the story.”

Cooper shared that the show “17 Kids and Counting” started because of the article she wrote. She said, “After my article was published, someone at Discovery Health Channel read it and commissioned a documentary for the channel about the Duggars, according to Michelle on the family’s website. That eventually led to the TLC reality show ’17 Kids and Counting’ ― a show that ran in some incarnation for seven years, but that I never once watched.”

Now that everything has come out about Joshua’s actions, Cooper said that even though she had no way of knowing the truth about his actions, she still regrets writing the story after she learned all about it.

She said, “I never imagined I’d be giving this family the platform to become such an influential force when I wrote a fluffy feature about them 19 years ago. I can only hope other extraordinary people I’ve written about, or will write about, attract a modicum of the same recognition for actual achievements, rather than for being really religious and having lots of kids.”

You see, Cooper is also a survivor of child abuse that’s why she relates to the situation. Even though she was not sexually abused as a child, she experienced ongoing physical and emotional attacks from her late mother. She shared, “I’ve felt a deep sadness about the effects of Joshua Duggar’s behavior. I’ve thought about my unsuspecting role in the family’s rise to fame, and what I may share in common not with the parents, who are about my age, but with several of their daughters. I myself am a child abuse survivor.”

She adds, “It’s often impossible to know how our decisions will play out, or to foresee how an innocent personal interest story might change so many lives in so many ways. I tend to feel responsible for everything ― call it the legacy of being an abuse survivor ― and partly because of this, I feel a little responsible for unleashing the Duggars onto the world. But I also know if I hadn’t written about them, another writer eventually would have.”

Andrea Cooper understands that blaming herself is unfair but she can’t help but feel responsible for their success.