One of the younger sisters of convicted sex offender Josh Duggar, the television personality Joy-Anna, recently discussed how her life was severely affected by her brother’s conviction and prison sentence.
The Duggar family rose to fame in the late 2000s after launching a reality television show featuring the lives of Michelle and Jim Bob Duggar and their 19 children. However, the family of devout independent Baptists who proudly discussed the values of purity, modesty, and faith in God, soon went on a downward spiral after the eldest of the Duggar siblings, Josh was reported to have molested multiple underage girls. He was also later convicted of possession of child pornography and is now serving time in prison.
Joy-Anna Duggar Forsyth, who is 10 years younger than Josh, recently appeared on The Unplanned Podcast alongside her husband Austin Forsyth, recalling the super hard time of her brother’s conviction and her difficult postpartum journey with her third child. Josh was convicted in Dec. 2021 and was subsequently sentenced to 12.5 years in federal prison for his crimes on May 25, 2022. This was exactly a year before the birth of Anna and Austin’s third child, Gunner, in May 2023.
Anna revealed in the podcast that the postpartum period following Gunner’s birth and the family trials she had been facing for the last few years was “the darkest time of [her] life.” At only 18 years old, she had to face what was dubbed one of the “10 Big Scandals of 2015” and face the disgraceful reality of her eldest sibling, who had also reportedly molested four of their siblings.
Later, the arrest and sentencing of Josh in 2022 caused Anna to fall into a “rebellion” phase and question everything, including her faith that she had held onto since childhood,
“Just my siblings and my parents and all this stuff was super hard at that time. And so I came to a point where I was just like, ‘What is even real? What do I believe?”
While she was tackling all these big changes in her life, the struggle of postpartum hit her, causing “super, super hard” hormonal changes in her. She recalled feeling like her “family was just falling apart.” With teary eyes, she also reflected on how it all came “crumbling down” during her postpartum and made her realize how she wasn’t “perfect” and did not “have it all together.”
During this time, two of her sisters, Jill and Jinger, who were victims of Josh’s molestation, released memoirs detailing their experiences. According to Anna, these books made her think about her own relationship with her faith and spirituality.
“My family had a lot of struggles at that time, and then these books came out, and I had to work through these things that I had.”
However, the hardships eventually helped Anna connect with her faith on a higher level, steering away from her previous idea of Christianity as a checklist. “My whole Christianity was always a checklist. I gotta read my Bible, check. I gotta pray, check,” she said. But despite all the difficulties in navigating through this trial of time, Anna believes that “it was good.”
“But I feel like it was good, and I can see now looking back how much God grew me in that season.”
Currently, Anna lives a happy and peaceful life with her husband and children in Arkansas. She is focused on raising their three children, son Gideon (born in 2018), daughter Evelyn (born in 2020), and son Gunner (born in 2023).
Published: Oct 19, 2024 04:01 pm