Guest post: One of these flawed money-saving approaches » « They just flat out pay for them

And who was that man?

Holy crap. Libby Anne did some Google-sleuthing after the Duggar parents’ interview, and she found something pretty…telling.

While Josh initially molested his sisters while they slept, he eventually began molesting them while they were awake, too. Did the family value personal space so little that the girls seriously had no idea this this was inappropriate?

“We pulled him out [of the home], and he went through working with that man.”

What man, pray?

“This man really reached his heart.”

“This man” is convenient shorthand for “I don’t want to tell you who.”

But there were clues.

He was running a little training center in Little Rock Arkansas. And under the roof of that training center, you had Little Rock police department on one side, and you had a prison ministry on the other. And he said Josh would come down there and actually do some construction work with him and he would counsel him and work with him and hopefully get him straightened out.

Did this training center have a name? Presumably it would have, but Jim Bob seems very interested in not mentioning it. Hmm. This is a good bit of information, though—the stuff about the police department, and a prison ministry. I wonder if the google might be any help . . . oh, here we go!

“Gothard’s presence here [in Little Rock] can be tracked to his friendship with former Little Rock Mayor Jim Dailey, whose idea it was for Gothard to create a facility in Little Rock to promote faith-based products. . . . “

Gothard. At least, it certainly looks that way. Libby Anne gives more details, then sums up:

Huh. Strange coincidence. At the time Josh Duggar was sent away, Bill Gothard, founder and head of the Institute for Basic Life Principles (IBLP) and the Advanced Training Institute (ATI), operated [a] “training center” in Little Rock. This training center ran a prison ministry, leased some of the building to the police department, and maintained something called “Integrity Construction Institute” for young men. [The center would have been run by a Gothard-appointed local director.] Why, I wonder, is Jim Bob so loathe to mention the fact that it was an ATI training center?

Oh right. It’s probably because last year Gothard was forced to step down after it came to light that he had sexually harassed and molested over thirty teenage and young women working at his facilities, and that the IBLP board had known about this and covered for him for decades. Oops. If Jim Bob isn’t willing to be forthright about the fact that Josh was counseled through a ministry run by an active sex offender, I’m really not sure why I should assume he’s being forthright in the rest of his statements.

Oyyyyyy.

There’s probably something else, too. If Josh was counseled through ATI as Jim Bob statements in the interview suggest, he would almost certainly have been counseled using ATI materials. You can see some of these materials here. These materials have been floating around the internet ever since the story about Josh broke, and wherever they have been read they have evoked outrage for their heavy victim blaming. This may play a role in Jim Bob’s apparent desire not to mention that the “training center” was an ATI facility.

Also, am I the only one seeing some transparently obvious child labor violations?

Yes but never mind all that. Blame the media.

Guest post: One of these flawed money-saving approaches » « They just flat out pay for them

Comments

  1. IDGAF says

    You’ll have to excuse me while I compose myself and attempt to scrape my jaw from the floor. So you’re telling me that a repeat offender (already likely to have been groomed) gets sent to a mentor (you have no idea what it took to type that word) so that he can learn to….groom?

  2. Lady Mondegreen says

    Libby Anne was able to figure that out, but our brilliant American press…

  3. Blanche Quizno says

    They say that he (Bill Gothard) groomed young women, selected the vulnerable and the hurting, told them it was God’s will for them to come work for him. They say that he made them feel special. That say he took advantage of their naivety – naivety instilled through the teachings and culture he created.

    I believe these stories, because I saw the edges.

    When we were at the Training Center, we joked about Gothard’s “harem”. We all knew there was a certain physical “type” of woman that he liked to be close to him, working for him.

    I saw him pick out young women who were obviously vulnerable and hurting – but also very attractive. I heard him promise them they’d be right at the center of the next big thing he was planning. Those plans never came to pass, but I saw the girls come and go.

    I saw the double standards. We weren’t allowed to go out with other staff in mixed-company groups. We weren’t allowed to have a conversation in the lobby with female staff members. And yet he – a single old man – had long “counseling sessions” with the same young women we were forbidden from meeting. At the time, we shrugged it off. He was the leader, he was allowed to make the rules.

    I saw the materials he published too, about “counseling sexual abuse”. Blaming victims, downplaying the damage of sexual abuse. The very sort of thing you’d expect, in retrospect, from an alleged sexual predator. http://micahjmurray.com/bill-gothard-homeschool-cult/

    Another Josh involved with Bill Gothard and ATI was Joshua Komisarjevsky, who was molested by an older foster child, and who then went on to molest younger children himself (this is how the cycle perpetuates – keep this in mind when reading about Josh Duggar. NOT an isolated instance). Komisarjevsky ended up murdering several people. https://homeschoolersanonymous.wordpress.com/2015/05/27/josh-duggar-and-josh-komisarjevsky-a-tale-of-two-joshes/

    Here is a downright horrifying interview with someone who was raised within the violent, sadistic Bill Gothard system – this is likely what’s going on at the Duggars’ once the cameras stop rolling: https://homeschoolersanonymous.wordpress.com/2015/04/04/man-shares-personal-testimony-of-how-bill-gothard-used-bible-verses-which-led-to-the-abuse-of-children-part-two/

    On an additional note, the police report reveals that Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar punish their children by spanking them with a rod. http://corinnestark.tumblr.com/post/119578222125/the-josh-duggar-situation-gets-more-fucked-up-the

    In Colorado Springs in 2007, Matthew Murray ranted about his super-religious, rule-driven home schooling, which used Gothard’s curriculum, in web postings before he opened fire on two Christian centers, killing four people and then himself, according to a Dec. 12, 2007, story in the Denver Post.

    “I remember the beatings and the fighting and yelling and insane rules and all the Bill Gothard bull — and then trancing out,” Murray wrote on a web forum days before the killings, according to a Dec. 13, 2007, story in the Rocky Mountain News.

    “I remember how it was like every day was Mission Impossible trying to keep the rules or not get caught and just … survive every [expletive] day,” Murray continued in the web posting, the Rocky Mountain News story said. November 06, 2011|By KATHLEEN MEGAN, kmegan@courant.com, The Hartford Courant

    It’s unspeakably sad. Christianity is poisonous.

  5. iknklast says

    These people are scary. Victim blaming is evil and immoral, and these are not good people

  7. anthrosciguy says

    It’s an awfully big coincidence that the Duggars handled this molestation by going to a cop who’s in trouble for child pornography and a counselor who’s a sex offender.

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