A lot of damaging information about the Duggar family has come to light in recent months.
And much of it became public knowledge as a result of the ongoing feud between Derick Dillard and Jim Bob Duggar.
Derick claims that Jim Bob stole millions from his own children by pocketing the money they were supposed to receive for their work on the family’s TLC reality shows.
The situation has led fans to examine the family’s finances, and it’s also raised questions about what Jim Bob’s sons-in-law expected when they married his daughters.
After all, Derick abruptly quit his accounting job with Wal-Mart after he and Jill got married.
You generally don’t earn a degree in a specific career field and then burn bridges with your state’s largest employer unless you have a very good reason.
Many believe that Derick’s “good reason” was that he was under the impression he had married money and would now be pulling in six-figures as one of the stars of a lucrative reality show.
Jill was the first Duggar daughter to get married, which means Derick had no one to look to for an idea of what to expect from his situation.
Clearly, the lack of precedent led to a miscalculation on his part, because these days, Derick is working as a Grub Hub driver and attending law school while threatening to publish a tell-all memoir about his time with the Duggars.
Derick no longer has any involvement with TLC, having been fired from Counting On in 2017 after making bigoted remarks on Twitter.
Dillard’s law school degree and memoir may eventually yield dividends, but many fans remain convinced that he thought he would be rich by now, simply because he married Jill.
“Do you think Derick thought Jill was loaded before they got married?” a Reddit user recently asked in the r/DuggarSnark forum.
The conversation led to a widely-held theory that Derick originally intended to marry Jana Duggar, but wound up with Jill for reasons that remain mysterious.
“That’s always been my theory. You can Google and see how much they get per episode,” one user wrote.
“Derick tried to bullsh-t a bullsh-tter [Jim Bob] and is salty. He didn’t get anything he wanted out of the deal. He didn’t get Jana. He didn’t get fame. He didn’t get paid.”
Follow-up questions led to an explanation of the theory that Derick initially asked to court Jana but Jim Bob decided Jill was a better fit for him.
“Jana isn’t ‘damaged’ like Jill is, and at the time was still young enough to be worth more than some random gangly kid with bad teeth,” one user theorized.
“Jill on the other hand had been abused by her brother, which was likely known in ATI circles,” the commenter elaborated.
“I’ve said this before, but Jim Bob saw all of Josh’s victims as a liability to their image, both in the community and publicly, that getting them married off was his major concern as soon as they became of age.”
The disturbing theory that Jim Bob came to view his daughters as irreparably damaged after they were sexually assaulted by Josh Duggar is a common one.
Jim Bob, of course, would never admit such a thing publicly.
But fans are hopeful that Derick will shed some light on this scandalous hypothesis in his forthcoming memoir.