Duggar-In-Law Dillon King: Amy And I Aren’t Grifters Like Her Cousins

Duggar-in-law Dillon King, Amy’s husband since September of 2015, appears to be getting sick of some of the associations with the Duggar name. King lashed out Thursday at commenters on the public Facebook page he shares with wife Amy. In the process, he got in some side jabs at the Jim Bob Duggar clan, hinting that he agrees with the common epithet of “grifter” leveled at that group — and with the frequent assertions that the entire family refuses to take honest jobs.

If you need a little background, Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar are a couple with 19 kids and a reality show. Well, at least, they had a reality show — until the public learned last spring that the oldest son, Josh, had molested several young girls, including some of his sisters. The Duggars were already the center of a lot of criticism for their fundamentalist views and politics, and this revelation merely ramped it up, as the family’s messages of sexual purity began to look hypocritical to many viewers.

Amy Duggar isn’t one of Jim Bob and Michelle’s kids, though. She’s Jim Bob’s niece, and her religious beliefs are more relaxed. Labeled the “rebel cousin” on the reality show, she differed from her female cousins in that she wore pants and dated, among other things. In September, Amy married Dillon King and expressed a lot of joy in leaving the Duggar name behind.

However, even as Dillon and Amy publicly claim that they don’t want to capitalize on the Duggar name and that they aren’t interested in a public life, the pair keep publicly visible social media pages and have started a new blog, which focuses pretty heavily on making their lives public.

It’s hard to say how sincere a person’s (or a couple’s) desire to step out of the spotlight is when they have a Facebook page listing them as a “public figure.”

On Thursday, though, it appears Dillon had enough. A visitor to the couple’s Facebook page posted a meme with an image of a job application and the words

“Fill out one of these and God will bless you with money.”

It’s not the first time Dillon and Amy’s page has been the vehicle for messages that may have been intended for Amy’s Duggar cousins, rather than the King couple. This one, though, appeared to strike Dillon as particularly insulting.

Since the young husband does run his own business, he probably has a point. However, what King’s response says about his own life and work is less interesting here than what his response says about his opinions of his cousins-in-law.

“I’m not sure you know who you’re talking to, this is Dillon not Amy.
And I’m not sure were you find the ‘grift’ thing to apply to Amy or myself, we have never ask for money nor will we ever. And the show being canceled doesn’t affect me at all. I’ve been working and punching a clock since I was 16 years old so I’m very aware of how going to work and making your own money really is. Now more recently in the last four years I’ve started my own business which is going very well. I married into the Duggar family that doesn’t mean I don’t have a job I don’t get up go to work every day and put in 10 to 12 hours a day trying to make my business succeed I probably work harder than most people because I have my own business no one else is out there helping me. everything I have in life is because of my effort and hard work and Gods blessings.”

Okay, most of this amounts to “the accusations you’re leveling at me show a lack of knowledge about my life.”

But check out these particular lines.

“I’m not sure were you find the “grift” thing to apply to Amy or myself, we have never ask for money nor will we ever.”

“And the show being canceled doesn’t affect me at all.”

“I married into the Duggar family that doesn’t mean I don’t have a job”

These together seem to hint that Dillon King does share some of the negative opinions the public has expressed about Amy’s cousins: that they “grift,” ask for money for nothing, and depend on fame to survive rather than working regular jobs.

The line, for King, appears not to be associating those qualities with Amy’s Duggar cousins, but associating them with Amy and himself.

[Image via Amy King/Duggar Fam Instagram]