Jeremy Vuolo is looking back on the early days of his relationship with wife Jinger Duggar.
“When I met you, your family was literally in hiding,” he recalled on the Wednesday, January 28, episode of the couple’s “Jinger & Jeremy” podcast. “Like, I met you and then it was, like, three or four months later, I go out and visit Ben [Seewald] and Jessa [Duggar] and everything broke, the news of the first scandal. And your family’s literally in hiding.”
Jeremy, 38, was referring to when Jinger’s brother Josh Duggar was accused in 2015 of molesting multiple girls when he was a teenager years prior. It was later revealed that some of the victims were Josh’s sisters.
“I had a relationship with you through those months and I’m watching how you were responding to your life crumble on international headlines,” Jeremy continued. “And I was going, ‘OK, this isn’t theory. This is actually real life that her faith is in practice.'”
Jinger, 32, and Jeremy met in 2015 and got married one year later. They share three children: daughters Felicity, 7, and Evangeline, 5, and son Finn, 10 months.
The 19 Kids and Counting alum shared her own perspective on the podcast about how her relationship with Jeremy began, noting, “I was glad that you were able to be around at that time because I think you saw our family in a place that a lot of people weren’t able to have a front row seat to. And I was thankful for that.”
TLC eventually canceled 19 Kids and Counting following the 2015 accusations against Josh, who was also involved in the Ashley Madison data breach that year. Jinger and some of her siblings returned for another series, Counting On, which premiered in 2015.
Jinger has been candid about her family’s struggles through the years, referring to the molestation scandal as the “worst trial in our family history” in her 2021 book, The Hope We Hold.
During an exclusive interview with Luxury Handbag Shopping, Jinger hinted there was a small silver lining from the scandal. “Our family was way closer because of that, and in spite of that, I guess you’d say,” she told Us in 2021. “I will never forget how I felt in that moment. And I think even everything that happens in our lives — because we’re in the public eye — it makes it more challenging because then it’s not just dealing with these things inwardly, but you have to give an answer to the world. That makes it a much tougher thing to walk through.”
Hard times continued for the Duggar family that same year when Josh — who shares seven kids with wife Anna Duggar — was arrested for receiving and possessing child sexual abuse material. He was sentenced to more than 12 years in prison, and TLC canceled Counting On following his arrest.
Jinger admitted to Us following Josh’s conviction that the situation was “difficult to even discuss,” but she was “grateful that justice is being served.”
“My heart just breaks for the victims and their families,” she said in 2023. “People will always let us down and fail us. You can look at something like that and say, ‘How in the world is this possible? How could this have happened?’ It just takes so much time to work through in your mind and process everything.”
