These are the most shocking moments from ‘Shiny Happy People’ everyone’s talking about

If you spent your weekend trying to absorb everything you heard and saw while watching “Shiny Happy People” on Amazon Prime Video, you’re not alone. The new Duggar documentary series premiered on Friday, June 2, and it seems like it’s all anyone can talk about at the moment.

There were many shocking details revealed in the four-part docuseries about the Duggar family and their specific brand of Christian fundamentalism through the radical Institute of Basic Life Principles founded by disgraced pastor Bill Gothard (he was removed as the head of IBLP after multiple accusations of sexual abuse surfaced against him from young girls within the church).

Each episode dove into the famous family of 19 children, their ties to the organization, white supremacy, politics, and—most prevalent of all, arguably—abuse. IBLP literature not only touts sexual abuse, financial abuse, mental and emotional abuse—it encourages it. Particularly against wives and children.

The series focuses heavily on Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar, as they’re two of the most prominent members and well-known ministers of IBLP. Viewers also learn about the crimes of Josh Duggar, the eldest Duggar child, who was sentenced to more than 12 years in prison in May 2022 for possessing and receiving child sexual abuse material. (He had previously confessed to sexually abusing four of his sisters as a teen, as well as having multiple affairs within his marriage to his wife Anna Duggar.)

If you don’t have time to watch the whole series, or you’re curious about the scandal of it all, here are the most shocking moments not previously known to the public that everyone seems to be talking about.

Jim Bob allegedly cheated his kids out of being compensated for their time on TLC shows “19 Kids and Counting” and “Counting On”

Jill Duggar Dillard, the only member of the Duggar family to participate in “Shiny Happy People,” says she and her siblings didn’t have a choice when it came to filming their family’s famous TV show. She said her dad, Jim Bob, made them all sign a contract to commit to five years of filming—but didn’t tell them what they agreed to. She said her parents also “signed for a bunch of the kids who were no longer minors.”

Jill and her husband, Derrick, didn’t allow a TLC camera crew in the delivery room when she was giving birth to the couple’s first son, Israel. But they still had to have the intimate moment captured on camera—their own.

“We did diary cams, we did a lot of work. So they still got the footage,” Jill explained.

Unfortunately, she and Derrick were never compensated for filming it.

“After Israel’s birth, we asked TLC to pay us enough just to cover what our out-of-pocket costs were for health insurance for Israel’s birth,” she says. “They said they paid the family. ‘Paid the family’ means we don’t get anything at that point. They said, ‘Well, we paid your dad, so take it up with him.'”

Jill says she was never paid for her time on either show, and neither were any of her adult siblings. She and her husband tried to fight TLC for compensation, but in order for them to receive any money for their time and work, the would have had to sign a “forever deal” with Jim Bob’s production company.

“We never received any payout. No check, no cash, no nothing. For seven and a half years of my adult life, I was never paid,” she says.

IBLP events featured abuse demonstrations recommended for parents

Michael and Debi Pearl wrote a book called “To Train Up A Child” that was used as teaching material for parents in the IBLP ministry. In one scene from “Shiny Happy People,” there are multiple demonstrations showing parents how to spank a child—with a hand and a rod.

Michael Pearl, a fundamentalist preacher, has said that “the rules, the principles, [and the] techniques for training an animal and a human are the same.” According to the documentary, he taught to punish children by spanking and hitting them with switches and similar objects.

At another IBLP event, a minister is seen taking a young boy on stage and showing an audience of thousands how he should be spanked and gaslit into believing he’s poorly behaved and in need of corporal punishment. It’s very difficult to watch.

Tampons are preached against as a form of “pleasure”

Heather Heath, who left the IBLP community as an adult, shares that tampons were confiscated from her and others because they were considered to be a “form of pleasure” and would “deny husbands the opportunity to break the hymen.”

Instead of math or language arts, kids homeschooled under IBLP learned “slut-shaming”

According to ex-IBLP member Brooke Arnold, the IBLP heavily encouraged parents to instruct their kids from “wisdom booklets” in lieu of traditional textbooks. These “wisdom booklets” preached that only God has “full knowledge” of everything and anything.

“In the wisdom booklet, there’s these drawings of women, and they’re wearing various different outfits,” Arnold recalls. Children were then asked to identify the specific “eye-traps”—things that might attract a man’s “lustful attention”—in each picture and the solutions needed to change them.

“And so you circle, ‘Oh, it’s the lace right here. Oh, it’s the mid-calf leaf shirt,” Arnold continued. “Instead of learning math, you’re learning slut-shaming.”

The booklet also condemns women who wink, saying that men and boys who “fall to her whoredom are stripped of resources and vibrancy of life.”

The law of crying out and victim-blaming the women of IBLP

IBLP members were forced to follow the “Law of Crying Out,” which basically means that if a woman doesn’t “cry out to God” while being sexually assaulted, she’s at fault and as much to blame for the assault as her perpetrator.

“God has established some very strict guidelines of responsibility for a woman who is attacked,” the law reads. “She is to cry out for help. The victim who fails to do this is equally guilty with the attacker.”

“It’s a teaching that basically resituates sexual assault as the victim’s fault,” Arnold explained in the docuseries.

This “law” held much influence over IBLP members and their conceptions about rape and assault—so much so that they were under the impression that being sexually assaulted was a gift from God. Because it made you resilient, the law claims.

Heath says that she and her fellow followers were once asked if they had been attacked, molested or raped and if so, what they did to deserve it.

“They glorified being attacked, ‘Would you rather have never been attacked and not be spiritually mighty?'” she says. “And I almost became jealous of my friends who had gotten raped because God wanted to use them more. And that’s so weird to say out loud.”