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Jill Duggar Dillard says she felt pressured to help her family after her molestation was made public

The "19 Kids and Counting" star and her husband appear in a new four-part docuseries titled, “Shiny, Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets.”

All eyes were on Josh Duggar in 2015 when news broke that he had molested five girls as a teenager. But his sister, Jill Duggar Dillard, says she felt pressured to rehabilitate the "19 Kids and Counting'" family's image, even as she was named as one of her brother's victims.

The reality star, who is now a wife and mother of three, looks back on her family's public fall from grace in a new Prime Video docuseries. In it, she says she felt pressured to do a TV interview with Fox News' Megyn Kelly after her brother's public scandal. At the time, Josh had acknowledged in a public statement that the sexual abuse allegations against him were true.

“In hindsight, I wouldn’t have done the Megyn Kelly stuff. I felt like I was in a place again of bearing the burden and the weight of (my family). Even though you volunteer, it’s like you feel obligated to help,” she says in the docuseries titled “Shiny, Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets."

Jill Duggar Dillard and her sister Jessa Duggar Seewald told Fox News they had forgiven their brother and seemed to downplay his actions. At one point, Jill Duggar Dillard said Josh Duggar touched his sisters while they were sleeping and explained that they didn't even realize it had happened until their parents told them about it later on.

In the Prime Video docuseries, Jill Duggar Dillard says that she doesn't like to discuss the traumatic experience at length. However, her cousin Amy King offers new details in the same documentary.

“Jill has strength and tenacity. She is not one to just keep quiet and silent, and so she's the one that really did something about Josh and hit him the night that he tried to do something to her,” she says.

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Jim Bob Duggar, far right, and Michelle Duggar, in green in the center, with their children. Their reality show, "19 Kids And Counting," ran for seven years. D. Dipasupil / Getty Images for Extra

Jill Duggar Dillard's husband, Derek Dillard, also appears in the docuseries, and criticizes Jill's parents, Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar, for asking their daughters to do the interview.

"The whole Megyn Kelly thing, I would not call it voluntary. Basically (it was) being called on to carry out a suicide mission: 'You’re gonna destroy yourself, but we need you to take the fall so that we can carry the show forward, because the show cannot fail,'" he says. “And they were gonna do whatever they could to get the return on their investment, and if that meant collateral damage that meant collateral damage.”

TODAY.com reached out to Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar for comment but did not hear back. The couple did share a statement on their official website. They described the docuseries as “sad,” and said it “paints so much and so many in a derogatory and sensationalized way.”

“We have always believed that the best chance to repair damaged relationships, or to reconcile differences, is through love in a private setting. We love every member of our family and will continue to do all we can to have a good relationship with each one,” the couple wrote.

Jill Duggar Dillard describes her interview with Fox News as something she "felt obligated" to do for "the sake of the show" and her parents. But despite the family’s efforts to downplay Josh Duggar’s actions, “19 Kids and Counting” was still canceled and Jill Duggar Dillard says she felt partially responsible.

“(The Megyn Kelly interview) didn’t save everything. It wasn’t enough,” she says.

Megyn Kelly was an NBC correspondent and a TODAY co-host in 2017 and 2018.

After "19 Kids and Counting" was canceled, TLC debuted a spinoff show featuring Jill and her sisters, called “Counting On.”

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Josh Duggar, the oldest of the Duggar family's 19 children, publicly acknowledged molesting his sisters as a teenager, a scandal that ended their popular TV show. Later, he was convicted of possessing child sexual abuse images and sentenced to more than 12 years in federal prison.Kris Connor / Getty Images

“Jim Bob’s clawing to get the show back as quick as possible. TLC was like, ‘Well we can’t focus on you and your wife or any of the kids in the home 'cause that’s too close to ground zero,'” Derek Dillard says in the docuseries.

TODAY.com reached out to TLC for comment, but did not get a response.

Jill Duggar Dillard was not exactly psyched to have the cameras rolling once again, she explains in the documentary.

“We were being pressured to come back. I didn’t want to but at the same time, I’ve never said ‘No’ to my family before ... I felt like if I said ‘No,’ I’m not obeying my parents and bad things are going to happen to me,” she tells the docuseries filmmakers.

Ultimately, the reality star obliged her family's request and appeared on the new series for 11 seasons over the course of five years. When she and her husband were living in El Salvador, filming got a bit tricky.

TLC was flying out to the country to film the couple, but when they asked them to return to the United States for a shoot, they say in the documentary that they resisted, calling it a "matter of principle."

“That was the first time that we really put our foot down and said ‘No.’ I’ve never said ‘No’ to my family before and just been like ‘No, no, no, we cannot do what you’re asking us to do,’" Jill Duggar Dillard says. "And it was one of those ‘Aha’ moments for us."

One of the docuseries' filmmakers, Cori Shepherd Stern, tells TODAY.com she was impressed with how open the reality star was during the filming process.

"She really touched me deeply as a filmmaker. As a human being, I thought she was incredibly brave to come on camera and I hope we’ve done justice to her story," she says.