Jill Duggar Breaks Silence Over ‘Counting On’ Departure and Possible Plans for TLC Return

Jill Duggar is finally shedding some light on the reason behind her and husband Derick Dillard‘s abrupt departure from Counting On. The married couple left the show in 2017, two years after it replaced 19 Kids and Counting, despite the fact that up until then, Counting On had mainly followed their family as well as her sister, Jessa Duggar.

Responding to a fan who asked if Duggar and Dillard had plans to return to the TLC series, she said, “We get asked that a lot… No plans to [return to the show] currently. It just all got to be too much for our little family, so we decided to step away from it all a couple years ago before the birth of our second child.”

Her ambiguous response did not mention Dillard’s homophobic and transphobic Twitter rant, which occurred around the same time they left the show — leading many fans to infer that his comments led to him being fired by TLC. He and Duggar have denied that as the reasoning behind their exit.

Duggar’s comment explaining why they left the show was on a post she shared of a screenshotted text conversation between her and Dillard, in which she said she let their kids watch a few old episodes of Counting On.

“I turned on one of the family shows for the boys to watch and went to put on makeup,” Duggar wrote to her husband. “Israel came running into the bathroom yelling, ‘Hey mommy! Mommy! They said the Duggars!!!’ Haha.”

Although Duggar did not show Dillard’s exact response, he did leave a laughing reaction to the message.

“This happened today,” Duggar captioned the post. “[I don’t know] if Israel remembers watching any episodes before today.”

Fans have noticed a slight chilliness between Duggar and Dillard and Duggar’s parents, Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar. Only fueling that theory was a recent snide remark from Dillard about his father-in-law. When a fan asked why Jim Bob supposedly wasn’t properly paying his children for Counting On, Dillard wrote, “You would have to ask him that.”

Additionally, Dillard slammed Counting On, claiming that TLC only cares about money. “[TLC] has issues. They begged us not to [quit] filming, but then didn’t want to talk directly with us about why,” Dillard claimed. “If money is all they care about, then it’s going to catch up with them – you must care about [people]. All I’ve got to say is, they better lawyer-up [because] a storm is inevitable.”