Amy Duggar King is revealing painful family secrets.
In her new memoir, “Holy Disruptor: Shattering the Shiny Facade by Getting Louder With the Truth,” the “19 Kids and Counting” alum opened up about the “darker side” of her grandfather, Jimmy Lee Duggar, detailed the physical abuse her mother, Deanna, endured and explained how the secrets revealed will shock certain family members.
At one point, Amy claimed in the book, Jimmy Lee came close to “murdering” her mom after learning she wanted to move in with her then-boyfriend.
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“He grabbed her by the throat, carried her from the kitchen to his bed, and jumped on top of her. He wrapped his hands around her neck, lay on top of her so she was unable to move, and started strangling her. … He almost succeeded in murdering my mother,” Amy wrote.
She explained that Deanna called for help, and her brother, “19 Kids and Counting” patriarch Jim Bob Duggar, was there to break things up.
“Jim Bob might not have known it at the time, but he saved her life that day,” Amy wrote.
Amy spoke to Fox News Digital ahead of the book’s Oct. 14 release date, explaining how some of her family might not know the extent of her grandfather’s behavior.
“Well, here’s the thing that’s interesting about my grandpa and just the impact and the dark shadows that he had. I don’t know if everyone knows that in my family,” she said. “I don’t know if that has ever been discussed with my cousins. I don’t know if that’s ever been discussed in a wide range as far as that. And so I wanted to be really candid and honest with the audience of my book that it stems from somewhere, right? It’s a ripple effect.”
“Abuse has a way of just going through different generations, and it can really leave stains, and it can really cause a lot of hurt and pain,” she continued. “Abuse is something that you have to speak about. And I don’t think it ever has been. So I think that those that read it will be shocked. And I think there’s family members that will read it and will be shocked of the truth.”
In the book, Amy wrote that while her grandfather often made her and her cousins laugh, “we learned by the time we were in junior high to be very cautious around him.”
“I’m not sure exactly when it happened or why, but eventually there were certain boundaries put in place by my mom and my grandma,” she wrote. “There was a shift in our family where the things we thought were funny suddenly weren’t funny anymore. Gramps had a crazy side, and we all knew it, but we didn’t fully know yet his darker side.”
Though Amy admitted she wasn’t fully aware of her grandpa’s background, she eventually discovered “cringe” secrets about him, including a troubled childhood, bouts of infidelity and a battle with alcoholism.
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“When things didn’t go his way, Grandpa didn’t accept it quietly. He made sure everyone knew about it. He had a flair for drama and would throw himself into tantrums, cussing, hollering and carrying on,” she wrote.
“My mom often told me stories about growing up in a household where out-of-control behavior was a regular part of their lives. She witnessed her parents’ fights night after night, sometimes stretching into the early morning hours, the arguments escalating like a heavyweight boxing match.”
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Amy claimed her mother wasn’t allowed to be alone with Jimmy Lee when she was younger due to various reasons.
“My mom knew there was a much deeper, uglier, and sadistic side to her father. She never took a shower if he was home, and she locked her bedroom door at night. It was an awful way to live.”
Describing one incident in which her mom returned home from college, Amy wrote that Deanna walked into her house and found her dad “violently yelling” at her mother.
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“She quickly left the living room without saying a word to her parents and went to her bedroom, hoping to escape the weight of it all, and began unpacking,” Amy detailed in the book.
“But her father followed my mother, storming into her bedroom. With a leather belt in his hand and the most haunting, crazed look in his eyes, he grabbed her by the legs, held her down on the bed, and began beating her, every hit harder than the last. … This brutal torture lasted for more than an hour. She screamed at the top of her lungs for help, begging him to stop, but the lashes continued and she began to bleed.”
“When Mom was black-and-blue and beaten to a bloody pulp, eventually the torture stopped, and JL left the room, too worn-out to keep going,” she continued.
“One thing that has always stood out to me when my mom tells this story is that throughout the entire horrifying event … her mother never came to help,” she added.
Fox News Digital’s Stephanie Nolasco contributed to this post.
