Folks, it looks like the inevitable unraveling of the Duggar clan might finally be underway.
And like so many major events of the modern age, it started not with a bang … but with a deleted tweet.
As you may already know, Derick Dillard was fired by TLC back in November after launching a bigoted twitter tirade against fellow network star Jazz Jennings.
You would think that after all that, Derick would have learned a valuable lesson about running his mouth on social media, but that doesn’t appear to be the case.
Last week, Derick went on yet another tirade, and this time it appeared he was hell-bent on biting the hand that used to feed him.
In a series of tweets (some of which were quickly deleted), Derick attacked TLC for refusing to pay his son’s medical bills after baby Samuel spent two weeks in the NICU.
Derick’s reasoning was that since the birth was featured on Counting On, the network should have helped cover expenses.
“We even requested that they help with some of the medical expenses from the birth that they made a pretty penny on, but they refused to help cover any of those costs,” Derick tweeted.
“We could pay for it fine; I had a great job,” he continued.
“The point is, I thought that at least since they were making money off the birth special episode, they could help soften the burden a little.”
When fans pointed out that Derick and wife Jill Duggar were paid for their appearances on the show and thus were entitled to no further compensation, the former reality star dropped a bombshell that left fans stunned:
“As far as we could tell we were volunteers and hadn’t been paid anything for the show,” he wrote.
“Like I said, for the year we were paying off our son’s birth expenses, both Jill and I thought we had been volunteering our time to help out [the show].”
Volunteering?! Is Derick seriously suggesting that he and Jill weren’t compensated by producers?
And if that’s the case, was anyone in th family paid a salary?
The answers, according to Derick, are yes and yes:
“TLC should approach all adults if they expect any obligation from them, so they can evaluate their own situation,” Dillard tweeted.
“Like I said, until recently, I assumed we were just volunteering to help out in filming where it would help out.
“I knew they didn’t owe anything but I didn’t think it was unreasonable to request some expense reimbursement under the impression we volunteered all the time.”
There’s that “volunteer” word again.
Derick chose not to answer direct questions about who did receive money from the network, but he made no effort to correct fans who speculated that Jim Bob was the only one getting rich.
“[The producers] were always asking for our time, so it seemed like a lucrative trade on their part, to make all the money they did and only be requested to help cover some expense,” he reiterated at one point.
“We paid it, but it seemed like a reasonable trade to request, considering what they asked of us.”
Asked why in the hell he would agree to put his life on television for free, Derick replied:
“There is too little space and time on Twitter to explain my whole thought process over the course of the past 4+ years, but the point is, TLC should have handled all of it much differently,” he tweeted.
“Doing the right thing should be more important than taking the path of least resistance.”
In other words, “Jim Bob made me do it.”
Watch Counting On online to relive Derick’s many years of unpaid labor.
