‘Duck Dynasty’s’ Jep Robertson Reveals He Was Sexually Abused as a Child

Duck Dynasty reality star Jep Robertson revealed that he was sexually molested as an adolescent.

In an interview with ET Online, Robertson said he was six when a female high school student began sexually molesting him on the school bus.

“I was 6, and it was on a school bus and it was an older girl,” Robertson said. “Back then the high school students would ride on the same bus as the grade school. There was this girl there that was just real mean … I don’t know, but it was a lot of things [that] took place — scary stuff. It was tough.”

Robertson and his wife, Jessica Robertson, co-wrote a book, The Good, the Bad, and the Grace of God: What Honesty and Pain Taught Us About Faith, Family, and Forgiveness, set for release June 23 in which he describes the incidents that took place.

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“An older girl started sitting next to me. She seemed sweet at first. She’d come sit beside me, like a motherly figure almost. I remember her being sweet and taking care of me. I liked to sit in the back so she’d come sit with me,” Robertson wrote in the book.

“After a while the girl started doing strange things. She’d take my hands and push them up under her shirt and tell me I was tickling her. Then she started making me pull down my pants. It was awkward. I didn’t know what was going on, but I knew something wasn’t right,” the story continues in the book.

Jep said that he didn’t want to go to school and “had a lot of absences” in response to being touched. “My mom always thought I was sick and there was definitely other reasons I didn’t want to go to school. I think for a while I just tried to bury it so deep that I kind of forgot about it for a while. I think God put that on me for meeting someone like [my wife] Jessica who went through some hard times herself, and I think it made our relationship stronger once we talked about it.”

The 37-year-old said that he couldn’t discuss the molestations with his parents because he was embarrassed.

“I was more embarrassed. I think in the end I didn’t want my mom and dad to think they did anything wrong, and they didn’t. It was just one of those things that happened, and I think it took me a long time to realize what had happened and how it effected me. Like I’ve said before I don’t think anything that happened to me made me do anything bad. I hear people say that,” he told ET. “I do think it affected the way I look at certain things. I was really scared of girls and just women in general, but I think God had a plan for that. I know it sounds weird but it’s helped me now that I have a bunch of girls. I think it helps us really communicate with them on what’s right and what’s wrong — where you should be touched or not be touched. It’s a tough thing to go through, but you just kind of live and go though it and make the most of it.”

When asked about the 19 Kids and Counting Duggar family, Jep said: “At some point I think you got to get a tough skin and no matter what anybody says about you, you just got to be like, ‘We’re just going to keep doing what we do.’ “

Jessica replied, “And I think that’s what they’re doing. I think they’re staying close-knit and I think they’ll be fine, but it’ll be a long road.” 

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