Jinger Duggar faced unexpected highs and lows of growing up on television, including a particularly traumatizing encounter at a dude ranch.
“We were in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. This dude ranch was basically two and half hours away from any time and even the closest town had, like, nothing,” Duggar, 30, told husband Jeremy Vuolo in a Wednesday, August 7, YouTube video. “We drove and drove and drove and it felt like we were never going to get there. … It’s an out-in-the-middle-of-nowhere dude ranch.”
Jinger and many of her siblings — she is one of Jim Bob Duggar and Michelle Duggar’s 19 kids — were enthralled by the prospect of riding horses.
“We show up at this dude ranch and we’re like, ‘This is the best! We get to ride horses for however many days we were there,’” Jinger said. “On one of the days they were taking us out on a trail ride and I got on a horse and they were like, ‘This horse is super chill, it’s kind of slow.’ But, they failed to tell me one thing.”
According to Jinger, the ranchers neglected to mention that the horse hated water.
“We came up to this body of water [that] was like a wide creek, but the horse stood there for a second and then it jumped over the creek with me on its back and then it started bucking,” she said. “I was holding onto the horn and it shook me up quite a bit, so they took me off.”
The trail ride was part of the footage for the 19 Kids and Counting pilot, which was initially called 16 Kids and Counting based on the number of Jim Bob and Michelle’s kids at the time. According to Jinger, the scary equine encounter did not make it into the episode but did jumpstart a greater fear in her.
“Maybe [they didn’t use the footage] because I was, like, traumatized [and] they were trying to be nice,” she speculated. “Usually, that’s good TV.”
Jinger and her family starred on TLC’s 19 Kids between 2008 and 2015 before the show was canceled amid her older brother Josh Duggar’s molestation scandal. Josh, 36, admitted to forcibly touching several minor girls, including some of his sisters. Years later, TLC greenlit a Counting On spinoff about how the family was moving on from the scandal. Counting On was canceled by the network in 2021 after Josh’s child pornography trial. He was convicted on two counts of receiving and possessing the explicit images, receiving a sentence of 12 years in prison.
Since Counting On ended, Jinger and Vuolo, 36, have been focused on raising their two daughters — Felicity, 6, and Evangeline, 3 — out of the limelight.
“We talked about it for a while even before we had kids and whether or not we wanted them in the public eye,” Jinger exclusively told Us Weekly in January 2023. “And we decided just to keep them out of the public eye and let them choose what they want to do. So that’s just been our decision. We will sometimes post pictures of the back of their heads or little videos and you can hear their little voices or whatever. But not showing their faces has been something that we’re planning on sticking to.”
