Olivia Plath has MANY siblings and she’s estranged from her VERY conservative parents.
This may sound familiar to a number of celebrity gossip followers.
This may sound especially familiar now that Amazon has released Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets, a documentary that aims to expose the ugly side of both the Duggar family and their controversial religion, the Institute in Basic Life Principles.
It features an interview with Jill Duggar in which the mother of three says her parents forced her to give birth on camera.
Plath, perhaps, cannot relate to this tribulation.
But the general idea of being raised by a mother and father who try to instill unusual and extreme values on their kids?
“That was my life up until a few years ago,” Plath said via her Instagram Story on June 2.
“A little triggering to watch, but also there is solidarity in having other people speak up and say, ‘Yep, you’re not crazy, happened to me too. I know about this.’ That is healing in a way.”
Olivia recently moved to Minnesota with her husband, Ethan. The spouses rarely talk to either set of parents due to their controlling nature.
In the wake of the Duggar documentary release, Plath said on Saturday that she received an “overwhelming response from people saying, ‘Please, let’s talk about this.’
Such a response, she now explains, prompted her and her sister Lydia to decide to talk about their experience as “ex-[fundamentalist] and ex-cult kids” more in-depth during an Instagram Live on Monday.
“I will say, the realm in which my public life exists, there’s a lot of things I can’t say,” the reality star confessed.
“There’s a lot of things I want to say about religion, about my past, about the world that I went right back into, and I hadn’t known to say them in the public space that exists for me, so I’m gonna get on [Instagram] instead.”
Emphasizing that she is “not really religious anymore,” Plath added:
“I’m jumping on to say my experience, to be honest, was decently negative. There’s a lot of things that I laugh about now, because what else are you supposed to do?”
Late last week, Amazon Prime dropped a four-part docuseries centered around the 19 Kids & Counting family and their religious affiliation.
The series featured interviews with Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar’s daughter Jill Dillard (née Duggar), her husband, Derick Dillard, and their niece Amy King (née Duggar).
Among the bombshell exposed on air included how Jim Bob allegedly failed to pay his children for their work on 19 Kids and Counting.
Also, Jill said she felt “obligated” to defend brother Josh Duggar amid his 2015 molestation scandal.
Premiering in November 2019, meanwhile, Welcome to Plathville originally followed Christian fundamentalist parents Barry and Kim Plath and their nine children, including their oldest son Ethan and his wife Olivia.
Initially, the show featured their lives in rural Georgia while largely abstaining from technology amid today’s digital age, although the dynamic has shifted as the family has evolved.
No Plath child has been found guilty of child pornography possession, at least.
For their creepy part, Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar released a statement shortly after this Amazon documentary was made available to the public.
“We love every member of our family and will continue to do all we can to have a good relationship with each one,” read the message.
“The recent ‘documentary’ that talks about our family is sad because in it we see the media and those with ill intentions hurting people we love.
“Like other families, ours too has experienced the joys and heartbreaks of life, just in a very public format.
“This ‘documentary’ paints so much and so many in a derogatory and sensationalized way because sadly that’s the direction of entertainment these days.”
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