'I was like, "Yeah, I'm definitely gay."' 'I was like, if they exist, I think I am one, and it just clicked,' she added. 'Growing up in a cult, it's difficult to know what your sexuality is when the only thing that you're given is an option is to marry a man and have lots of kids,' she explained. 'When I told that story to my therapist, she looked at me and she said, "Elizabeth, not only is that child abuse, but your parents are a part of a cult." And it just dawned on me, and I was like, "Oh, yeah, you're right."'Ī year later, she realized she was a lesbian after listening to a podcast with Christian people who were gay, something she didn't realize was an option before. 'If it weren't bad enough that my parents were having me parent my younger sister, when my younger sister fought against it and would refuse to hang out beside me, my parents got a rope and tied us together,' Hunter said. Hunter was in college when she told her therapist that her parents used to tie her to her younger sister to keep her in line and realized she was in a 'cult'Ĭonservative Christian parents Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar, who have attended and promoted IBLP events, implemented a 'buddy system' with their 19 children in which each older child was paired with a younger child to take care of.
Hunter was taught how to bake bread, how to sew, and how to play piano - all skills that she 'needed to be a good wife.' By the time she was 17, her parents had her thinking about marriage. You must have done something to be punished.' God is punishing you because you've gone out from the umbrella of protection. She said her mom told her, 'You're sick, so you must have done something to get sick. Hunter said that when she got sick, her mom blamed her, claiming the cold was a punishment for disobeying her parents. She wasn't even allowed to wear the color green, simply because her father didn't like it. She couldn't wear clothes with words on them because her mother felt they drew attention to her body. 'We weren't allowed to listen to any contemporary or non-Christian music. We weren't allowed to watch movies or television shows,' she explained. 'Whatever your dad said was absolute law, and you had to do whatever your dad wanted you to do or you were disobeying God himself,' she explained in one clip Hunter reflected on her strict religious upbringing in an interview with UNILAD, recalling how she was homeschooled and studied the Bible. It wasn't until she was an adult and trying to enroll her sister in public school that she learned she had been rehomed and was never legally adopted, though she still considers her mother and father to be her parents. 'For the rest of my life, I believed I was adopted by my mom and dad.
'My legal guardians drove me up to a home, unloaded my one backpack full of things, and then drove off,' she recalled in another video. She was three when her biological parents gave her up, and she spent years in and out of foster homes until her parents took her in when she was nine.
'Whatever your dad said was absolute law, and you had to do whatever your dad wanted you to do or you were disobeying God himself,' she explained in one clip. Hunter (pictured as a child) was nine when she was taken in by a family in Texas that belonged to the Institute in Basic Life Principles (IBLP), also known as ATI