A leading advocate of the patriarchal Quiverfull movement groomed a teenage girl as his ‘personal sex object” and then used the purity culture to shame her into silence, according to a lawsuit filed by his victim.

Douglas Phillips resigned last year from Vision Forum and Vision Forum Ministries over what he described at the time as an extramarital affair.

But the lawsuit, reported by Right Wing Watch, revealed more details about this relationship and the ways that women are treated in the Quiverfull movement – which has been popularized by the prolific Duggar family and their TLC reality show, 19 Kids and Counting.

Attorneys claim Phillips, a close friend to the Duggar family and an associate of actor Kirk Cameron, ‘methodically groomed” Lourdes Torres since she was 15 years old and led her to believe they would be married.

Phillips told the girl this was possible because his wife, Beall Phillips, ‘was going to die soon.”

Torres appeared in two Vision Forum films, ‘Alone But Not Alone” and the anti-feminist documentary ‘Return of the Daughters.”

Right Wing Watch also noted that when Torres graduated from high school in 2003, Phillips wrote a blog post commending her parents for ‘bringing their daughter into mature Christian womanhood.”

But at […]