'Duck Dynasty' star Jep Robertson says he was molested as a child

Duck Dynasty’s Jep Robertson told Entertainment Tonight that he was molested when he was 6 years old and has written about the abuse in a new book.

“Basically, I was young, I was 6, and it was on a school bus, and it was an older girl,” he said on the show, where he appeared alongside his wife, Jessica, to promote a book they co-wrote titled The Good, the Bad, and the Grace of God: What Honesty and Pain Taught Us About Faith, Family, and Forgiveness.

“It was real mean,” he said. “A lot of things took place. Scary stuff. It was tough. I didn’t want to go to school. I had a lot of absences.”

He went on to say he didn’t know if he “necessarily consciously wanted to” keep it a secret from his family:“I think in the end I didn’t want my mom and dad to think they did anything wrong, and they didn’t,” he said on ET. “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 affected me.”

See a clip from Robertson’s ET interview below. For more on the story, head to PEOPLE.