Former reality-TV star and religious conservative activist Josh Duggar was convicted Thursday of receiving and sharing child pornography, which could put him behind bars for as long as 20 years.
Prosecutors said Duggar possessed pornography of children as young as 7 on his work computer, which he’d partitioned to hide the content from others. Duggar’s attorneys claimed that he’d been hacked and someone had remotely used the computer to store child pornography, but that argument didn’t hold water with the Fayetteville, Arkansas jury. He faces up to a $250,000 fine for each guilty count in addition to his jail time. Sentencing has yet to occur.
Duggar, 33, gained fame as the eldest child on TLC’s 19 Kids and Counting, a reality TV show about his religious conservative family. He parlayed that into a career on the religious-right circuit, including a prominent lobbying job with the Family Research Council, a Christian conservative organization, where he worked as the executive director of FRC Action, the organization’s political arm. His family was popular for years at right-wing political events, from the Conservative Political Action Conference to campaign stops with presidential candidates Mike Huckabee in 2008 and 2016 and Rick Santorum in 2012. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who at the time was running her father’s campaign before becoming Trump’s White House press secretary and is now running for governor of Arkansas, called him a “good friend” in 2014, before any accusations against him had been made public.
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But all that began unraveling in 2015 when the tabloid In Touch Weekly uncovered a 2006 police report that included allegations that Duggar had committed multiple acts of sexual misconduct against minors when he was 14 and 15 years old—including assaults on four of his sisters and a fifth girl. Duggar resigned from the FRC when those allegations became public, but Huckabee continued to defend the family at that point, calling the actions “inexcusable” but not “unforgivable.”
Spokesmen for Huckabee Sanders’ campaign and the Family Research Council didn’t respond to a request for comment for this story.
In Touch Weekly reported at the time that Duggar’s father, former Arkansas Republican State Rep. Jim Bob Duggar, knew about his teenage son’s actions for more than a year before reporting them to police. The elder Duggar is now attempting a political comeback, running for the state Senate.
Josh Duggar represented those actions as horrible mistakes that he’d long left behind.
“Twelve years ago, as a young teenager, I acted inexcusably, for which I am extremely sorry and deeply regret. I hurt others, including my family and close friends,” Duggar wrote in a 2015 statement to People. “I confessed this to my parents, who took several steps to help me address the situation. We spoke with the authorities where I confessed my wrongdoing, and my parents arranged for me and those affected by my actions to receive counseling. I understood that if I continued down this wrong road that I would end up ruining my life.”
But Thursday’s conviction indicates that he hadn’t changed that much after all.
