Josh Duggar was arrested in late April in Arkansas. From what I understand, the arrest was two years in the making, and it stemmed from a federal raid on the car dealership owned by Josh. The feds found hundreds of images on Josh’s work computer, and the images were just as heinous as everyone knew they would be. One week after his arraignment, Josh was in court for his bail hearing, and the judge ended up releasing him under not-so-strict circumstances. Josh is now living with friends, he wears a GPS tracker and he’s not allowed to be around any children but his own. He actually gets “unlimited contact” with his own children, which… is pretty disgusting, given the charges against him. Now People Magazine has a story about how his pregnant wife Anna Duggar is sticking by him:
Josh Duggar has his wife Anna Duggar’s support amid his ongoing child pornography case.
“She’s standing by him,” a source tells PEOPLE exclusively. “She thinks Josh is innocent.”
“[Josh] has seen [his] children with Anna there. She has to be there,” the insider adds of Anna, who is currently pregnant with the pair’s seventh child.
Josh was released from jail one week after his arrest. As he awaits trial, he is required to stay with third party custodians Lacount and Maria Reber. He is being confined to their home with GPS tracking. Josh was additionally granted “unlimited contact” with his children — Mackynzie Renée, 11, Michael James, 9, Marcus Anthony, 7, Meredith Grace, 5, Mason Garrett, 3, and Maryella Hope, 17 months — provided that Anna is present. However, he is not allowed to see any other minor children, including his many nieces and nephews.
Josh’s trial is set for early July. If convicted, the former reality star faces up to 20 years of imprisonment and fines up to $250,000 on each of the two counts, making his total possible sentence 40 years.
Considering the bail hearing testimony, it sounds like the prosecution has an open-and-shut case. The only thing I’m curious about from an investigative standpoint is why the two-year delay between the crimes being uncovered in 2019 and the 2021 arrest of Josh Duggar? I wonder if that will be explained during the trial? And I’m assuming Anna will attend the trial. She’ll probably bring the children, my God. As for Anna standing by Josh… I expected that. She stood by him when she learned that he had abused his sisters and other children. She stood by him when she found out he cheated on her with adult women. I don’t think Anna has any other options in her life but to stand by him. What happens to Anna if and when he goes to prison though? Will the Duggars take her in? Will she have to get a job?
Photos courtesy of Backgrid, Anna Duggar’s IG.
She’s been brainwashed her whole life. I hope one day she will really see what kind of person Josh is… and get her kids the heck away from him.
She has been. There’s so much pushing against her figuring this out – or, rather, doing so out loud. Her poor dead soul. Her poor children’s souls. The souls of those children victimized.
Nah, she is a garbage human being as much as he is. If she doesn’t care about CSA her soul is dead.
Where there’s fire, there’s fire, Anna.
I see this so often in work
Zero safeguarding of other minors and women – where are child services and the state in this case?
Wives and mothers standing by abusers and rapists- unfortunately also often siding against their brave and traumatised children
The biggest lie ever told was the one which said men who search out and enjoy watching the abuse and rape of minors are not rl threats. Such damaging nonsense based on zero credible research
And…my sympathy for her is over.
She’s officially complicit, especially as she keeps having his children when his previous assault on his sister’s shows he doesn’t care if the child is blood related to him. She could be giving birth to his next set of victims. I get that their strange religion means the man is the head of the family and is secondary God, but he’s not around now because jail/out on an ankle monitor. She can and should leave if not for her self then for her kids.
She needs to quickie divorce so she can get half the money before he spends it all on legal fees and fines.
They likely have a “covenant marriage,” which is harder to divorce from. However, I think considering the charges against Josh, she has a case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covenant_marriage
They don’t have any money. Jim Bob has all of the family money and doles it out to the kids. He’s the only one who received payment for both of their shows. The kids were told they were doing it for free as ministry work.
Fluffy, it’s true that JB doles out the money, but Josh has some funds of his own. He has been transferring things into LLCs in Anna’s name for about a year now. Most of us initially thought they were doing it because his dodgy real estate dealings caught up with him.
Agree 100%. This. Exactly.
Jim bob has the money made off the backs of his older daughters that did all the labor of having a big family. The older daughters that were victimized by Josh. And now their earnings are being spent to defend him.
I think can be both complicit and a victim at the same time.
While we know that she has choices; she should leave, she should turn her back on Josh, and she should ensure that her children are protected from that sick monster. But she doesn’t see those as choices in her world. Anna was groomed for this. She was gaslighted from childhood to be this person. And I’m sure that the church and the Duggar’s are holding her leash tight.
She has been programmed to believe that Josh’s actions are her fault, and that leaving him would be a sin.
From everything I’ve read, from people in the field, the conviction rate is so high for these crimes because they make sure to dot every I and cross every T so it takes a while for them to get everything in order and everything they need to make sure it’s air tight.
I think they also have to spend some time determining if the images are real or digitally created. Which has to be the worst job in the world.
I read they also convened a grand jury, which, with COVID, probably delayed the process.
Also Covid delayed his arrest. Sounds like they have a pretty strong case against Josh. He was dumb enough to take pictures of his desk and text them while he was downloading the images on his computer so his argument that it was someone else using his computer is pretty much nil. I heard they also think it was Biden who set them up even though when they first came to confiscate his computer it was still the Trump’s presidency. Jim Bob will financially take care of her and the children when Josh goes to prison, provided she still stay married to him.
I was raised in this crap. My parents are still in it. They firmly believe that Josh is innocent and he is being framed by a liberal conspiracy.
His sisters were raised in that crap too and they called him out for molesting and raping them. So have others within his community. He’s also cheated on his wife, admitted it and she took steps with “covenant eyes” software to make sure he doesn’t cheat again. Because he could not be trusted to be faithful without it. This is all admitted from themselves within their community.
Slight correction, his sisters never publicly mentioned Josh’s abuse until it was revealed by InTouch. Jessa and Jill, as the married victims, were trotted out to make excuses and tell lies about what Josh did. The Duggars’ position was that it was only light touching (it wasn’t) and Josh asked god for forgiveness anyway, so all was fine. The most anger back then, IMO, came from John David Duggar. He did an interview on Counting On and you can tell he has no love for Josh.
Ok so they didn’t “call him out”, but they did confirm. It’s my understanding their relationship with their parents and brother is very strained to say it kindly.
It doesn’t change the facts he molested his 2 sisters as children and this was admitted by all parties directly involved in their own ways.
Sorry to hear. A little curious to know why the Deep State would bother spending two years conspiring to frame a secondhand car salesman already acknowledged as a child molester, but who am I to question why?
The raid happened on Trump’s watch not the liberals.
imagine the victory lap the Trump/QAnon crowd would be doing if the pedophile were a “liberal” and/or non-white and/or non-heterosexual instead of a white straight male Xtian.
Meanwhile so many in the Conservative party is being busted left and right with damning evidence and some admissions for grooming and trafficking minors for sex. But that doesn’t count and no one should pay attention to that because Conspiracy you guys!
It is a real problem when people cannot think for themselves because they are guilted to feel a blind loyalty to those in charge in order to stay in charge.
Have people learned nothing from all those cult leaders molesting children?
The two year delay was because I think this was a huge operation, multi-country.
Read an AMA with someone who grew up with Josh. Anna and her family knew all about his abuse of his sister before they got married. He apparently had a courtship fall apart because the woman’s family found out about what he did and was like “hell no.” She’s not some babe in the woods who was tricked. She knowingly married and had kids with him with knowledge he was abusive.
I read that too! I got serious ‘Jim Bob defends him so hard because he has something to hide too’ vibes
He’s the golden child to them. He’s the oldest and male so he is their number one, the most important child in that religion. They don’t value women at all so it didn’t matter what happened to the sisters or the babysitter that he molested, the only thing that mattered was trying to sweep it under the rug as fast as they could for Josh’s sake. The men don’t take any responsibility for their actions, any terrible thing that they do or are accused of is from the devil and it’s not their fault. These men aren’t even expected to be able to control themselves around women showing some ankle so that’s why the women dress the way they do. They are treated like toddlers so that’s what you get, over grown toddlers who have never be held accountable for their actions. The men in these religions will do anything to hold on to their power and they’ve done a very good job at brainwashing and abusing people into thinking this is God’s way.
“‘Jim Bob defends him so hard because he has something to hide too’”
I FIRMLY believe this is the case.
If only Jim Bob would protect his daughters as much as he protects Josh…
I’ve always had a lot of sympathy for Anna. She didn’t find out what sex is until just before her wedding, and RimJob and Josh deliberately misled everyone about the abuse of his sisters. The Duggars sold it as light patting due to youthful curiosity, so no one ever sat Anna down and explained in plain terms that Josh likes to hurt children. She was ignorant, brainwashed, and didn’t really have a choice. I didn’t understand why Anna stayed through the cheating scandal, but many partners put up with infidelity and it wasn’t criminal, so not my business. But this? She knew he was under investigation, knew an arrest for heinous crimes was coming, and still decided to have another baby with him. She still brings her older children to spend time with him. Anna wasn’t complicit in the beginning, but she sure is now.
I wonder if she’ll think it’s worth when they remove her kids and put them in foster care. SMH
So Josh has his accomplice, ok. Just keep birthing him new victims, Anna. These poor kids should all go to some foster family, none of the adults around are going to protect them from that POS “father”.
Would anybody be shocked if she tries to take the fall for this in some way? If her husband told her to take the blame and say “It was me, I did it, my husband had no knowledge”, she totally would, right??Of course it would not work because all the evidence points to him. But he would have no shame and would totally try anything to worm his way out. And she’s programmed to do whatever he tells her.
Its bad enough that in their cult men have no accountability and they then turn to the woman and ask her “what did you do that helped lead to this?”
THIS. Most likely she will be blamed for not being “joyfully available” enough, and if she doesn’t defend josh she will be ostracized by a community and a family that holds the purse strings. As a woman, she is secondary to her husband’s needs. She is both a victim and a perpetrator of this abusive cult. The only people I truly feel sorry for are his victims and his children. Child services needs to take them away.
She needs to have a conversation with her oldest daughter. And listen to what that girl may have to say.
YES. My coworker and I were talking about this the other day, and she pointed out that the oldest daughter has been pictured wearing a lot of outfits that include pants/leggings, when they generally tend to favor skirts on the girls. Perhaps because they know daddy has a preference for girls around her age and so they’re trying to make her less “tempting” to him? The whole situation is just so unbelievably gross. I sincerely hope he hasn’t abused his own children, but would not be a bit surprised if he has.
Not very comforting, when you consider that pants and leggings are MORE form-fitting than skirts.
It was child porn on his computer, he has a history of sexual abuse with his own minor sisters. This woman is either dumb, severely brainwashed or just nuts. Combination of all of it i suppose. I feel so badly for those children.
My money is on dumb and brainwashed. There are brainwashed people who get out; Anna has no interest.
Also evil. Ignoring CSA is simply just that.
Wow, just the headline makes me sad.
Nope, no.no 1000X.
He molested his own sisters, apparently downloaded child pornography so heinous the Philippines wanted to resurrect the death penalty for, and this woman still is standing by him?
No. There is no telling what that monster has already done to his own children. The fact that his wife is still supporting him is evil.
@Watson – I hadn’t heard about the Philippines thing – when was that?
The video Josh downloaded over and over was so heinous that the Philippines wanted to revive the death penalty for the man who created it. And that’s not theatrics. This CSAM was so awful that it was urban legend for years.
Ladies and Gentlemen: May I present to you … the biggest fool on the planet: Anna Duggar.
I have a brother like Josh who is married to a woman like Anna. I hope beyond hope that law enforcement has Josh’s number and takes his slimy ass down. All children deserve a childhood free from abuse.
I have zero sympathy for her and find her complicit in it. She clearly knew something-there was software on his computer that reported what sites he visited to her. He bypassed it so she wouldn’t get any reports of his crimes.
Exactly Zuri! Of course she knows. I have zero sympathy for her and if he has interfered with their children she should not have custody because she clearly doesn’t care about their safety.
He admitted he had a porn addiction and they treat all porn child or adult the same. He partitioned his hard drive to bypass the software they had installed to let her know what websites he was visiting.
Same! I’m also tired of people saying she’s so brainwashed she couldn’t leave. Some of her own damn siblings have left and she’s still in contact with them, she’s not some babe in the woods who doesn’t have any contact with the outside world. She’s making an active choice to stay and put her kids in danger.
There are some women that regardless of their religion will always prioritize some man and his needs over the safety and security of their children. We have someone like this in my family, she is still married to a molester, she will never believe he did anything wrong, and she will never understand why no one wants to come to her house or visit her or let the grandkids meet him, and in fact it allows her to paint she and her husband in her mind even more as “victims” of her supposedly lying daughters.
This. Is. Horrible.
I know of one family where the mother remained married to her husband after it was found out that he had been abusing their daughter. He continued to live in the home with their daughter until she graduated and moved away.
Another family is still defending their son who abused his sister. My friend had to cut ties and say the grandkids could not spend time with them because they were insistent on downplaying what happened. Both of these families are very religious, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence.
Anna is an adult and mother and she’s putting her own children at risk. The state needs to step in and keep those kids out of his reach, because clearly Anna is prioritizing Josh over the children.
PS I can’t wait til this pedophile POS goes to prison.
Josh downloaded the most heinous CSA video available – three separate times- and she is standing by him. The Philippines openly said they wanted to bring back the death penalty for the man who made such a horrific video – and Josh downloaded it three different times.
I have compassion for the brainwashing that Anna has been through her whole life & the fact that she has few, if any, options, but those children should be taken away from her if she plans on standing by her god awful husband.
Someone in my own family was in a similar–not exact, but similar–situation as Anna. Where abuse of her child from a family member was revealed to her. (his victim, the girl, was living with her father–she was living not in the same house as this man). And she lived in denial for many months after the truth came out in part because she was afraid the man in question would kill her because of what she knew. I knew the man in question. This was not an unreasonable assumption for her to make. He had threatened her directly with killing. I, too, was afraid of him killing me because I was a credible witness, and because he had tried to groom me into abuse, too, but I had escaped multiple times. He threatened to sue me if I cooperated with the cops and broke into my car to leave menacing notes and things. He was a safecracker for a living; there is no alarm he can’t disable, no lock he can’t pick. He made it clear that I would never be safe as long as I believed in his guilt. I lived in a state of mortal fear for years. It was really hard for me to have someone in my family act like the allegations weren’t real. I mean, I didn’t want to believe them either, but because I had narrowly escaped his clutches, it all seemed very obvious to me that it was true. But it’s possible that Anna is in denial as a coping mechanism, and that she won’t stay that way. It wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility to me that she is enduring similar threats as the ones I faced. I hope she sees the light. I hope she gets out of there. But mostly I am just terrified for those children. They should be in protective custody, away from their father. I don’t understand how he is allowed to have any contact with *any* child. That is a failure on the part of whoever set the terms of his bail.
I’m sorry you lived through that.
God I’m so sorry you lived through this.
Holy smokes, that’s terrible. I’m sorry.
I believe that Josh and Anna already live on the larger Duggar family’s property, so if he’s convicted, she’ll stay there. She might get treated like a poor relation or like she’s responsible for her husband’s crimes, but she’s not going anywhere, and the senior Duggars have every incentive to make sure that doesn’t change.
They’ve been living in a warehouse on the property that belongs to Jim Bob and Michelle.
That’s about what I expected, fluffy_bunny. I’m glad a few of the kids seem to have eased away – I know Jinger lives in LA now and that Jill decided to actually make decisions about her life with her husband after that family fallout about money – but it’s a shame so many of them are kept dependent on the parents.
The kids need to be removed from her care. Period. Their mother is in a cult and is not capable of protecting them.
If she thought he was innocent, why did she have a kiddie porn tracker on his computer?
She keeps giving birth to his next victims, and no one in their community seems to care.
Just shows how dumb she is, can’t keep her story straight.
The program in question is marketed as checking for ‘inappropriate’ websites, i.e. adult porn. Josh was known to have cheated on Ashley Madison so it’s not surprising (in their culture) that it was there. There is nothing in the existence of the monitoring software that suggests she knew he was into CSA. I’m not saying she didn’t, just that the software says nothing either way.
@ Talia “There is nothing in the existence of the monitoring software that suggests she knew he was into CSA.” Except that she was told before she married him he had molested four of his sisters, who were all under the age of 12 while he did it. Even if she only thought it was “inappropriate touching”, they were still children that he felt the urge to touch, and not only one sister one time, but multiple sisters, multiple times.
I commented on this on another post, but there is nothing about that software that is geared as a “kiddie porn tracker”. My ex used it as an accountability feature for adult content, nothing related to any type of child abuse ever showed in the records. There are perfectly legal reasons that software might be used that have nothing to do with child abuse.
She‘s brainwashed for certain. I hope the kids are ok. I hope that, at the very latest, when she reaches menopause, she can rise up like a Valkyrie and expose and eradicate this family‘s generations of sins to the next generations of children and followers.
If he violates the terms of his bail and has contact with his minor nieces or nephews, would anyone even report him? Some of his siblings might even bring their children over to where he’s staying because they believe he’s innocent or that what he did isn’t serious. I still don’t understand why the judge let him out of jail.
No, I don’t think anyone in his circle of freaks would report him. I can see someone being dumb enough to post it on instagram for the world to see and report on, however. So there’s hope he might get picked up.
I’ve recently binged at least half of Rachel Bernstein’s 164 episode IndoctriNation podcast (which I can’t recommend enough) so while I know intellectually Anna’s behavior is typical it is still hard to comprehend emotionally.
The world needs to be sanitized of people like this. Her, her family, this movement, everyone except the children.
I said what I said.
💯!!!!!!!
The littlest one in front picking a huge booger really says it all about that family photo.
That, and look how young the baby is, and she’s pregnant again??
She’s so disgusting, as disgusting as him
He should not be free.
With Josh’s wife being so complicit, how can they trust that she is really supervising Josh when he is with their kids? Is an ankle monitor really a true determent to Josh?
There was a delay because Bill Barr was in charge. From the time he took over the DOJ until his last day, he was delaying and interfering in DOJ and FBI cases involving Trump, Matt Geatz, and Rudy. The DOJ and FBI are still populated with people who worked in Trump’s administration(Chris Wray). Trump and the republicans filled the courts with judges that would fulfil their agendas, the reason why Josh was let out on bail with just an ankle monitor, supervised visits, and 3 complicit adults.
The system is also broken, there are way too many examples of predators(i.e. Donald Smith, James Kater) being released over and over again after committing horrible crimes against children(Kater’s 1978 and 1986 convictions were overturned, there was a mistrial in 1992, he was finally convicted in 1996; each time he was released he viscously attacked girls).
This is a horrible tragedy. I hope he rots and she gets help someday soon.
I wonder if Anna should be the designated monitor when Josh is with his children. Unless the people having custody of Josh now are also required to be there and can be trusted, it would be safer to have someone unconnected with the family and church.
Supposedly the case took so long because they did two forensic examinations of his computer (@ the DOJ) and the second only came back in February. Covid delayed the testing.
Word is that Anna believes he was targeted somehow. The crazy word is that she believes that Biden orchestrated the entire thing to keep Sarah Huckabee Sanders from winning the governorship of AR.
The last thing was supposedly that the grown siblings didn’t know what was going on because their dad & Josh downplayed it. But numerous siblings were present (online) for Josh’s bail hearing and heard the actual charges. The lead investigator & a parole officer testified at the hearing. Part of the reason he got out on bail was because the gov’t admitted that they didn’t think he was a threat or they would have arrested him sooner.
I kind of wish publications would not include the children’s names – I know they must be out there publically somewhere, but I feel it legitimizes the Duggars as public figures, and associates them with their father’s criminal charge.
Why is this family still being covered in People?
Why does she look just like Josh’s sisters? Do all these cult women look alike?
They do kind of look alike, yeah. They follow the teachings of Bill Gothard, a sexually-abusive cult founder who had very specific ideas about how women should dress and style their hair. If you take a group of white women from fairly similar ethnic backgrounds and have them all wear that long, wavy style with no makeup and loose, conservative clothes, a lot of them will end up looking fairly similar.
I honestly hope that at the end of this, when he is proven guilty and convicted, her absolute conviction to support a child sexual abuser will be enough to cause authorities to remove their children. Not to place them with their other complicit family members, but to remove them completely from that horrifically abusive cult/family entirely. Because she absolutely cannot be trusted to protect her children from him, any more than his parents protected his sisters from him. She just keeps birthing more victims…if not for him, for the other abusers they’ve surrounded themselves with (*coughJimBobcough*).
Those kids don’t stand a chance with their poor little lives at the mercy of people like that. People can talk about her being brainwashed all they want, but to me, it’s pure evil to keep children in that environment just because “you have faith.” Those kids are pure innocents that have no choices. He’s pure evil for being an abuser. She’s despicably evil for siding with him and ignoring ALL of the horrific things he’s done.
I know that foster care/adoption are not universally better than another situation, but I’d have to guess that those kids getting out of this cult would probably be better on balance.
He is a total POS but I just came here to say, on a lighter note, the kid picking his nose in the headline picture is an absolute MOOD!
I think they stand by her IF she stands by him–which may be here best (only) option.
This stand by your man BS is putting your children at risk.
She is the worst kind of woman, an enabler that is willing to ignore the horrible truth, endangering her and others children. Hope social services would do something at this point.