Josh Duggar of the TLC reality show 19 Kids and Counting goes on trial Monday morning in Washington, D.C., in an initial attempt to claw back his rights from a 2008 child pornography charge after a plea deal ran aground when state prosecutors fell apart and he was accused of perjury.
Duggar, the eldest child of the 2008 Family Research Council Film Council Student Workshop, faces a maximum five-year prison sentence if convicted on all five counts. His lawyer, Kristina Becker, called the case “absurd” and has argued that the trial should be thrown out, with prosecutors based in Montgomery County ignoring several key facts. Becker said Duggar did not knowingly download or otherwise possess any child pornography and was not committing a crime because it was not known to him that he had acquired the material.
“Here, there is no evidence Mr. Duggar acquired and viewed pornographic images. There is no evidence that he ever downloaded or viewed any of the pornography other than the one that was on his computer,” Becker told the judge. “There is nothing to show that he downloaded or viewed any of the Internet pornography that the state deems illegal or to imply that he knew or was willfully indifferent to that he possessed any of the pornography.”
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“The state only has proof of possession of the one file that they feel is illegal,” Becker said, per NPR. “But the other file … they say is child pornography, but it doesn’t contain child pornography.”
Another Duggar attorney, Joe Farrell, told the Post, “We are hopeful that they continue to look at this and decide it is silly and we will win it.”
Duggar, who now lives in Rockford, Ill., is a member of the evangelical Christian community that helped propel President Trump to power in 2016. He has since vanished from public view. The Josh Duggar case was first reported by TMZ in March. He was a minor when police investigated him in 2008 after receiving a tip from a school janitor.
In a bombshell police report released by the state of Arkansas in June of last year, details emerged about Duggar’s shady past. His wife, Anna, returned to Arkansas to be with him after his arrest, and they have four children together.
Duggar’s conduct was described as “significant and involving minors.” Citing unidentified sources, The Washington Post reported that authorities asked the victims to come forward as a precaution, but most have refused to come forward. As a result, Duggar was not charged with a felony, but the statute of limitations had run out on four counts before charges were filed in March of this year.
He was fined $7,500 and ordered to undergo a year of counseling and ordered to perform two years of supervised probation. The allegations against him covered a span of nearly a decade and a half, going back to 2002.
The first print reports on the case came two months after the case was filed, with the Post’s Nicole Cliffe writing that it “is an ugly end to a half-decade of whispers that the man’s involvement with underaged girls had left him vulnerable to exploitation in the adult world.”
The next major update came with Duggar’s arrest in Springdale on May 21, 2017, after his wife found pages from his cell phone documenting sexual conduct with minors, along with explicit journals documenting his efforts to please women, according to a video account of his arrest posted by Arkansas news sites.
The eventual story, which resulted in questions over whether Duggar was addicted to porn, distracted from a family with political ambitions, who had recently launched a political action committee, Victory for America, tasked with supporting presidential hopefuls ahead of the 2020 election.