Duggar sentenced on child porn charge
by May 25, 2022 4:16 pm 1,570 views
On Wednesday (May 25) in Fayetteville, a federal judge sentenced a Springdale man who enjoyed a degree of fame as a reality television personality to federal prison for receiving and possessing material depicting minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct.
U.S. District Judge Tim Brooks sentenced Josh Duggar, 34, to 151 months in federal prison without the possibility of parole.
According to court documents and evidence presented at trial, Duggar repeatedly downloaded and viewed images and videos depicting the sexual abuse of children, including pictures of prepubescent children and depictions of sadistic abuse.
Duggar installed a password-protected partition on the hard drive of his desktop computer at his used car lot in Springdale to avoid pornography-detecting software on the device. The password for the partition was the same one he used for other personal and family accounts. He then accessed the partition to download child sexual abuse material from the internet multiple times over three days in May 2019.
Duggar downloaded the material using the dark web and online file-sharing software, viewed it, and then removed it from his computer.
Law enforcement in Arkansas detected Duggar’s activity during an undercover investigation involving the online file-sharing program, subsequently searched his car lot in November 2019, and seized Duggar’s desktop computer and other evidence. Significant evidence pointed to Duggar’s presence at the times of the offenses, including pictures that Duggar took on his phone that geolocated at or near the car lot.
Duggar also sent multiple timestamped text messages to various individuals that indicated he was at the car lot at the relevant times. Additionally, he was the only paid employee on the lot at those times. The messages were sent, and the iPhone pictures were created, at times within minutes of when the child sexual abuse material was downloaded or displayed on the desktop computer.
A federal jury convicted Duggar this past December. He appeared with his mother and father, Michelle and Jim Bob, and siblings on the TLC television series “19 Kids and Counting” from 2008 to 2015.