The price Josh Duggar paid in 2003 for sexually abusing underage girls:
Jim Bob Duggar: "I gave Josh a very stern talk about what might happen if he continued such behavior."
Trooper Hutchens: "Nothing else to do."
Hutchens is currently serving 56 years for child porn. https://t.co/8x58NpAEgo
— Mrs. Betty Bowers (@BettyBowers) April 30, 2021
No, really: Used-car salesmen. Slap a new coat of paint on this clunker, we can still pawn it off on some rube with no better option…
Trying to figure out who #JoshDuggar is? As a scholar of religion in America and someone who has followed the Duggar extended universe since the mid-2000s, allow me to sketch a brief timeline for you. Josh is the eldest son of Arkansas couple Michelle and Jim Bob Duggar. 1/
— caroline matas (@carolinematas) April 30, 2021
I took the liberty of stripping some twitter headers:
After Josh’s birth, Michelle and Jim Bob experienced a miscarriage that spurred them to forego birth control & leave the # of children they had “up to God.” Soon, they had 5 kids living in the back of a small home on a used car lot, the front of which served as Jim Bob’s office.
As the younger kids neared schooling age, the Duggars decided to homeschool, a decision influenced by Jim Bob’s discovery of the Institute of Basic Life Principles, a ministry that creates homeschooling materials and conferences, run by the now-infamous Bill Gothard. 3/
The Duggars rose to national prominence after Jim Bob’s failed run for Senate in 2002. An Associated Press photo of Jim Bob, Michelle, and their then 13 children on their way to vote in the Arkansas primaries led to national news coverage and ultimately… 5/ pic.twitter.com/Xt4nTlDbgG
— caroline matas (@carolinematas) April 30, 2021
…a profile in Parents magazine that led to their being noticed by executives at Discovery. Their first TV special, 14 Children and Pregnant Again, aired in 2004, depicting how the family of 16 made life work in a small, 1-bathroom home. https://t.co/9tS9gSy3ul 6/
— caroline matas (@carolinematas) April 30, 2021
The success of the first Discovery Health documentary led to several more TV specials, including one that followed the building of their current 7,000sq ft home. Later it would come out that it was right before the filming of these specials that Josh molested 4 of his sisters. 7/
TLC built off the success of the specials with a TV series, successively called 17, 18, and 19 Kids and Counting. As Josh neared adulthood, the show heavily featured his courtship, marriage, and the birth of his first few children. Josh parlayed his fame into a job with… 8/
…the Family Research Council, a SPLC-designated hate group and the former policy arm of Focus on the Family. The Council primarily lobbies for pro-life and anti-same sex marriage and anti-trans causes. Michelle got in on the action too, recording a robocall in 2014… 9/ pic.twitter.com/EOLiZnlkjw
— caroline matas (@carolinematas) April 30, 2021
…that warned Fayetteville families that trans bathroom bills would allow “males with past child predator convictions that claim they are female to have a legal right to enter private areas that are reserved for women and girls.” Her son, of course, had skirted conviction. 10/
While there had been rumblings for years about Josh’s teenage misconduct, the scandal exploded when InTouch released a FOIA-obtained, redacted police report that seemed to include interviews with multiple Duggar girls, including a 5yo, attesting that Josh had molested them 11/
Josh quickly released a vague apology for “wrongdoing,” he resigned from his FRC position, and TLC pulled the 19 Kids and Counting Show. In their first TV appearance following the news, the Duggars sat for interviews with Megyn Kelly. https://t.co/JZuZH8tGS7 12/
— caroline matas (@carolinematas) April 30, 2021
*CONTENT WARNING* Jim Bob and Michelle defended their inaction after Josh’s molestations, with Jim Bob saying, “He said…he had gone in and just basically touched them over their clothes while they were sleeping; they didn’t even know he had done it” 13/
In a you-can’t-make-this-up turn of events, the police officer Jim Bob eventually took teen Josh to for a “very stern talk” after the molestations pleaded guilty to 8 counts of possession of child pornography just a few years later in 2007. https://t.co/OSmHtTTmIg 14/
— caroline matas (@carolinematas) April 30, 2021
The Duggar family quietly moved on after the initial hubbub from the scandal. TLC started a new Duggar TV show, Counting On, intended to focus on the older Duggar girls and their new marriages and families. But slowly, Jim Bob, Michelle, & Josh’s wife Anna were featured again 15/
This despite the fact that the Duggar parents were never pushed to account for their failure to respond meaningfully to their son’s indiscretions, who until his arrest yesterday was living with his wife and 6 children in a warehouse on the same plot as the Duggar compound. 16/
Yesterday’s arrest was, in some ways, a long time coming. Homeland Security agents raided Josh’s workplace (a used car lot) in 2019 and have presumably been building this case for a while. Today, he pleaded not guilty to charges of “receiving and possessing child pornography” 17/
.@Garrett_Photo broke the news. Josh faces up to 20 years in federal prison. Josh’s wife Anna announced last Friday that she is pregnant with their 7th child, a girl. Judge declared that, if granted bond, Duggar must live “in a home without minors.” 18/18 https://t.co/acrhR7SE3p
— caroline matas (@carolinematas) April 30, 2021
And if that weren't bad enough, the founder of the Christian Treatment Center the Duggars send Josh Duggar to had to resign for "sexually grooming" teens and young women.https://t.co/tSG6XjOE7C
— Mrs. Betty Bowers (@BettyBowers) April 30, 2021
That's what the Christian Treatment center they sent him to did. Hard work and prayer are their "cure".
— josh T. (@dshwa76) April 30, 2021
TFW you reported a story six years ago and the details still blow your mind: pic.twitter.com/vjSXoHRHcA
— Sarah Posner (@sarahposner) April 30, 2021
This piece from Homeschoolers Anonymous on Gothard, the Duggars and sexual abuse is relevant still. https://t.co/6O0UsV0nyV
— Kristin Rawls (@kristinrawls) May 1, 2021
Anna Duggar is probably being told right now all of this is her fault and if she had been more available* to Josh and pleasured him better/more he wouldn't have had to turn to kids.
*I mean, she's pregnant right now so she's been plenty available but it's still all her fault. https://t.co/nnEG4iUxAp
— Veronica McDonald?? (@Purify_toast17) May 1, 2021
I mean…I am praying for something. https://t.co/HUGLlJPj1M
— Jeff Fecke (@jkfecke) May 1, 2021
raven
Hi
zhena gogolia
And I’ve just been reading about Blake Bailey. Disgusting.
Lapassionara
@raven: Yea. What else to say after reading this post.
piratedan
I’m glad that the Duggars are there to serve as a cautionary example on the evils of evangelicalism.
raven
@Lapassionara: Yea, well the Salukis are play FOOTBALL so I have something to do!
bbleh
See this is why all those librul leftists are such haters, cuz Josh has accepted the love of the Lord into his heart, and that washes away ALL transgressions of the appropriately skin-toned with the appropriate social and media connections! I mean, how could they possibly BE so unforgiving? No wonder they continue to reject the leadership of the true president …
tinare
Just awful people.
phdesmond
wow, that’s sordid.
Ken
Spare a moment of sympathy for the guy whose picture Duggar hijacked for his OKCupid account. Actually, never mind, he’ll probably make money off the publicity.
(Source: The Agony Booth.)
Enhanced Voting Techniques
More men with that creepy conservative look. Considering Cruiz has the same look and I wonder what will come out about him.
MagdaInBlack
My mother used to say that when someone is playing all ” holier than thou” they’re hiding something. Once again, Mom was right.
Cheryl Rofer
What is it with the child pornography and never-ending molestations?
I am trying to think out the psychological underpinnings, beyond that a parent molested them, which seems to be predisposing
I guess it’s a power trip to have another human being who you can both use for your private pleasure and also ruin their life.
And then the guilt makes you think that everyone does it, hence the basement of pizza parlors.
jonas
Statistically speaking, at least one or two of the Duggar children are bound to be gay as well. It should be fun to see how they deal with that.
Ken
@MagdaInBlack: Reading that excerpt about Gothard, I think it goes beyond hiding something. That’s well into “every accusation is a confession” territory.
moonbat
Once you accept that every monotheistic sacred text is misogynistic, it all starts to make sense.
bbleh
@Cheryl Rofer: Once, long ago, I happened to talk with a Yale psychologist who studied this very matter, during which I was very careful not to make judgmental remarks, assuming not only that s/he was far more knowledgeable than I but also that s/he approached the issue with an attitude of understanding rather than judgment. Despite this being at a bar, the responses surprised me with their directness, from which I took away that, whatever the cause — nature, nurture, or some combination — a sexual attraction to children is as much a part of their nature as adult heterosexuality or homosexuality is to respective adults, and all there is to do is prevent its realization, chemically, forcibly, or by some other means. Tragic.
Mike in NC
We have a friend in Virginia Beach who was actually named “Jim Bob” and who became a banker. He used to joke how all the customers he met expected to see an inbred hillbilly.
bbleh
@moonbat: Yeah, bit of a problem with that Abrahamic lineage.
Woodrow/asim
Yes. And it’s also why QAnon is so hot about this shit, yet unable to actually do anything about it, the assholes!
Sexual assault so damn often boils down to power tripping. Dealing kids in is a form of using that power against the most helpless — most unable to fight back! — of us all. It’s the fuel of that abuse that powers so much of QAnon’s influence and power (remember Pizzagate?)
Look: someone is using the decades of abusive tactics that convinced many that “Liberals” are immoral, to now claim that they are not just allowing Gays to “lie with kids,” but that Liberal Politicos are trafficking in kids, themselves, en masse.
(A certain now-dead asshole millionaire and his political sidekicks didn’t exactly help with that impression.)
And the reality is that too damn many of these people who do this shit? Are people who never got a leg up on how to engage Women as people. Everything spins out of the fact that they grew up spitting on Feminism, on Women’s agency, on even basic decency towards anyone they id’ed as a Women — on anyone other that “white Christian Men” holding any real power.
The lesson of the kind of society that creates Chattle slavery and Jim Crow is simple — dehumanize one segment of who you live with, and it becomes too damn easy for anyone to be dehumanized.
Even your kids.
(Damn, now I need to shower in hot bleach.)
dopealope
what a broken group of people …
mali muso
As an exvangelical who grew up in fundie circles (although thank goddess not quite so extreme), this shit infuriates me. Every accusation is a confession. There is truly no depth to these horrible excuses for people.
geg6
Every accusation these people in Qanon and these nutty evangelical cults make is a confession. We all should know this by now. You’d think the proper authorities would have figured this out. It never, ever fails.
debbie
Sad what a vengeful god can do to a person.
Mike E
White patriarchy seems nice
rikyrah
There is absolutely no surprise about this. Nobody who was following the initial charges is shocked.
Angered
Disgusted
Enraged
Yes
Surprised?
No.????
Citizen Alan
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: I still remember that picture of Cruz where he tried to pick up his own daughter and she recoiled from him like he was the Boogeyman.
Dan B
And the homeschool leader instructs families to smile and be upbeat no matter what and for children to obey immediately with a smile. The consequence of the most minor willfulness is shunning. It’s psychological torture.
scav
They do keep dugging themselves in deeper.
The Pale Scot
Jim Bob and Josh definitely needs couple of these of these to finish their look
Kay
@Mike E:
There was a long -running criminal case here involving several of these families and …just a disaster.
Not all of them can be reality tv show stars of course. The families here had decided to “farm” except none of them knew how and they didn’t have enough land to even feed their giant families, let alone bring in income, also, as a I mentioned, none of them had any idea how to do it. At one point “the plan” was to raise strawberries to sell. So, like 7 adults and 20-odd children were going to survive on growing 5 acres of strawberries, planted and cultivated by hand.
When and if the grown children get out of the cult they often don’t have documents of any kind- no social security number, no birth certificate, no school records. It’s one of the ways they control them.
There was enough human abuse to keep investigators busy for 2 years, but that wasn’t all that was happening. Really horrendous animal abuse. The animal abuse was actually what got them because someone came on the property to dig a well, saw it, and reported it.
Jackie
My generation of kids were taught to respect and mind (obey) their elders. It took me well into my 20s to realize the impact it had on children. And, that while meaning well, it was the wrong wording. Adult predators took full advantage of that teaching.
bbleh
@scav: Lol
Kay
The reality tv show connection here is also absolutely disgusting. My God, WHY are they still promoting this family? No one takes any responsibility at all? They were filming this show and paying these people tens of thousands of dollars and while they were doing that 4 little girls were being molested? THAT wasn’t enough to pull the plug for good? They did a spin off show?
Kay
Josh Duggar has seven children. Maybe QAnon could go rescue them. It’ll be the one and only time they ever did anything useful.
Another Scott
Relatedly??
I get e-mail.
From Alan Grayson – “Should I run against Rubio, for the Senate?”
Is comma-abuse disqualifying??
Hmm….
Cheers,
Scott.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Another Scott:
Yes.
lgerard
Jim Bob is such a controlling freak. He told his children that the TV show was part of their “ministry”. It was only after years of doing it did they find out that he was being paid by TLC for each episode.
One of his daughters actually had to sue him to recover what she termed a minimum wage compensation for her contribution over the years. She is currently viewed as a blasphemer by the rest of the herd.
SiubhanDuinne
Damaged people, damaging their children unto the third and fourth generations.
I don’t know how you break that terrible inheritance of trickle-down abuse without major interventions.
Kay
It’s not like people don’t know about this. Educated: A Memoir was a bestseller. It’s the same philosophy but with some anti-government militia thrown in. Absolutely horrific child abuse which was put forth as some kind of “alternative lifestyle”, dressed up in Right wing political views and religion. There is no other group of people who would ever get the deference these people get from law enforcement for what are crimes.
Ohio Mom
bbleh:
What the psychologist told you makes intuitive sense to me. I suppose there must be people whose sexuality is children-centered who don’t act on their desires. We never hear about them obviously.
SFAW
@Another Scott:
It, depends on who is doing, it.
moonbat
In these type of fundie groups, young girls are seen as chattal, property of the father or the eldest son. I grew up around people who thought like this. Child and sex trafficking was inevitable when you isolate these girls from proper schools and any outside the family contact and “educate” them at home.
The idiot TV producers who kept giving these monsters a platform are complicit. They have a lot to answer for, as Kay pointed out.
Uncle Jeffy
Mrs. Uncle and I have been binge-watching Handmaid’s Tale -and after seeing that picture of Jim Bob and his little army, I’m not sleeping well tonight.
Doc Sardonic
@Another Scott: Send him back a 1 word email………NO
karen marie
@Woodrow/asim: I read some twitter threads recently by people from large families who had to parent younger siblings while mom acted as manager and administrator. I don’t know but that Josh wasn’t in that position. His acting out against his sisters possibly made him feel powerful and in control in a family where he was treated as a servant but also inculcated with the belief that his needs and desires were paramount and his sisters were his servants.
Absolutely horrific that the Duggars are held up as paragons of godly living, and those who have promoted them – like the Huckabees and too many other high-profile Republicans – haven’t been driven from polite society.
Mary G
I needed some pure cuteness to cleanse my palate for sleep without nightmares of my own “good Christian” abusers, and here it is:
Thank you, Twitter Dog.
westyny
I think I’m going to be sick. The TV producers should be answerable, too. The news media has to get in on the act in exposing the sheer amount of child abuse going on in the evangelical home-schooling cults.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Mary G:
I have a closeup of a young deer.
Mary G
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Aww, thanks.
gene108
@karen marie:
In families with very strong patriarchal views the “parenting” is left to the older sisters. The brothers get exempted from this.
Edit: I doubt Josh was ever expected to do much in the way of caretaking for his younger siblings.
LiminalOwl (formerly The Fat White Duchess)
@Cheryl Rofer: More recent suggests that being the recipient of physical abuse is a larger risk factor than sexual abuse.
Comrade Colette
@gene108:
Even in families without overt strong patriarchal views, this is the norm. You know all those statistics about how women do the great majority of housework/childcare even in households where both mother and father work outside the home full-time? That shit starts early.
In our family of seven, my sister and I spent hours every evening doing dishes and cleaning the kitchen. My brothers took out the trash once a week. My ostensibly egalitarian and feminist parents modeled and enforced this division. Yes, I’m still disgusted at the inequity decades later.
ETA: and my relationships with my younger siblings were permanently shaped by the requirement to carry out so many “parenting” duties for them, because my mother was overwhelmed and my dad was at sea most of the time.
HumboldtBlue
This is really good.
Anne Laurie
This has ‘always’ been the norm — still is, for most of the world. The bulk of the day-to-day gruntwork in large ‘traditional’ families falls on the oldest girl child(ren), but the boys have been expected to go ‘earn for the family’ as soon as they can understand the concept. (Think farm hands, garbage scavengers in big cities, street-corner sellers / beggars.) Our modern child-labor laws mostly prevent this — rightly — or Josh & his brothers would’ve been picking at the nearest farm rather than ‘wasting time’ past the eighth (or fifth) grade. (Even there, the pandemic exposed how many families rely on teenagers working at McDonalds or the local grocery to keep food on the table, especially when the parents are undocumented.)
Heck, even John F Kennedy’s family did this, to a surprising degree — if you read the family bios, the old man was busy earning, Rose was pretty much checked out, and the older kids were supposed to be ‘looking out for’ their younger siblings. It’s not as though they couldn’t have afforded to hire nannies, but having the kids ‘pitch in’ was so much the norm that it never seemed to cross their minds.
ian
To say nothing about the quality of childrearing when you have that many children, statistically having that many children means that at least one of them is going to do something pretty awful.
J R in WV
From the original post:
What’s really funny and terrible/horrible at the same time is that they always blame the person with the least individual freedom, the person bound by all the rules, a woman, every time, and even if they’re only 5 or 7 years old. Nothing is ever the fault of the patriarchal “leader” a young man groomed for power since he was 7 or 8.
It’s always the fault of the girls being molested, always. Now I’m gonna read the rest of the thread. Don’t know what I hope for with regard to Josh. Few legal punishments are severe enough for that rat bastid. \
ETA: And how it’s the fault of the little girl who was just trying to sleep in a bed at home, which should have been the safest place in the world for a little girl, except for her religious head of family, her dad, the monster. It’s her fault, not Dad’s … There people are so sick, they should all lose all those children, even Foster Care would be better than living with these monsters.
J R in WV
@jonas:
They will punish that child with all the psychological weapons they have carefully developed to keep members of the flock in line. And if that doesn’t work, they will beat it out of them.
The only two plans they ever use.
Perverted psychology or physical terror. And they really have psychological terror down pat, they’ve been using that for thousands of years now. Monsters.
J R in WV
@Citizen Alan:
The boogeyman IS the abusive parent, almost always the father, or a mother acting on the father’s orders. But Boogeyman is already there in the home, in charge of the home, right there in the bedroom with the kid.
That’s the whole point of the Boogeyman story, it’s the monster right there that you aren’t even allowed to run from. And Daddy is the Boogeyman for that small tragic family, and for the pretty little girl. And no one is allowed to help her other than by lying to her, tellling her that everything will be all right.
No. It won’t be all right, ever; not as long as Mr Cruz has access to the little girl, any little girl.
Sometimes it’s narccisist mommy, but not as often as it is daddy.
Barney
@karen marie: Mike Huckabee is a big supporter of the Duggars, even after the sexual molestation came to light, and he was also a booster of Bill Gothard – see https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2008/1/19/439174/- .
Gravenstone
@SFAW: What did it ever do to you?
SadOldGuy
My late father was the eleventh of thirteen children and yes, he was raised by his three older sisters.
Malovich
@Woodrow/asim: “And the reality is that too damn many of these people who do this shit? Are people who never got a leg up on how to engage Women as people.”
I’d take it a step further; their understanding of personhood is crippled to the point that when they project their understanding of personhood onto the world and get rejected they become furious.
Then they turn around and say they deserve the same rights to power as anyone else and that criticizing what they do with that power is tantamount to oppression.
Children are an ideal vessel for their abuse because kids will adapt to what gets thrown at them, if they survive. And thus validate the abuser’s experience and understanding of the world.
Instead of, y’know, getting therapy.