Josh Duggar appears in a post-conviction mugshot taken by the Washington County, Arkansas jail on Dec. 9, 2021.
Disgraced reality TV star Josh Duggar asked a federal appeals court to give him a new trial for downloading and possessing child sexual abuse material. The federal convict claims that he was inappropriately denied the opportunity during his first trial to tell the jury about an “alternative perpetrator.”
Prosecutors say that the onetime 19 Kids and Counting star was barred from doing so because the trial judge rightly found his theory wasn’t plausible.
A little more than one year ago in December, a federal jury in Arkansas found Duggar guilty of both of the charges against him. Months later, U.S. District Judge Timothy Brooks sentenced Duggar to more than 12 years behind bars, a term he is currently serving at a low-security prison in Seagoville, Texas.
Prosecutors found a tough sentence more than justified by the “depraved” material found on his work computer, behind multiple layers of encryption. Authorities said that the photographs and videos depicted the sexual abuse of children “as young as toddlers.”
One infamous video, titled “Daisy’s Destruction,” depicted the sexual assault of an 18-month-old. Australian human trafficker Peter Scully, who created it, is currently serving a life sentence in the Philippines for his crimes. The government estimated that they found more than 600 illicit images on Duggar’s computer. His attorneys dispute that number.
Before trial, Duggar wanted to cast Caleb Williams — a former employee at his car lot — as an alternative suspect, but Brooks found that Duggar did not have any basis to do so. Williams was only at Duggar’s car lot “from May 8 to May 11, 2019, several days before any child pornography downloads took place,” the judge noted.
Duggar’s attorney Justin K. Gelfand argued that he should have been permitted to question the chronology.
“If permitted to inquire, Duggar would have established Williams: worked at the business; had familiarity with the computer and its software; engaged in eBay sales and utilized the computer to print labels; sent a text message on May 7, 2019 offering to watch the business that week; spent the night one mile from the business on May 9, 2019; and concealed all metadata on documents provided to the Government in an attempt to establish he was not present,” Gelfand wrote in the defense brief filed Tuesday.
Prosecutors say that the multiple layers of encryption and firewall point only to one person: Duggar.
In 2015, the hack of Ashley Madison revealed that Duggar had a profile on the extramarital affairs website, and he released a statement calling himself the “biggest hypocrite ever.” After the data dump, Duggar — then known as a conservative Christian activist — installed software on his computer called “Covenant Eyes,” designed to alert his wife if he accessed pornography. Prosecutors say, and the jury found, that Duggar bypassed that software by creating a Linux partition on the work computer. On that partition, Duggar used the Tor browser for encrypted surfing and BitTorrent to download the illicit files, authorities found.
The Justice Department’s appellate attorney Joshua Handell told the Eighth Circuit that all of this evidence points to Duggar, and none of it to Williams.
“This Court need not even consider the overwhelming evidence implicating Duggar as the culprit, including: the testimony that he had discussed setting up a Linux partition to avoid the Covenant Eyes software; the fact that the partition was created with an unusual password that Duggar had used across numerous accounts for years; and the text messages placing Duggar at his car lot on the same dates and times that CSAM was downloaded on his computer in his office,” Handell wrote. “The critical point is that no evidence inculpates Williams.” (Italics in original)
Duggar leveled other arguments on appeal, which failed before the trial court. His defense team tried to suppress evidence discovered by Homeland Security Agent Gerald Faulkner on Duggar’s cell phone when authorities went to his car dealership on Nov. 8, 2019.
Though Duggar claimed that he asked to call his lawyer, it is undisputed that he signed Miranda warnings before his interview with authorities.
Read the appellate briefs of Duggar and the government.