On Wednesday, Josh Duggar, a disgraced reality TV star, was sentenced to 12 years and seven months in jail for downloading a terrible collection of ‘the worst of the worst’ child pornography.
Since a federal jury found Duggar, 34, guilty of child pornography possession and receipt in December, he has been held in custody.
According to a trial in Fayetteville, Arkansas, the father-of-seven used the desktop computer at his car dealership to search the dark web for filthy films like ‘pedo mom’ and ‘play tot darling.’
The tech-savvy pervert downloaded a further 600 images depicting children as young as seven being raped and violently abused, the court heard.
One horrifying sequence depicted a little girl being bound, whipped with a cat o’ nine tails and locked in a cage.
The cache was so disturbing that a seasoned FBI child exploitation investigator said it was ‘in the top five of the worst of the worst that I’ve ever had to examine.’
U.S. District Judge Timothy Brooks sentenced Duggar solely on the receipt charge, agreeing with both parties to vacate the possession charge as it was the lesser of the two offenses.
Defense attorneys had asked for a five-year stretch, the lightest possible punishment, insisting that Duggar, said to be a devoted dad and committed Christian, maintained his innocence and intended to appeal.
They argued that, of the hundreds of child porn images identified by investigators, only a small portion had been viewed and none of those fell into the category of ‘sadistic or masochistic’.
Prosecutors demanded a 20-year term – the maximum possible – arguing that it was hard to think of anything more sadistic that a grown man raping a little girl.
To illustrate the lasting devastation done to victims of child porn, government filings presented testimony from the mother of a young girl who had appeared in one of the videos Duggar downloaded.
‘My daughter is a real person,’ the mother stated. ‘She was horribly victimized to provide this source of ‘entertainment’. She is exploited anew each and every time an image of her suffering is copied, traded or sold
‘I asked my daughter what she most wanted to ask of the judge. Her request: ‘Please, don’t let them pretend no-one’s getting hurt!’
‘She had some words for the defendant as well: ‘don’t you know, no one should do that to a little girl! Don’t you know it hurts!’
Duggar’s mom Michelle and wife Anna both wrote letters to Judge Brooks pleading for leniency, the latter comparing her husband to Ronald Reagan in an effort to stress his work ethic and decency.
‘Joshua has a compassionate heart and he is willing to make personal sacrifices for the benefit of others,’ Anna wrote.
‘Joshua embodies the quote from Ronald Reagan: ‘There is no limit to the amount of good you can do if you don’t care who gets the credit’.
Responding, prosecutors said that Duggar’s supportive family and ‘privileged lifestyle’ merely made his crimes ‘all the more baffling’.
They argued that a ‘pattern of activity enhancement’ should be applied to his sentence, citing evidence from Bobby Holt, a family friend who testified about the molestation scandal that engulfed the Duggars in 2015 and led to their TLC show being canceled.
Speaking from the witness stand at the trial, Holt choked back tears as she revealed how Duggar had confessed at age 15 to groping and penetrating his younger sisters during ‘bible time’ and while they slept.
The defense fought to exclude her testimony but the judge ultimately agreed that it provided important clues about his sinister appetite for minors.
‘Despite achieving some level of fame through reality television as an adult, he is better known at this point for his behavior outside his family’s show, including his sexual improprieties and criminal sexual conduct,’ prosecutors wrote of Duggar.
‘More importantly, none of these letters meaningfully grapple with his crimes or his sexual proclivities toward prepubescent girls.’
Duggar’s astonishing downfall began on May 14, 2019 when his computer made the first of two ‘digital handshakes’ with Detective Amber Kalmer of the Little Rock Police Department.
Kalmer was using a specialist police program called Torrential Downpour which targets pedophiles by catching them in the act of sharing child pornography files online.
She tipped off Feds who traced the IP address to Wholesale Motorcars and seized Duggar’s office HP desktop, iPhone and MacBook.
After volunteering to speak with agents – but without knowing anything about the nature of the probe – Duggar asked them: ‘Has someone been downloading child pornography?’
When forensic scientists studied the HP they found someone had installed complicated software called a Linux partition which creates a second, independent operating system within the same device.
The partition could only be accessed by rebooting, hitting F9 and entering the password intel1988 – the same password used for Duggar’s internet banking and the Duggar family Instagram and Twitter accounts.
Mom Michelle Duggar, pictured with husband Jim Bob, had also asked for leniency for her son in a letter to Judge Brooks last week
It provided the secret online space where he could search for, download, then delete child pornography, all behind the innocent veneer of a standard work computer with a wholesome wallpaper of his family.
The Linux partition also helped Duggar circumnavigate Covenant Eyes, an ‘accountability’ program installed on his computers and phones to warn his wife if he looked at porn or tried to download peer-to-peer software.
The government retrieved dozens of backed up text messages and images from Duggar’s Apple devices that placed him at the car lot at almost the precise same times that the porn was downloaded and viewed.
One image appeared to show someone pointing their phone at the HP computer to take a screenshot of a YouTube video about car repairs.
Metadata revealed it was taken at 4:20pm on May 14, 2019 – less than an hour before Duggar’s computer received a vile trove of child pornography entitled ‘webcam collection’.
A closer look at the faint reflection on the screen revealed it to be Duggar wearing a distinctive Wholesale Motorcars baseball cap. He was wearing the same hat later that day in a selfie he took with his wife.
Prior to today’s sentencing Judge Brooks threw out several defense motions arguing the trial was unfair as Duggar remained locked up at the Washington County Detention Center awaiting his fate.
Duggar’s lawyers contended that a former employee or hacker could have exploited Duggar’s lax internet security to hijack his computer and remotely download and view the child porn without anyone knowing.
Prosecutors branded their arguments a ‘fantasy’ and jurors unanimously agreed after deliberating for six hours.