From the moment that Josh Duggar was arrested on child pornography charges back in 2021, media outlets and former fans of the family have been obsessing over the same two questions:
Did his family know about his crimes, and if so, why didn’t they take any action to stop him?
It now seems almost impossible that the family didn’t at least suspect that Josh was engaged in criminal sexual activity.
We may never know why they continued to enable him, but we do know that the outcome was catastrophic.
Earlier this week, an anonymous Reddit user who claimed to know the Duggars hosted an AMA (“ask me anything”) session on the r/DuggarsSnark subreddit.
Reddit confirmed the user’s claims that they were a casual acquaintance of Josh’s, and that they knew Anna well enough to be invited to the couple’s wedding.
Not surprisingly, one of the first questions was about the extent to which Josh has his family fooled.
“Does the family/broader community actually buy into the ‘Josh is innocent’ lie?” one user asked.
“He’s a creep and if you spent 20 min with him you knew it,” the host responded.
“I think there are a couple siblings who maaaaaybe think he could be innocent but for the most part it’s widely accepted he’s not innocent.”
That revelation follows on the heels of a bizarre claim by Josh’s lawyers who alleged in their appeal filing that Josh was framed by a longtime family friend named Caleb Williams.
Williams is also a convicted sex offender (there seem to be a lot of those in the Duggars’ circle), and the attorneys claim he downloaded the offending materials while doing freelance work in Josh’s office.
It’s already been established, however, that Caleb was in Illinois on the day in question, not Arkansas.
Elsewhere in the thread a different user claimed that she also knew Josh and also got “creep vibes” after spending time with him “several times at their house or various places.”
This person went on to allege that Josh behaved flirtatiously toward her when she was just 13 years old.
“I knew him casually and can confirm. Throughout the course of a few years I was around him several times at their house or various places and definitely got the creep vibes,” this user wrote.
“I remember being 13 and feeling like he was hitting on me (he was like 19 or 20 at the time),” they continued.
“I told my parents and of course the didn’t believe me.”
Sadly, stories like this are not uncommon in insular religious communities like the one the Duggars live in.
Too often, victims are met with skepticism, and law enforcement and other outsiders are regarded with intense mistrust.
It’s this set of circumstances that enables perpetrators like Josh to operate for years without suspicion.
And once their crimes are exposed, these predators benefit from their neighbors’ wariness of outside influences.
The community attempts to handle the matter internally, thus allowing men like Josh to avoid prosecution.
When Josh hit on a 13-year-old girl, her parents didn’t believe her.
When he molested his own sisters, his parents helped him cover up his crimes.
In this way, the family and the community in Josh was raised collaborated in creating a monster.
Josh Duggar Tried to Seduce Me When I Was 13 and He Was 20, Reddit User Says was originally published on The Hollywood Gossip .