Attorneys made their opening statements in Josh Duggar’s child pornography trail Wednesday morning after a judge issued an order allowing prior allegations of child molestation to be introduced as evidence against the reality TV star.
Duggar was the oldest of the “19 Kids and Counting” show that ran on TLC for seven years until 2015, when allegations that Duggar, now 33, had molested four of his sisters when he was a teenager prompted its cancellation, as CrimeOnline previously reported. A spin-off that did not include him, “Counting On,” ran from 2015 until Duggar’s arrest forced the network to cancel it as well.
It is those allegations that US District Judge Timothy L. Brooks ruled could be used as evidence in a 15-page opinion he released before the trial began, according to KNWA.
Asssistant US Attorney Dustin Roberts handled the opening for the prosecution, describing for the jury the types of imagery — and their graphic titles — found by a detective monitoring the “trafficking and trading” of sexual images of minors and tracked back to a peer-to-peer streaming network allegedly used by Duggar. Some of the children were as young as 7, he said.
Roberts also detailed how Duggar’s desktop computer used a Linux partition drive in addition to the usual Windows drive to evade the “Covenant Eyes” application he had voluntarily placed on his computer to restrict his viewing of certain material and report him to another person if he does. “Covenant Eyes,” he said, doesn’t work on a Linux operating system.
Duggar’s attorney, Justin Gelfand, told the jury that Duggar didn’t know enough about computers to create the partition and that someone else could have been culprit.
“Why does it have to be Josh?” he said.
After the opening statements, Little Rock Police Detective Amber Kalmer testified how she’d run across a peer-to-peer transfer of a video file and some 65 pornographic images of children. Some of that imagery was shown to the jury. She also described how law enforcement uses its own software to track such transfers and how that software collects the user’s IP address, location, and other “hash values” that are “like thumbprints” on individual files.
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[Featured image: Josh Duggar/Washington County Jail]
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