Arkansas police have destroyed the records of the investigation into Josh Duggar’s alleged molestation of five underage girls, a police spokesman announced Friday, a day after the reality TV star resigned his position as head of FRC Action.
Springdale Police spokesman Scott Lewis said Judge Stacey Zimmerman ordered the 2006 offense report destroyed Thursday. Zimmerman didn’t return a request for comment on Friday.
“The judge ordered us yesterday to expunge that record,” Lewis said, adding that similar records are typically kept indefinitely. “As far as the Springdale Police Department is concerned this report doesn’t exist.”
Neither Duggar nor his father, a former state representative, returned calls seeking comment Friday.
Several Arkansas Republicans have rallied behind the Duggar family, which is still engaged in state politics. Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar attended the kickoff event earlier this month for Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, who supported the family in a Facebook post on Friday.
“Those who have enjoyed revealing this long ago sins in order to discredit the Duggar family have actually revealed their own insensitive bloodthirst, for there was no consideration of the fact that the victims wanted this to be left in the past and ultimately a judge had the information on file destroyed_not to protect Josh, but the innocent victims,” Huckabee wrote.
Arkansas Sen. Bart Hester said Josh Duggar, who he has known for about five years, has been open and honest about the incident with wife, family and friends. State Sen. Jon Woods, who has known the Duggar family since 2005, said the family had put the issue behind them.
“It’s between the family members and was addressed a long time ago but it’s new to the public,” Woods said. “The family had time to heal and now the public needs time to heal.”
Last October, TLC canceled a series about child beauty pageant contestant Honey Boo Boo and her Georgia family amid reports that her mother, June Shannon, was dating a man with a criminal past.
A judge ordered these police records destroyed, not sealed, but destroyed? I wonder who has the motivation and legal standing to investigate this action by “the court”?
" I know a friend of a friend of a friend … ( to get the records destroyed ) " .
A white southern boy gets his criminal records expunged BECAUSE he’s a white southern boy. What could be more Republican?
This judge’s outrageous actions, as well as the comments by Huckabee, illustrate the essential character of Evangelical Christianism.
To those outside the Evangelical Christianist bubble, the nature of Josh Duggar’s criminal actions are seriously disturbing, as are the actions of the Duggar family and the Arkansas criminal justice system in covering them up. However, within the closed, insular, and perverted universe of today’s “Conservative Christian” movement, Ted Nugent’s enthusiastic songs and statements about having sex with underage girls have been completely ignored. We’ve seen Phil Robertson, patriarch of the Duck Commander morons extolling the virtues of wedding and bedding underage girls with nary a peep of protest from supposed “family values” Christianists. And, perhaps most disgustingly, we get to hear Republican Christianists not only downplay the brutal assaultive nature of rape while joyfully celebrating the pregnancies that result, but also sponsor legislation and policies that give rapists legal access to the children their victims have given birth to.
In other words, as long as the sexual predators are white males and the victims are female, “family values” Christianists and Republicans will make excuses for it. Why? Because similar kinds of actions are repeatedly described approvingly in the Old Testament. They only give a shit about sex when it involves people of the same sex, whether it’s consensual or criminal.
This horrible story will have very short legs not just within the Evangelical Christianist and conservative movements (not that there’s any real separation between the two), but also within the non-Fox mainstream media. The quivering, ignorant, lazy stenographers who make up the vast majority of the nation’s “professional journalists” are petrified at the prospect of going after the Christianist hypocrites who effectively control today’s Republican Party, and the Democratic Party is right there with them, crouching in fear at appearing to be anti-religion.
well, clearly nothing offensive in the records then…