Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar have spent most of the last few weeks trying–and mostly failing–to explain why they dragged their feet in reporting that their eldest son, Josh, improperly fondled five girls while he was a teenager. Well, it turns out they have a new problem on their hands. InTouch Weekly, the magazine that originally broke the scandal last month, reports that Arkansas child welfare authorities are now investigating the Duggars. However, so far it doesn’t look like America’s favorite babymakers are willing to cooperate.
InTouch discovered via a Freedom of Information Act request that on May 27–only eight days after Josh publicly admitted his actions of a decade earlier–a worker with the Washington County Department of Human Services drove to the Duggars’ home in Toonitown to check on the welfare of one of the Duggars’ minor children. However, Jim Bob and Michelle refused to let the worker in. On Thursday morning, InTouch released the audio of that call. Listen here.
At around 11 a.m., the worker called 911 to request police assistance. He said that DHS was investigating the Duggars, and for whatever reason Jim Bob and Michelle weren’t being cooperative. “We have to see the child to make sure the child is all right,” the worker said. “So we just need police assistance.”
It’s not immediately clear what triggered this new investigation. It could have been triggered by a complaint to a child abuse hotline–as was the case in 2006, when Oprah Winfrey’s producers got a tip about the 2002-03 incidents and called it in. However, a Fox News report suggests that when DHS officials saw InTouch’s extensive reporting about the affair, it decided the situation was serious enough to merit investigating the Duggars again. It’s not likely we’ll get many specifics, since Arkansas law doesn’t allow the disclosure of which child DHS was trying to check out.
The most benign interpretation of this is that Jim Bob and Michelle either have some really bad lawyers or some extremely frustrated lawyers. In the absence of something we haven’t heard or seen, they really don’t have a leg to stand on. Remember, they could have faced charges of child endangerment for waiting so long to report Josh’s actions. Specifically, the incident where Josh fondled his five-year-old sister should have never happened. Any normal parent would have taken Josh’s fondling of a babysitter as a sign that they had to get him help, and fast. The fact that Jim Bob admitted that he knew Josh had committed a crime makes this latest incident all the more incomprehensible.
There’s another reason the Duggars would do well to cooperate. It’s well established that the statute of limitations does not apply if the defendant engages in fraudulent conduct. Former Arkansas state trooper Jim Hutchens says Jim Bob only told him there was one incident–and if lying to a law enforcement officer isn’t fraudulent conduct, I don’t know what is. That’s one of many reasons I started a petition asking local prosecutors to do some investigating of their own.
When Megyn Kelly asked Josh’s younger sisters, Jill and Jessa, if any more “family secrets” were due to come out in the future, Jill quickly answered “No!”–almost certainly on orders from Jim Bob and Michelle. Well, now we know that even as she said that, DHS was indeed investigating the Duggars. It’s rather ironic that Jim Bob and Michelle at the very least let their daughters be told they “defrauded” Josh by stirring up lustful thoughts in him, and thus brought their abuse on themselves. After all, this is yet more proof that for the last decade, the Duggars have defrauded this nation.
TLC hasn’t made a decision on whether to formally cancel the Duggars’ show, “19 Kids & Counting.” Never mind that advertisers have been bailing on the show left and right. And never mind that even before this development, there was so much evidence that Jim Bob and Michelle endangered their daughters that it could stretch from their home in Arkansas to my home in Charlotte. You would have thought that the fact that DHS appears to be actively investigating the Duggars would be the end of the ballgame. Apparently not, as of Thursday night.
You know what to do, folks. Pester TLC on Facebook, on Twitter, and on the Web. If TLC doesn’t cut ties with the Duggars after this latest development, it owes this nation an apology.
