Joseph Duggar, a former star of TLC’s “19 Kids and Counting,” was arrested in Arkansas and is now charged in Florida with lewd and lascivious behavior involving a child under 12, according to an affidavit prepared by the Bay County Sheriff’s Office in Panama City, Florida. The case traces back to an allegation police say emerged in Arkansas and then moved to Florida investigators.
According to the arrest affidavit, police in Tontitown, Arkansas, contacted deputies in Bay County after interviewing a 14-year-old girl who said Joseph Duggar molested her several times during a family trip to Panama City Beach when she was 9. The affidavit says the girl reported the conduct and that the matter was referred for further investigation by deputies in Florida.
The affidavit states that this week the girl’s father confronted Duggar about the alleged abuse and that the father said Duggar admitted to the acts. It also says Tontitown officers arranged for the father to call Duggar while a detective was on the line, and that Duggar again admitted to the actions, according to the affidavit.
Joseph Duggar was 31 when he was arrested, and the affidavit says he was taken into custody in Arkansas, where he lives, while awaiting extradition to Florida. The reporting said there was no online Florida court docket at the time, so it was not known whether Duggar had an attorney, and the Duggar family media request website did not produce an immediate response.
In a statement Thursday, the Tontitown Police Department said the investigation remains open and referred additional questions to the Bay County Sheriff’s Office. The statement came from a department serving a town of about 4,300 people in northwest Arkansas.
The allegations arrive in the shadow of prior developments within the Duggar family’s public history. TLC canceled “19 Kids and Counting” in 2015 after allegations that Josh Duggar molested four sisters and a babysitter years earlier. Josh Duggar later was sentenced in 2022 to about 12 1/2 years in prison on convictions tied to receiving and possessing images portraying child sexual abuse.