Was this all a long time coming? Josh Duggar is currently in the middle of another media firestorm after confessing to infidelity and an addiction to porn on Thursday, Aug. 20 — but as it turns out, the troubled Duggar son has been battling his demons for some time. (Duggar has since removed the line about pornography from his statement).
On Josh and wife Anna Duggar’s joint website, the 27-year-old hinted at having “wrong thoughts” and “temptations” from a very early age in a previous post.
“As I became a teenage young man I was constantly tempted to have lots of wrong thoughts, and often battled to keep my heart right,” he wrote on the couple’s page about their love story. “One of the greatest things that helped me in my struggles was my parent’s commitment to accountability. They were faithful to talk with each one of their children — if we were willing to share honestly and openly with them — to maintain a clear conscience.”
“I learned quickly that great freedom can be achieved by accountability, and great accountability requires humility & openness,” he continued. “I often had failures in my early teenage years, but found I had a clear conscience only when I was willing to confess my thoughts and temptations quickly to God & my parents.”
The lengthy recounting of the married couple’s courtship period frequently references Duggar’s talks with God and with his parents about his feelings for Anna.
“As we talked, I felt God speak to my heart that this was the girl I was going to marry someday!” he wrote. “By that night I still could not get her off my mind! I went to my dad and told him what I felt like God had told me. He told me that he thought it could be a possibility, and then asked if I felt that I was ready to get into a relationship. I knew that I had a lot to get ready if I felt courting… or even marriage was in the near future.”
On Thursday, Aug. 20, Duggar revealed on the Duggar family’s official website that he had been “the biggest hypocrite ever,” having viewed pornography on the Internet and developing a “secret addiction.”
The troubled reality star also admitted that he had been “unfaithful” to his wife, Anna, during their seven-year marriage.
Duggar was previously the executive director of the conservative lobbying group Family Research Council, but he resigned from his post after news broke — in May — that he had previously molested five underage girls, four of whom were his own sisters, back in 2002, when he was 14 years old.
The confession comes one day after Gawker revealed that a credit card belonging to a Joshua Duggar had been used to sign up for not one, but two subscriptions to Ashley Madison, a website that guarantees its members discreet extramarital affairs.
Among the turn-ons that the user listed were “one-night stands” and “experimenting with sex toys.”
Duggar and Anna are parents to Mackenzie, 5, Michael, 4, Marcus, 2, and Meredith, who just turned 1 month old.
