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Two days after the arrest of former 19 Kids and Counting star Joseph Duggar, an arrest warrant for his wife Kendra Duggar was also issued and served.
According to the Tontitown Arkansas Police Department, the town in which the Duggar’s live, Kendra Duggar was charged with four counts of endangering the welfare of a minor and four counts of false imprisonment — both in the second degree — on Friday.
According to a release by the Tontitown Police Department, those charges were also issued against Joseph Duggar. Joseph Duggar’s original arrest charges from Wednesday of last week were for lewd and lascivious conduct with a minor under 12 years old.
At the time, the Bay County Sheriff’s Office stated those charges related to the alleged 2020 molestation of a then-9-year-old girl in Panama Beach, Fla.
“Investigators discovered the victim’s father confronted [Joseph] Duggar about these incidents on March 17th, 2026,” the statement reads. “Duggar admitted his actions to the victim’s father and to Tontitown Detectives.”
Joseph Duggar was arrested in Tontitown last week. On Friday, he waived his right to an extradition hearing, which set in motion his transfer to Florida to face the child molestation charge.
According to the Washington County Sheriff’s Office website, Kendra Duggar was released soon after her arrest on a $1,470 US bond. The Duggar family did not respond to a request for comment from CBC News on Monday.
19 Kids and Counting’s cancellation
The separate set of charges against both Joseph and Kendra Duggar come almost five years after Joseph Duggar’s older brother Josh was convicted of downloading child sexual abuse images.
In that case, investigators testified that a computer at a car dealership owned by Josh Duggar was used in 2019 to download images depicting the sexual abuse of children, including toddlers. He was sentenced in 2022 to 12½ years in prison. In 2024, the Supreme Court rejected an appeal against his conviction.
Josh and Joseph Duggar both starred in the TLC show 19 Kids and Counting. That show followed an Independent Baptist couple — Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar — as they raised their children, all with first names beginning with the letter J.
After their first release, 2004’s 14 Children and Pregnant Again!, the often-retitled series of TLC shows that would become 19 Kids ran from 2008 to 2015, when it was cancelled following allegations that Josh Duggar had molested four of his sisters and a babysitter years earlier.
At the time, authorities began investigating after receiving a tip from a family friend but concluded that the statute of limitations on any possible charges had expired. A follow-up series, 2015’s Counting On, was cancelled after Josh Duggar’s arrest.
Joseph and Kendra Duggar’s courtship and 2017 marriage was documented on that show, though they have in recent years stepped back from the spotlight. The last post the couple made on their public Instagram account was from 2021, celebrating their third child’s second birthday.
