Josh Duggar
Josh Duggar, pictured here at the Family Leadership Summit in Ames, Iowa, on Aug. 9, 2014, recently moved with his family to one of his family's homes in the Arkansas mountains following the Ashley Madison hack. Reuters

What does someone do when his marital affair goes incredibly public? If you’re former “19 Kids and Counting” star Josh Duggar, you retreat from the public eye to your farmhouse in the mountains of Arkansas.

That’s right, following the revelation that the eldest Duggar son had not one but two active accounts tied to the website Ashley Madison, Entertainment Tonight reports that Josh has sequestered himself and his family in one of their rural homes. His wife, Anna Duggar, remains by his side even though he publicly confessed to being “unfaithful” to her after his name was discovered on the cheating website.

The 27-year-old former TLC star released a statement on the family’s website admitting to his unfaithfulness after his name was uncovered in the recent hack of Ashley Madison, a website devoted to facilitating affairs for consenting adults looking to cheat on their spouse. Duggar confessed to ownership of both accounts and blamed the problem on a crippling addiction to pornography.

“I have been the biggest hypocrite ever. While espousing faith and family values, I have secretly over the last several years been viewing pornography on the Internet, and this became a secret addiction and I became unfaithful to my wife,” the statement read.

Other than a brief preamble in Josh’s initial statement, the Duggar family has remained relatively tight-lipped about the entire scandal. The news comes on the heels of the controversy involving Josh from earlier this year that got the hit reality series “19 Kids and Counting” pulled off the air. It was revealed then that Josh had engaged in sexual misconduct with five young women -- two of whom were his sister -- when he was a teen himself.

One member of the family that isn’t staying quiet is Anna’s brother, Daniel Keller. According to People, he left a tirade on one of his sister’s recent Facebook posts in which he slammed her husband and revealed that he’s actively trying to get her to leave Duggar following his infidelity.

“I told her I would go get her and her children stay w [sic] me. She said she’s staying where she’s at. But I won’t stop trying to get that pig out of our family,” one particularly biting comment read.

There’s no telling what the family’s next move will be other than to simply lay low. Without a TV series to worry about, protecting their image may very well be a matter of simply not addressing the scandal until their fans, the media and the public collectively move on. After all, Josh Duggar was hardly the first person to get swept up in the Ashley Madison website hacks.

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