CP's Top 10 News Stories of 2015 (Part 1)
8. Josh Duggar, Ashley Madison highlight sex issues in Church.
The presumed anonymity of the Internet came crashing down on July 15 when an estimated 32 million subscribers to the adultery website Ashley Madison were snared in a data leak by a hacking group called the "Impact Team."
Among those caught in the data dump were 10,000 federal employees, many of whom used their .gov accounts as they lustily searched for "discreet affairs."
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The data leaked to the public included the names, home and email addresses, payment amounts and customers' usage dates.
Those who used their government Internet connections to log in to the website over a period of five years included workers at more than two dozen Obama administration agencies, including the departments of State, Defense, Justice, Energy, Treasury, Transportation and Homeland Security.
Among the federal employees named included at least two assistant U.S. attorneys and an information technology administrator in the Executive Office of the President.
One name that surfaced stunned fans of TLC's reality TV show "19 Kids and Counting," as it was revealed that eldest son Josh, a married father of four children, spent $986.76 as a customer.This included a $250 payment for an "affair guarantee" within the first three months of service.
The embattled TV star who months prior had confessed to molesting at least five girls when he was 14, including two of his sisters, was found to have multiple accounts on Ashley Madison from February of 2013 to May of 2015. Duggar sought extra-marital affairs under the categories of "conventional sex," "experimenting with sex toys," "one night stands," and "open to experimentation" among several other provocative categories.
R.C. Sproul Jr., son of Robert Charles Sproul, a noted Reformed theologian and founder of the international Christian organization, Ligonier Ministries, also revealed that he visited Ashley Madison in a "moment of weakness" last year and was suspended by the board of Ligonier Ministries for it.
"In August 2014, in a moment of weakness, pain, and from an unhealthy curiosity, I visited Ashley Madison. My goal was not to gather research for critical commentary, but to fan the flames of my imagination," wrote the 50-year-old Sproul, a Calvinist Christian minister, theologian and widower in a post on his website. Sproul, whose wife died in 2011, is a father of eight and grandfather one.
"I was there long enough to leave an old email address. And within minutes I left, never to return. I did not sign up for their service or interact with any clients. I have always remained faithful to my wife even after her passing," he said.
While it was expected that some 400 pastors, church staff and elders would resign from their positions because of accounts registered to the Ashley Madison site, the owner of a faith-based crisis firm said some of those listed in the data leak didn't sign up for the service and were able to prove it.
Hunter Frederick, president of Frederick & Associates, a crisis management firm, told The Christian Post that about 30 people attached to churches contacted his for help because they weren't clients of the Ashley Madison though their names appeared in the leaked data.
The CEO of Ashley Madison, Noel Biderman, subsequently resigned from his position as the parent company of the cheating website offered a $500,000 reward for the arrest of the hackers.
