October 16, 2026Updated October 17, 2026, 10:20 a.m. ET
Melissa Gilbert is rejoicing after a judge threw out the child sex abuse case filed against her husband Timothy Busfield.
A New Mexico judge on Oct. 16 granted the 69-year-old actor-producer’s motion to dismiss his grand jury indictment, according to documents obtained by USA TODAY.
Although the “Little House on the Prairie” actor has not publicly commented on the judge’s decision, she posted a Shakespeare quote on Instagram on Oct. 16: “Thus shines a good deed in a weary world.”
She also posted a New York Times article about the case update on her Instagram Story.
Busfield, who has denied the allegations, was charged in February with four counts of criminal sexual contact with a child stemming from alleged incidents with two minor twins while he worked as a director on Fox’s “The Cleaning Lady.”
In his ruling, Judge Joseph Montano of New Mexico said, “The prosecutor failed to act fairly and impartially, including by failing to properly instruct the grand jury on the law relating to subpoenaing witnesses and by failing to instruct the grand jurors on a proceeding that actually withheld requested witnesses.” »
Montano determined that grand jury members requested additional testimony before returning the indictment. However, the prosecutor reportedly told the 12 jurors that the testimony of additional witnesses would require a subpoena and 36 hours’ notice, without saying that a judge could grant a shorter deadline or that witnesses could voluntarily testify without any subpoena.
“Tim said from the beginning that he was innocent. That he would fight to prove his innocence. And he did,” Larry Stein, Busfield’s civil attorney, said in an Oct. 16 statement to USA TODAY in response to the dismissal of the indictment.
Melissa Gilbert has long proclaimed her husband’s innocence
Gilbert supported Busfield throughout the case, pleading for her husband’s innocence.
The couple met in the 1980s and crossed paths frequently for decades before beginning a relationship in 2012 and marrying in 2013.
In an interview with “Good Morning America” on April 6, she said the director’s arrest and everything that followed was “the most traumatic experience of our lives.”
“Our life as we knew it is over,” she told host George Stephanopoulos in an interview that aired April 6. “We mourn what we had. All our plans, all our dreams, all our ideas, all our plans – for Tim, it’s done. He canceled it. Even if he’s exonerated, he’ll still be that guy.”
Gilbert said she never doubted her husband’s innocence, describing him as “the last person in the world who would harm a child.” She said justice in this case would include “exoneration, apology” and “freeing from this cloud.”
“If I thought for one second that Tim Busfield hurt a child, he would have a lot more to fear than prison,” she added.
“I know this man in my bones. No one knows him better than me. I literally know everything about him,” she said, adding that he is “an honorable, caring and generous human being” and that she is “100 percent confident he will be exonerated.”
In January, she wrote one of more than 70 letters of support to the “West Wing” actor, calling him “my love, my rock, my partner in business and in life.”
“I started this letter with logic, but now feelings have taken over. I can’t do anything about it. I just want this extraordinary man to be safe and sound,” she wrote to a Bernalillo County Metropolitan Court judge. “So I’ll end by asking you to please, please take care of my sweet husband. As he is my protector, I am his, but I can’t protect him right now and I think that, more than anything else, that’s what really breaks my heart.”
Contributors: Liza Esquibias, Anna Kaufman and Brendan Morrow, USA TODAY
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