Looks like former Little House on the Prairie actress Melissa Gilbert isn’t packing up her wagon just yet. In true prairie fashion, she’s planting her boots in the dirt and standing by her man, former West Wing actor Timothy Busfield – even as a legal storm rolls in stronger than a Walnut Grove blizzard.
Busfield, 68, has been indicted by a New Mexico grand jury on four counts of criminal sexual contact of a child tied to incidents involving child actors on a TV set, and he has pleaded not guilty.
His wife Melissa Gilbert, 61, meanwhile, is playing the role of loyal frontier wife – telling the world she trusts Busfield with her “children’s lives,” her grandchildren’s lives, and her nieces and nephews. She also believes he’ll be exonerated.
In an exclusive sit-down interview [1] on Good Morning America on Monday, Gilbert also says she went into the marriage with Busfield with her eyes wide open, aware of past allegations against Busfield long before they tied the knot back in 2013.
She’s calling the current ordeal “traumatizing,” insisting her husband is being judged before the facts are fully aired – like a town gossip circle that skipped the trial and went straight to convicting and exiling the suspect.
Gilbert used the interview to complain about how their lives will never be the same. She said in the interview, “We are grieving what we had – all of our plans, all of our dreams, all of our ideas, all of our projects. For Tim, it’s done. He’s canceled…Even if he’s exonerated, he will always be ‘that’ guy.”
Here’s where the sympathetic fiddle music screeches to a halt for Gilbert: the allegations against Busfield are serious, involve children, and prosecutors say a grand jury found enough evidence to move the case forward.
For all the snark, there’s one hard truth: Busfield is presumed innocent until proven guilty. He denies the accusations, and his legal team says they’ll fight to clear his name. So while Gilbert may look like she’s straight out of a Walnut Grove episode called “Half-Pint Holds the Line” as she defends the homestead against outsiders, the real story will be decided not by whispers on the prairie – but in a courtroom.
Meanwhile, “Half-Pint” isn’t straying far from her husband’s side – or his legal defense. Busfield’s attorney, Larry Stein, did most of the talking during the ABC interview, often speaking in place of Gilbert.
At one point at the end of the interview when Stein was going to answer yet another question from interviewer George Stephanopoulos, Gilbert looked over at the attorney and said, “I’ve got this one.”
For an interview billed as Melissa Gilbert’s chance to speak out, she barely did any of the speaking. Instead, viewers got a front-row seat to her lawyer running his mouth while “Half-Pint” chimed in just enough to remind everyone how sad everyone should feel for her.