New Whistleblower Site FaithLeaks Releases Confidential Documents About Child Sexual Abuse in Jehovah’s Witnesses Community

[Guest Nicole]

The founders of MormonLeaks, a transparency organization that has released hundreds of controversial documents related to inner-workings of the Mormon Church, recently launched FaithLeaks, an ambitious and far-reaching project that aims to expose corruption and abuse across other religious organizations. Today, the new group has published dozens of pages of documents related to sexual assault allegations within the Jehovah’s Witness Church, documents which are presumably part of a database that church officials have refused to relinquish in an unrelated sexual molestation trial, resulting in a one and a half year legal battle and millions of dollars in fines.

The 69 pages of documents detail how Jehovah’s Witnesses authorities and church officials handled allegations of repeated sexual assault by one of its local leaders. The interviews and detailed notes compiled by church authorities about molestation and rape allegations are horrific. The 33 documents also provide a staggering play-by-play of how the Watchtower Tract and Bible Society—the parent corporation and governing body for the Jehovah’s Witnesses, often simply referred to as “the Watchtower”—handled the case internally over the course of nearly a decade—playing therapist, prosecutor, jury, and judge—and the lengths to which they went to keep these accusations away from the “worldly court of law.”

The documents show that in 1999, a committee of Jehovah’s Witnesses elders found allegations from two women that their father had sexually abused them to be credible, yet held off on forming an internal judicial committee to take their own form of judicial action against the alleged abuser because one of the daughters was not willing to face the father and formally make the accusations against him, as judicial committee policy requires. Once she went through with the process years later, a spiritually guided trial was held and he was disfellowshipped. However, a year later he was reinstated. The documents show that Jehovah’s Witnesses leaders cast shade on one accuser and her husband for trying to take this matter to secular law enforcement.

Read more: https://gizmodo.com/new-whistleblower-site-faithleaks-releases-confidential-1821799936

[Guest Nicole]

https://faithleaks.org/newsroom/2018/01/09/faithleaks-releases-documents-surrounding-sexual-abuse-investigation-in-jehovahs-witness-congregation/

[Guest Nicole]

SECRET DOCUMENTS REVEAL SEX ABUSE SCANDAL IN JEHOVAH’S WITNESSES CHURCH

Thirty-three letters and internal documents, leaked Tuesday by the transparency organization FaithLeaks, expose a series of sexual abuse accusations against a member of the Jehovah’s Witnesses church and the efforts the church made to cover up the scandal and keep it from the “worldly court of law.”

The documents, written between 1999 and 2012, are communications between church leaders and the church’s legal entities, a group referred to collectively as Watchtower. They detail accusations of sexual abuse from three separate accusers.

In 1999, a committee of church elders determined that the allegations of two young women who said their father had sexually abused them were true. One of the young women said she had been tied to a bed by her father and had her vagina examined for signs of masturbation when she was as young as five. The accuser’s sister also said her father had started to “fondle and touch” her when she was only three years old. The woman also said she was repeatedly raped by her father between the ages of eight and 12. The young woman said her father would sit on her bed and cry and pray after raping her.

“Our impression upon speaking with both girls was similar. That they are both quite rational. It certainly appears that these were real events,” the letter to Watchtower,signed “with warm Christian love” from the Palmer Congregation of Jehovah’s Witnesses of Brimfield, Massachusetts, reads.

Read more: http://www.newsweek.com/secret-documents-sex-scandal-jehovahs-witnesses-church-faith-leaks-776796

[JW Insider]

Just read these through. It took 2 hours to do them justice. Sometimes you get angry and hope it's righteous indignation. But it is easy, even through emotion, to see that much of what transpired with the victims should be expected if not inevitable. Both daughters were both accusers of their father. And another young girl in his congregation also made another accusation of sexual abuse. The fact that the accusers both remained as sisters, married, one even serving with her husband at Brooklyn Bethel, and the other one married and continuing to serve as a pioneer, makes the case even more interesting when dealing with issues of credibility, reluctance to come forward, congregational privileges, etc.

There were many disturbing elements to the correspondence. One was the cold, dismissive way in which almost nothing could be done, for years, until both of the rape/abuse victims were able to meet face-to-face with their rapist father. (Yes, I'm taking the side of the girls and the elders who met with both of them, not the father and perhaps a circuit overseer who seems to take his side.) There seemed to be almost a sense that there must be a scripture somewhere that a land-line telephone can also count as "face-to-face" meeting, but nothing less can count. (Later, of course, [2004] even a phone "face-to-face" was questioned as inadequate if the elders didn't get a chance to ask their own questions.) For years, the father makes the most of the inability of the daughters to prove their accusations, although they had thought about recording the audio from their abuse on a hidden cassette recorder under the bed, but I can't tell for sure what might have happened to the referenced tape, or if it ever existed, or worked.

Still one of the most disturbing aspects with respect to the judicial handling of such cases is the idea that comes through from the viewpoint in a letter from the elders, and which pops up again in the correspondence. It helps explain why this has been such a pervasive problem in Witness sexual-abuse cases all over the world.

Letter from body of elders in a Windsor, CT congregation to body of elders in Ware, MA congregation. [9/23/04]

• "We have had some concerns regarding [the rape victim's] seeming obsession in filing charges against [her rapist father] from the start of the long ongoing investigation into this matter."

But I see a kernel of this same type of thinking, pop up several times in the correspondence, and even when one reads between the lines of the Society's correspondence, too:

CCoJW [WTBTS/Patterson] to the Accused [8/18/05]

• ". . . her only option was to report this to the elders. . . . It is regrettable that [victims] discussed these accusations with others who were not in a position to address these charges in harmony with our theocratic arrangements."

There were places that showed just how regrettable it was that the victims, for so long, discussed these accusations ONLY with those who were in a position to address them in harmony with our theocratic arrangements. Much of what the elders and the WTS did here, was handled evidently with best intentions, but you can see so many times where early age-appropriate training of young persons from professionals and intervention/investigation from professionals would have had much better effect that "theocratic arrangements" alone. A father-daughter(s) rape/incest case is the worst of all worlds from the standpoint of preparing the very young and vulnerable, but professionals are making progress here too. As a school principal, now retired, my wife has had occasion to be impressed with the methods used by CPS, psychologists, and Police investigators into such issues. Of course, being professionally trained is not just for non-Witnesses. (In the leaked correspondence, one of the victims was, at a much later time, seeing a JW professional as a counselor.)

Even the accused was evidently able to "score points" by claiming that the accusations against him brought reproach on the organization.

The unprofessional methods of trying to find holes in the victim's story was just the kind amateur behavior to expect from elders who are not trained in these matters, and who, deep down, wish that accusations, especially against brothers who serve as elders or m.s., would just go away due to the reproach issues. If they don't go away, at least they should be handled internally, as far as possible. But they did their investigation under the limitations of their experience, their training, and the imposed limitations of the theocratic arrangement. One of the most poignant moments is when elders seek out the sister at Bethel to help verify the accusations from her sister who is a pioneer in her congregation. The Bethelite sister is very reluctant to speak, but when the elders convince her that she should speak up, she finally tells her own story, at the hands of her rapist father, which is as bad or even worse than the experience of her own sister.