How to Deal With Elderly Family Members Jehovah's Witness
A Secret Database of Child Abuse
A erstwhile Jehovah's Witness is using stolen documents to expose allegations that the religion has kept subconscious for decades.
Updated at 12:25 p.m. ET on Apr v, 2019.
In March 1997, the Watchtower Bible and Tract Guild, the nonprofit organization that oversees the Jehovah's Witnesses, sent a letter of the alphabet to each of its 10,883 U.S. congregations, and to many more congregations worldwide. The organization was concerned nearly the legal risk posed past possible child molesters inside its ranks. The alphabetic character laid out instructions on how to deal with a known predator: Write a detailed report answering 12 questions—Was this a onetime occurrence, or did the accused have a history of child molestation? How is the defendant viewed inside the customs? Does anyone else know almost the corruption?—and mail it to Watchtower'due south headquarters in a special blue envelope. Keep a copy of the study in your congregation'south confidential file, the instructions continued, and do not share it with anyone.
Thus did the Jehovah's Witnesses build what might be the world'south largest database of undocumented child molesters: at least two decades' worth of names and addresses—likely numbering in the tens of thousands—and detailed acts of alleged abuse, most of which have never been shared with police force enforcement, all scanned and searchable in a Microsoft SharePoint file. In contempo decades, much of the globe's attention to allegations of corruption has focused on the Catholic Church and other religious groups. Less notice has been paid to the corruption amongst the Jehovah'southward Witnesses, a Christian sect with more than 8.5 meg members. Notwithstanding all this time, Watchtower has refused to comply with multiple court orders to release the data contained in its database and has paid millions of dollars over the years to go along it surreptitious, even from the survivors whose stories are contained within.
That effort has been remarkably successful—until recently.
A white Priority Post box filled with manila envelopes sits on the floor of Marker O'Donnell's wood-paneled abode office, on the outskirts of Baltimore, Maryland. Marking, 51, is the owner of an practice-equipment repair business and a longtime Jehovah's Witness who quietly left the organized religion in late 2013. Soon after, he became known to ex–Jehovah's Witnesses every bit John Redwood, an activist and a blogger who reports on the various controversies, including cases of child abuse, surrounding Watchtower. (Recently, he has begun using his own proper noun.)
When I kickoff met Marker, in May of terminal year, he appeared at the forepart door of his modest home in the aforementioned outfit he almost always wears: khaki cargo shorts, a short-sleeved shirt, white sneakers, and sweat socks pulled upwards over his calves. He invited me into his densely furnished office, where a fan barely dispelled the wafting smell of cat food. He pulled an envelope from the Priority Mail service box and passed me its contents, a mixture of typed and handwritten letters discussing various sins allegedly committed by members of a Jehovah'due south Witness congregation in Massachusetts. All the letters in the box had been stolen past an anonymous source inside the organized religion and shared with Mark. The sins described in the letters ranged from the mundane—smoking pot, marital infidelity, drunkenness—to the horrifying. Slowly, over the past couple of years, Mark has been leaking the most damning contents of the box, much of which is still clandestine.
Marker's eyebrows are permanently biconvex, and when he makes an important point, he peers out in a higher place his rimless glasses, eyes widened, which lends him a conspiratorial air.
"Starting time with these," he said.
Among the papers Marking showed me that mean solar day was a series of letters most a man from Springfield, Massachusetts, who had been disfellowshipped—a grade of excommunication—three times. When the man was once again reinstated, in 2008, someone working in a division of Watchtower wrote to his congregation, noting that in 1989 he was said to accept "allowed his 11-year-old stepdaughter to touch his penis … on at least two occasions."
I was struck by the oddness of the language. It insinuated that the man had agreed to, rather than initiated, the sexual contact with his stepdaughter.
Subsequently I left Mark's business firm, I tracked downwardly the stepdaughter, now xl. In fact, she told me, she had been only 8 when her stepfather had molested her. "He was the adult and I was the kid, and then I thought I didn't have any choice," she said. She was terrified, she told me. "Information technology took me two years to go to my mom about information technology."
Her female parent immediately went to the congregation's elders, who later called the girl and her stepfather in to pray with them. She remembers information technology as a humiliating feel.
Her stepfather was eventually disfellowshipped for instances that involved "fornication," "drunkenness," and "lying," according to the letters. But according to the stepdaughter, his alleged molestation of her resulted only in his being "privately reproved," a closed-door reprimand that is usually accompanied by a temporary loss of privileges, such equally non beingness allowed to offer comments during Bible written report or atomic number 82 a prayer. The letters brand no reference to police existence notified; the stepdaughter said her mother was encouraged to continue the thing private, and no attempt was fabricated to keep the stepfather abroad from other children. (Calls to the congregation'southward Kingdom Hall—the Witness version of a church—for comment went unanswered.)
By the time the letters were written, the homo was attention a different congregation and had married another woman with children; he is yet role of that family today. Near the end of the last letter in Mark'south possession is a question: "Is at that place whatsoever responsibility on the role of either trunk of elders … to inform his electric current married woman of his past history of child molestation?"
Marking O'Donnell'south childhood was an isolated one. His parents, Jerry and Susan, had started attending Jehovah's Witness meetings in the mid-1960s. Some other couple from Baltimore had told them of Watchtower'due south prediction that the world would cease in 1975, bringing death to all not-Witnesses and transforming Earth into a paradise for the faithful. In 1968, just later on Marker was built-in, Jerry and Susan were group-baptized in a swimming puddle in Washington, D.C. Mark was an but kid, and he inherited his father's peculiar dearest of record-keeping. Marking would show upward to meetings at the Kingdom Hall with a briefcase full of religious texts.
As in any religion, there's some variation among Jehovah'due south Witnesses in how strictly they translate the teachings that govern their religion; Mark's upbringing seems to accept been especially stringent. Equally a child, he attended at least five meetings a week, plus several hours of individual Bible study. On Sat mornings, he joined his parents in "field service," knocking on doors in search of converts. He was taught that well-nigh people outside the organization were corrupted past Satan and, given the chance, would try to steal from him, drug him, or rape him. Mainstream books and magazines were considered the work of Satan. If he broke any of the religion's chief rules, he could be disfellowshipped, meaning even his own family unit would have to shun him.
Throughout Mark'south childhood, he heard elders cite Proverbs thirteen:24: "Whoever holds dorsum his rod hates his son." Marking's parents took the lesson to heart and beat him frequently. The faith forbids celebrating birthdays, voting, serving in the military machine, and accepting blood transfusions, fifty-fifty in life-and-death situations. Witnesses were encouraged to devote themselves to bringing more converts into the religion earlier the end of the world arrived. "Reports are heard of brothers selling their homes and property" to spend their last days proselytizing, said a Watchtower publication in 1974. "Certainly this is a fine way to spend the short time remaining earlier the wicked earth'south terminate." Some Witnesses stopped going to the doctor, quit their jobs, or ran up debt.
But piety, Mark noticed, did not always translate to morality. When he was 12, Marking became suspicious of a local Witness named Louis Ongsingco, a flight attendant who would bring home Toblerone bars for the local Witness kids and invite them to his flat to act out religious plays. Mark noticed Ongsingco touching young girls in a way that made him uncomfortable. He told an elder about his concerns. Just rather than take activity against Ongsingco, the elderberry told him what Mark had said. Days after, Ongsingco pulled Marker aside and scolded him.
Mark's instincts seem to take been right. In 2001, i of Mark's childhood friends, Erin Michelle Shifflett, forth with four other women, sued Ongsingco for sexual set on. The cases were settled out of court for an undisclosed sum. Ongsingco died in 2016.
To Marker, the lesson was that for all the accent the elders placed on moral purity, there was no greater sin than speaking out confronting other Witnesses.
By the time Marker was in loftier school, in the early 1980s, 1975 had come and gone, but Watchtower had a new prediction for the apocalypse. Information technology said that the world would terminate before the passing of the generation that was alive in 1914. At the time, the youngest members of that generation were 70, then the new prediction created a sense of urgency.
"My parents basically told me, 'You lot're not even going to alive to graduate from college,'" Mark said. At 17, despite having a year of college credit and a guidance counselor imploring him to apply, he decided to settle for a high-school diploma. He was baptized and after started his practice-equipment repair company. The business organisation provided enough flexibility for him to perform fifty hours of field service for the Witnesses a month, which qualified him for the rank of auxiliary pioneer.
Though many Witnesses left the organized religion later 1975, membership was on the upswing past the 1990s, and the organization was building new Kingdom Halls. Mark was installing a audio system in a new hall in Baltimore in the autumn of 1997 when a young adult female named Kimmy Weber asked to borrow his ladder.
At xx, Kimmy was putting in more than than 90 hours of field service a month, making her a full-fledged pioneer. She had completed a two-year program at a customs college on a scholarship, and would later become permission from the local elders to go her bachelor's degree. Mark was drawn to her drive and intensity. He tracked down her email address; they flirted over AOL Instant Messenger and were married within eight months. They wanted to offset a family, but decided to wait until after the arrival of paradise on Earth, when they, and their children, would be perfect. In the meantime, Kimmy began opening their home to abused and abandoned cats.
Every bit Mark's business organisation grew, he brought on employees, generally other Witnesses. When he and Kimmy had saved enough coin to buy the firm beyond the street as a rental property, they filled its three units with other Witnesses. At that place were ski vacations, softball games, dinner parties, and game nights—always with friends who shared their faith.
But as much every bit Mark enjoyed his friends' company, he started to chafe at the insularity of their social life. It felt less like intimacy and more like a self-imposed bubble. These frustrations eventually grew into suspicions about Watchtower itself. He'd heard rumors that the organization was covering up cases of pedophilia and child abuse. But Watchtower always dismissed such criticism as "backslider-driven lies."
A few years after he and Kimmy married, he saw a protester outside a Witness convention property a sign that read A JW Elder Molested Me. "I looked at that sign," Mark told me, "and I locked it in my encephalon. I'll never forget information technology. I said to myself, In that location's no way he'south lying. Nobody would stand out there and hold a sign that says An Elder Molested Me unless information technology really happened. No way. He's telling the truth."
Watchtower adjusted its estimates for the apocalypse several more times. In 2010, it introduced the Overlapping Generations theory, which claims that the cease volition come up before the death of everyone who was alive at the same time as anyone who was alive in 1914. Marker found these revised predictions difficult to take.
In tardily 2013, Mark had an extreme reaction to an antibiotic and was confined to his burrow for several weeks, abroad from the meetings and Bible studies. Left alone with his thoughts, he began to admit to himself that he no longer believed Armageddon was imminent. The Jehovah's Witnesses he knew were no more than deserving of God'south mercy than the nonbelievers he'd met. And here he was, 45 years old and facing a health crisis. How much more of his life was he willing to waste inside the bubble?
That Nov, as he and Kimmy were preparing to spend the weekend at a friend'due south business firm, Mark of a sudden stopped packing and told Kimmy he couldn't maintain the facade anymore. He never attended another meeting.
Though Kimmy kept going to meetings, her Witness friends pressured her to leave her marriage. "They would only come out of the blue with unsolicited advice," she told me. "'Don't forget, Kimmy, Jehovah comes first!' 'At some point, you'll take to brand your choice!'" But she didn't want to leave Marker. "I just tried to figure out, how can I stay a Witness and him not?"
Mark'southward doctor had suggested that he accept daily walks every bit office of his recovery. Kimmy already had a routine of evening strolls, and he began to bring together her. Mark told Kimmy that he'd once planned to be an engineer, and that he felt he'd been forced to choose between God and his appetite. Kimmy said she'd once dreamed of becoming a doctor or a veterinarian. She revealed that she'd always been terrified that having kissed Mark before they were married meant she might die at Armageddon. She told Mark she feared that, at 36, she'd missed her risk to have children.
Their walks got longer, eventually reaching 8 or 10 miles a nighttime. "She was trying to become into my head, to effigy out what was going on," Marker told me. By this point, he'd given himself permission to delve into so-called apostate textile, books such equally Crisis of Conscience, a 1983 exposé written by a former fellow member of the Jehovah's Witnesses Governing Torso. He as well started watching YouTube videos past Lloyd Evans, a former British elderberry who has amassed a dedicated following with his anti-Watchtower arguments. A Witness tin can exist disfellowshipped for sharing such fabric, then Mark didn't tell Kimmy.
Instead, he shared minor pieces of data to claiming what Kimmy had been taught, such as the truth virtually the 1975 doomsday prediction. Kimmy had grown up believing that overzealous Witnesses, non Watchtower, had chosen that appointment. But Marking, who rarely threw away annihilation, encouraged her to read the Watchtower articles exhorting members of the organized religion to sell their homes. Kimmy began to entertain the kind of doubts she'd been trained to ignore. "But I think the big trigger for her," Mark said, "was when I mentioned Candace Conti."
Candace Conti, now 33, was raised as a Jehovah'south Witness in Fremont, California. When she was 9, the elders in her congregation paired her with a man named Jonathan Kendrick for Sat-morning field service. Instead of going door-to-door to preach the word of God, Kendrick would take Conti to his firm and molest her, she says. She estimates this went on for about ii years.
Years later, later Conti had left the Witnesses, she discovered Kendrick'southward name on the federal sexual activity-offender registry. When she went dorsum to the elders in her sometime congregation to tell them nigh the abuse, she was rebuffed past something called the two-witness rule.
Rooted in Deuteronomy xix:15—"No single witness may convict another for whatever error or any sin that he may commit"—the 2-witness dominion states that, disallowment a confession, no member of the organisation can be officially defendant of committing a sin without two credible eyewitnesses who are willing to corroborate the accusation. Critics say this rule has helped turn Witness communities into havens for child molesters, who rarely commit crimes in the presence of bystanders.
The elders told Conti that without a second witness to the molestation, there was nothing they could practise. (When reached for comment, Watchtower's Office of Public Information said, "Our policies on child protection comply with the constabulary, including any requirements for elders to report allegations of child abuse to authorities." Watchtower declined to comment on specific cases out of respect for the privacy of all involved.)
Conti asked the elders to consider a programme she had devised for tracking child molesters inside the organization. When they refused, she sued Watchtower, her sometime congregation, and Kendrick. During depositions, the elders admitted that they'd long known Kendrick had a history of child molestation—they knew before they paired him with Conti for door-to-door ministry, and before they rejected her story about the abuse. In 2012, a jury awarded Conti $28 million, believed to be the largest jury verdict ever for a single victim in a kid-abuse case against a religious organisation. (On entreatment, judges reduced the damages to less than $three 1000000. Kendrick has ever denied Conti's allegations.)
Others had come forward with accusations against Watchtower earlier, only Conti refused to take a settlement, and the trial, with its blockbuster budgetary honor, became a major news story. In the years since, Watchtower has faced dozens of like lawsuits from victims who say the system's policies enabled and protected their abusers. In add-on to the 1997 "special blue envelope" letter of the alphabet, these suits have cited a 1989 letter in which Watchtower discouraged elders from reporting wrongdoing to civil authorities. "There is 'a time to keep repose,' when 'your words should show to be few' (Ecclesiastes 3:7; 5:2)," it read. "Improper employ of the tongue past an elder tin can result in serious legal bug for the individual, the congregation, and even the Order."
It was one such lawsuit that brought attention to the database.
José Lopez was seven years old when he was molested by Gonzalo Campos, a boyfriend Witness whom the local elders had recommended every bit a mentor, despite knowing that Campos allegedly had a history of molesting young boys. When Campos assaulted Lopez in a La Jolla, California, abode in 1986, the boy told his female parent, who immediately reported Campos to the elders. They said they would handle the situation, and told her not to call the police force. Yet Campos continued to rise in the organization, eventually becoming an elder. In 2010, he fled to Mexico, where he after confessed in a deposition to molesting Lopez and several other young boys.
Lopez filed a lawsuit confronting Watchtower in 2012. When his lawyer, Irwin Zalkin, requested that Watchtower turn over all documents related to Campos and other known molesters, the organization at get-go refused, saying it lacked the resource to locate and sort all the information. But a senior official for Watchtower later testified that all the data had, in fact, been scanned and stored in a Microsoft SharePoint database.
Zalkin introduced a software adept who testified that Watchtower should exist able to produce the documents in as footling as two days using unproblematic search terms. Still, Watchtower did not comply. The judge grew frustrated and eventually barred the organization from mounting a defence, and handed Lopez a $13.5 million award. (An appellate court overturned the ruling, proverb the estimate should have sanctioned Watchtower incrementally; the case was settled for an undisclosed sum in January 2018.)
When Zalkin raised the issue of the database in another instance against Campos, in 2016, the approximate ordered Watchtower to pay a fine of $iv,000 a day until information technology handed over the documents. Watchtower racked up $2 million in charges before settling the case in February 2018.* Zalkin has again requested the release of the database documents in another California case he's brought on behalf of a quondam Witness.
Exactly how many alleged pedophiles are named in the database has been the source of broad-ranging speculation. In 2002, i former elder said the number was 23,720. (Watchtower would not comment on the number at the fourth dimension except to say that it was considerably lower.) During the Lopez trial, a Watchtower attorney estimated that the organization had received 775 blue envelopes from 1997 to 2001, but did non say how many it had received since then. Peradventure most tellingly, in 2015, an Australian investigation institute that the perpetrators listed in the database represented 1.five percentage of that country'southward Witness population of 68,000. Assuming the percent is comparable in the U.S., which has a Witness population of i.two one thousand thousand, the number of declared American abusers in the database would be 18,000.
U.Southward. regime have so far taken no action against Watchtower, simply other countries accept launched investigations. In 2016, a royal committee in Australia found that Watchtower demonstrated a "serious failure" to protect children, including not reporting more than ane,000 alleged perpetrators of sexual abuse (more half of whom take confessed to committing the abuse) and at to the lowest degree 1,800 victims in that country since 1950. In 2014, the U.K.'s Charity Commission opened two investigations, one of which is ongoing. Last yr, in the Netherlands, so–Justice Minister Sander Dekker urged Watchtower to carry an independent investigation into hundreds of abuse allegations received via a special hotline. Watchtower declined.
Past the time Marking told Kimmy about the Conti trial, in August 2014, she was starting to see things differently, also—enough that she decided to read the trial transcript. "It was like someone just punched me in the stomach," she told me. "It was like this whole crack happened in my head."
Mark knew that Kimmy had suffered concrete and psychological abuse at the hands of her female parent, who was mentally ill, but Kimmy didn't talk about it much. Now she began to open up. She told Mark near how her female parent would lock her and her two siblings in their bedrooms or the basement for days with no nutrient and only a litter box for a toilet. How she would keep them up all night by banging on pots and pans, then send them to school delirious and malnourished. She was also physically abusive toward Kimmy's father, who worked long hours and was largely unaware of how his married woman was treating their children. "She would vanquish us every which fashion y'all tin imagine. Scream at us, cuss at u.s. for hours and hours and hours," Kimmy said. There was sexual abuse, as well, which Mark hadn't known about. (My attempts to contact Kimmy's female parent for comment were not successful.)
Like many abusers, Kimmy's female parent used animal cruelty to keep her kids from telling anyone. She would drown kittens in the toilet, and then hang the corpses from a ceiling fan in their bedrooms or place them in a jar past their bed, "making the point that she could kill us if we didn't cooperate or nosotros told," Kimmy said. "That's why I'thousand ever trying to rescue cats," she added, laughing darkly. "That'south some easy psychology in that location."
But Kimmy did tell. As a 12-year-old, she went to the elders in her congregation for assist. They told her she couldn't study her mother to the police, "because information technology would make the arrangement await bad," she recalled. They discouraged her from seeking counseling, because a therapist might blame the faith or become the authorities involved. Finally, the elders asked Kimmy a question: If her mother did end upward killing her, could that forestall Jehovah from resurrecting her at Armageddon? "Of class, I said no," Kimmy said, rolling her eyes. "They told me, 'Go home and obey your female parent.'"
She told once more at 15, after she'd been baptized. This time, the elders said they would need a second eyewitness earlier they could intervene. Kimmy offered her brother—who has corroborated Kimmy's allegations for this story—merely was told that his testimony wouldn't be apparent, because he wasn't baptized. "It was my give-and-take against my mother'south discussion," Kimmy said. Years later on, she would acquire that her brother had already reported the abuse to the same elders.
Kimmy had heard of the two-witness rule, but she'd assumed it was a peculiarity of her local congregation. When she read the transcript of the Conti trial, she discovered that it was Watchtower doctrine and had been used for decades to forestall other driveling children from getting help. "The scales fell off my eyes," she said. Soon, both she and Mark would exit the organization for practiced.
Over the next couple of years, the implications of Kimmy and Mark's conclusion became credible.
1 of Mark's employees quit. Two of the couple'due south tenants moved out in the middle of the night. Shut friends stared at their feet when Kimmy ran into them at Walmart. "I went and hid three rows downwardly and cried," she told me. Marking'south human relationship with his parents, e'er strained, disintegrated. His business faltered. He and Kimmy had some savings to fall dorsum on and would notice other tenants. But in his mid-40s, with no college degree or résumé, Marker faced an uncertain future.
On a lark, he emailed Lloyd Evans, the British activist with the YouTube videos. Mark told Evans his story and thanked him for the work he was doing. To his surprise, Evans wrote dorsum, suggesting some online ex-Witness groups he should bring together. Still wary of existence labeled an apostate (neither he nor Kimmy had been officially disfellowshipped, though they'd stopped attending meetings), Mark joined Facebook under the pseudonym John Redwood—an homage to Evans, whose pen name was John Cedars—and began finding others with like stories. Every bit he connected with ex-Witnesses around the world, he was struck by how similar their accounts were to his ain. He began writing about his experiences on Facebook. His posts spurred conversations among former Witnesses, giving him a new sense of purpose.
In the summer of 2015, the ex-Witness customs was transfixed by Commonwealth of australia's royal-commission hearings, live-streamed online, into sexual abuse in religious organizations. The commission had been trying to go testimony from a member of Watchtower'south Governing Torso—the organization's all-male person ruling council, which then consisted of eight men. By a strange twist of fate, 1 member, Geoffrey Jackson, was in Australia at the time, disposed to his sick begetter.
Watchtower had managed to avoid a subpoena by claiming that the Governing Body was strictly informational and played no role in creating policy. Mark—who had obsessively collected Watchtower literature his entire life—had the evidence to show this wasn't true. He dug out a copy of the "Co-operative Organisation Manual," an obscure document explaining all the functions of the Governing Torso, and emailed information technology to Angus Stewart, the lead litigator in the proceedings. Stewart used the manual to amendment Jackson.
In forepart of the committee, Jackson became the first active member of Watchtower'south Governing Trunk to acknowledge that "child abuse is a problem right throughout the community." He also admitted that in most cases, children who make such charges confronting Watchtower are telling the truth.
It was an emotional moment for those whose abuse Watchtower had denied. Mark received an email from Stewart proverb that the "Branch Organisation Manual" had proved to be crucial in securing Jackson's testimony. Possibly, Mark thought, his all-encompassing collection of Watchtower ephemera and his encyclopedic knowledge of the organized religion could be used for something other than recruiting.
Withal using his John Redwood pseudonym, Mark became a regular contributor to Evans's anti-Watchtower news site, JWsurvey.org. Trey Bundy, who has covered Watchtower's sexual practice-abuse scandals for the Center for Investigative Reporting, invited Mark to speak at a 2017 briefing on the topic in London that also featured Zalkin, the attorney, and Michael Rezendes, the Boston Globe reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize with his co-workers for their investigation of sexual corruption in the Catholic Church. The conference marked the offset fourth dimension that Mark used his real proper noun as an activist, figuring the Witnesses he knew in Baltimore were unlikely to hear about the small overseas gathering.
Marking too used JWsurvey, where he connected writing under his pseudonym, to encourage Witnesses to expose Watchtower'due south abuses—a call that has yielded hundreds of emails. "He just comes off every bit so sincere and knowledgeable and clear," says Faith McGinn, a former Witness and an abuse survivor who reached out to Mark terminal April. "That's what prompted me to finally come forward." Mark has built an international network of abused, disfellowshipped, and aggrieved Witnesses, whom he has connected to journalists, attorneys, and one another. "Mark is probably the central ex-JW in the ex-JW community," says Jason Wynne, the founder of AvoidJW.org.
A Jehovah's Witness who has started doubting the faith's tenets merely not yet left the organization is said to exist "physically in, mentally out," or PIMO. In 2017, a PIMO human being and his girlfriend began walking into Kingdom Halls in Massachusetts, opening locked file cabinets with a set of stolen keys, and removing or making copies of sealed documents. They had heard churr about Watchtower covering up child abuse and, at kickoff, simply wanted to see the evidence themselves.
Most of the documents they took were messages between local elders and Watchtower headquarters, or from one congregation to another, discussing the alleged sins of private congregants. One young man was disfellowshipped for stealing candy bars, another for refusing to remove a sign from his van window that said beating children violates God's police. A woman was disfellowshipped for having sex with her ex-husband when he came over to plow her driveway during a snowstorm.
Merely they as well gathered dozens of letters dealing with accusations of rape, domestic violence, and molestation, including several questionnaires required by the 1997 "special blue envelope" letter. In total, 12 individuals are named as suspected child molesters, though missing documents make information technology hard to piece together some of the stories.
Not knowing what to practise with the documents, the PIMO man—who has requested anonymity and prefers the code name Judas—posted a redacted version of a single letter he had stolen on an ex–Jehovah'south Witnesses subreddit. Merely five sentences long, the letter informed Watchtower that a ministerial retainer had admitted to physically and mentally abusing his wife for years. In the most recent incident, he crush her and then badly that she would have sought medical attending, "if it were not for her business organisation over the reproach it would bring on Jehovah's proper noun." As penalisation, the husband had been stripped of his rank and had lost all "special privileges," like handling the microphone at Kingdom Hall meetings. No mention was made of involving police or taking steps to protect the wife. Judas had blacked out the names of the couple and the congregation, but not the date.
"It was just one unproblematic letter that shocked me," Judas told me. "I wanted to see if this would get anyone's eyes who is really important and could tell me what I should do with this information." His plan worked. Jason Wynne saw the letter of the alphabet and sent Judas a private message, alarm him that he could be exposing himself and others to legal problem or harassment past posting sensitive documents online. Judas replied, asking for communication on how to release his other documents.
At Wynne's asking, Mark reached out to Judas with a plan to release the information while still protecting his identity. Judas went to a distant post part and mailed him the documents in a USPS Priority Postal service box with no return address. He besides used secure channels to send scanned copies to Mark and Wynne. Though they wanted to somewhen leak redacted versions of every document involving a criminal deed, they decided to start with one big story: the case of a Witness human from the Palmer Congregation in Brimfield, Massachusetts, who allegedly abused his 2 daughters and another young girl.
The story plays out across 33 letters—69 pages in all—between the congregation and Watchtower headquarters. One of the man'due south daughters said he had tied her down and molested her; the other said he had raped her repeatedly for nine years. He allegedly took i of his daughters into the woods and showed her where he would bury each of her body parts if she told. The girl who wasn't his girl said he raped her in his neighbour's mobile dwelling when she was 4.
At starting time, the elders took just nominal action considering one of the sisters refused to accuse her father in person. In 2003, the elders finally disfellowshipped the human being later on he confessed to molesting 1 daughter. Merely he was reinstated a twelvemonth after, partly because the daughter who had accused him of years of rape refused to answer new questions from the elders, who expressed disapproval in the letters that she and her hubby had alerted ceremonious regime.**
Mark and Wynne, nervous about trafficking in stolen documents, wanted to create some other layer of protection for Judas and themselves. And then Wynne approached Ryan McKnight, the proprietor of MormonLeaks.io, a site dedicated to transparency in the Mormon Church. They shared the Palmer documents with McKnight, who used them equally the inaugural posts for a new site, FaithLeaks.org, and worked with a reporter from Gizmodo to independently confirm the story. Mark and Wynne never shared any details almost Judas'south identity with McKnight, then that he could honestly say he didn't know who had stolen the letters.
On January 9, 2018, the documents went live on FaithLeaks, and Gizmodo published its story. Other American outlets picked it up—as did media in the U.Grand., Finland, Spain, Lebanon, Hungary, Republic of chile, and Bolivia. (The Palmer Congregation has never made whatsoever public comment on the corruption or camouflage allegations, and didn't return a comment asking for this story.)
A month later the documents appeared online, McKnight received an e-mail from an officer with the Brimfield Law Department; the Palmer Congregation had reported the theft of its documents, and wanted the perpetrator brought to justice. The officer asked McKnight almost the source of the letters he had published, but McKnight had no information to give.
The officer also asked whether McKnight could connect him with one of the victims, whose case appeared to autumn within Massachusetts's statute of limitations. McKnight reached out to the victim to let her know that the police were interested in talking with her. In August, I spoke with the law officeholder who had contacted McKnight, and a spokesperson for the Hampden County commune chaser, whose jurisdiction includes Brimfield. Both told me that their offices continue to assemble information on the Palmer case, but they could neither ostend nor deny that an investigation into the alleged abuser had been opened. An investigation into the theft of the Watchtower documents is ongoing.
Six months after the leaks went public, Mark received a call from his mother, whom he hadn't spoken with in more than than a year. His father had been diagnosed with esophageal cancer, and his treatment wasn't going well. She needed help, she said, though she didn't expect much from her son.
Mark felt hurt, not only by his mother's low opinion of him, just also that nobody from his old congregation had bothered to tell him about his dad. He and Kimmy immediately became involved in his parents' lives, doing their grocery shopping, driving his father to radiation treatments, and managing his care. They mostly avoided talking about faith with Mark's parents; to lift their spirits, Kimmy even gave them 1 of her favorite cats. For the commencement time in his developed life, Marker grew shut to his parents, and Kimmy became a daughter to them.
In Jan 2019, Mark'south begetter died. 3 weeks later, on a Sat afternoon, Marker was once over again sitting in the Baltimore Kingdom Hall he'd attended as a kid. Though he and Kimmy had—to their great surprise—all the same not been disfellowshipped, they did non know what to expect. Both had become song Watchtower critics online and no longer bothered to hide their identities. Still, there is an unwritten dominion among Witnesses that funerals are a no-shun zone. They were mostly greeted warmly, and both were glad to run into some erstwhile friends. The elderberry giving the eulogy spoke of Jerry O'Donnell's ever-present smile and his endearing habit of obsessive record-keeping.
Tardily that dark, driving back to Mark'south house, I asked him about the state of the Judas documents, a field of study he had put off discussing with me during his father's illness. He said he planned to send the documents describing serious crimes to the relevant local authorities. And he was excited about more documents he expected to receive soon.
I asked him almost a picture that had been on display at the funeral, a faded Polaroid showing a large group of people wading into an aboveground pool in a large, empty parking lot. He laughed. That was a moving picture of his parents' baptism, in the parking lot of a stadium in Washington, D.C. In one case again, he told me almost how his parents became Jehovah's Witnesses subsequently a local couple told them the cease of the world was coming. This time, though, he told the story with a tone of forgiveness I hadn't heard before. "You accept to remember," he said, "they were talked into this, also."
* This article originally stated that Watchtower paid a $two million fine. Though the organization did incur that fine, information technology did not brand a split up payment of $two million to the courtroom once the case was settled.
** This article originally implied that, equally a result of existence pressured by the elders, the daughter had not contacted civil regime.
Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2019/03/the-secret-jehovahs-witness-database-of-child-molesters/584311/
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