Jehovah’s Witnesses Currently Paying $4K a Day to Hide Details of Child Sex Abuse by Leaders
A religious organization has been ordered by to pay $4,000 a day until it releases documents showing its leaders have protected a pedophile for decades.
By Rachel Blevins
TheFreeThoughtProject.com
November 21, 2017
Victims who claim they were told not to speak out about the sexual abuse they endured as children are now sharing their stories, as the religious organization that abused them is paying over $2 million to protect its leaders.
A court in San Diego ordered Jehovah’s Witnesses to pay $4,000 each day for withholding documents that show their leaders were aware that a man with a history of child sex abuse was being promoted within their organization—despite continued allegations against him. The decision was upheld by an appellate court in California this month.
The original lawsuit was filed by Osbaldo Padron, a former Jehovah’s Witness who claimed that he was sexually abused as a child by an adult member in the organization, Gonzalo Campos. According to a report from Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, “Campos confessed to sexually abusing seven children,” but a police report was never filed.
“During that time, leaders at the Jehovah’s Witnesses world headquarters in New York–known as the Watchtower–knew that Campos had abused children, according to court documents. Yet they continued to promote him to higher positions of responsibility in his congregation and took no action to prevent further abuse, the documents show.”
A similar pattern of the organization protecting sexual abusers has also been ongoing in the United Kingdom, according to a report from the BBC. Two women reported that they were raped by family members or by friends of family members, and they were advised not to report their abusers to law enforcement.
“I asked [the organization], ‘what should I do? Do you report it to the police, [or] do I report it to the police’?” Louise Palmer told BBC. “And their words were that they strongly advised me not to go to the police because it would bring reproach on Jehovah.”
The Rest…HERE
