Jehovah’s Witnesses Ordered to Pay $4,000 Daily Over Child Abuse Documents in San Diego, California, Case

A California appeals court last week upheld an order requiring the Jehovah’s Witnesses to pay $4,000 for each day it does not turn over internal documents detailing alleged child sexual abuse. According to the report, the amount now stands at $2 million.

The ruling comes from a case in San Diego, where Osbaldo Padron, a former Jehovah’s Witness, sued the religion for failing to warn congregants that a child abuser was in their midst. Padron says he was sexually abused as a child by an adult member of his congregation, Gonzalo Campos. Campos confessed to sexually abusing seven children.

Court documents allege that leaders at the Jehovah’s Witnesses world headquarters in New York, known as the Watchtower, knew Campos had abused children. The documents show that these leaders continued to promote him to higher positions of responsibility in his congregation and took no action to prevent further abuse, according to the filings.

Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting reviewed multiple cases involving Campos as part of a broader investigation into what it describes as the Watchtower’s institutional cover-up of child sexual abuse in its congregations. According to internal Watchtower documents cited in the report, the organization has instructed congregation leaders, called elders, to keep child abuse secret from law enforcement as a matter of policy since at least 1989. In 1997, the Watchtower sent a letter to all local elders across the United States instructing them to submit a written report about anyone currently or formerly serving in a position of responsibility who was known to have sexually abused a child. Protecting children who cannot protect themselves is the lesson at the heart of these allegations (Proverbs 31:8-9).

Three years ago, Padron sought those documents in court, hoping to show a pattern extending beyond his own case. The report notes that the documents would also provide a roadmap to what are likely thousands of known or accused child molesters in congregations across the country.

The Watchtower argued repeatedly that producing the documents would violate the privacy rights of people named in them, confidentiality privileges between elders and congregants, and the organization’s religious protections under the First Amendment. The court dismissed those arguments, but the Watchtower has not fully turned over the documents. In June, Judge Richard Strauss imposed sanctions of $4,000 a day until the organization complied. The Watchtower appealed.

In upholding Strauss’s order last week, the appellate judges described the Watchtower as a “recalcitrant litigant who refuses to follow valid orders and merely reiterates losing arguments.”

The judges wrote that if the Watchtower again refuses to comply with the court’s order, Strauss would be justified in dismissing the Jehovah’s Witnesses from the case and ruling in favor of Padron. “Indeed, we find Watchtower’s conduct so egregious that if it continues to defy the March 25, 2016 order, terminating sanctions appear to be warranted and necessary,” the judges wrote.

Source: Read the original report