In March 1997, the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, the nonprofit company overseeing the Jehovah’s Witnesses, despatched a letter to every 10,883 U.S. Congregations and many extra congregations worldwide. The corporation turned worried about the legal threat posed by possible baby molesters within its ranks. The letter laid out instructions on how to cope with a recognized predator: Write a detailed file answering 12 questions—Was this a one-time incidence, or did the accused have a record of baby molestation? How is the accused regarded inside the community? Do all people else know approximately the abuse?—and mail it to Watchtower’s headquarters in a special blue envelope. Please keep a copy of the file for your congregation’s confidential record; the instructions continued, and do now not percentage it to all of us. Thus did the Jehovah’s Witnesses construct what is probably the arena’s biggest database of undocumented child molesters: at least two a long time worth of names and addresses—probable numbering inside the tens of thousands—and exact acts of alleged abuse, most of which have by no means been shared with law enforcement, all scanned and searchable in a Microsoft SharePoint report. For a long time, the world’s interest in abuse allegations has focused on the Catholic Church and different spiritual agencies. Less be aware has been paid to the abuse of some of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, a Christian sect with more than eight.5 million participants.
Yet, instead of following multiple court docket orders to release the statistics in its database, Watchtower has paid hundreds of thousands to keep it secret, even from the survivors whose testimonies are included inside. That attempt has been remarkably successful—till recently.
A white Priority Mail field packed with manila envelopes sits on the floor of Mark O’Donnell’s wood-paneled domestic office on the outskirts of Baltimore, Maryland. Mark, fifty-one, owns an exercise-device restore commercial enterprise and is a longtime Jehovah’s Witness who quietly left the faith in overdue 2013. Soon after, he became regarded to ex–Jehovah’s Witnesses as John Redwood, an activist and a blogger who reviews the diverse controversies surrounding the Watchtower and instances of infant abuse.
(Recently, he has started the use of his call.) When I first met Mark in May of the final 12 months, he seemed at the front door of his modest home in the same outfit he almost always wears: khaki cargo shorts, a quick-sleeved blouse, white footwear, and sweat socks pulled up over his calves. He invited me into his densely furnished office, wherein a fan barely dispelled the wafting odor of cat food. He pulled an envelope from the Priority Mailbox. He exceeded its contents, an aggregate of typed and handwritten letters discussing numerous sins allegedly devoted by using members of a Jehovah’s Witness congregation in Massachusetts. All the box letters were stolen by a nameless supply in the faith and shared with Mark. The sins described inside the letters ranged from the mundane—smoking pot, marital infidelity, drunkenness—to the frightening. Slowly, over the past couple of years, Mark has been leaking the most damning contents of the field, which are still secret. Mark’s eyebrows are permanently arched, and while he makes an essential factor, he peers out above his rimless glasses, eyes widened, which lends him a conspiratorial air. “Start with these,” he said.
Over a couple of years, Mark O’Donnell has been leaking stolen letters and other papers documenting baby abuse instances. (Lexey Swall) Among the pieces, Mark confirmed that day become a sequence of notes about a man from Springfield, Massachusetts, who had been disfellowshipped—a shape of ex-communication—in three instances. When the man turned into another time reinstated in 2008, a person operating in a department of Watchtower wrote to his congregation, noting that during 1989 he was stated to have “allowed his eleven-12 months-antique stepdaughter to touch his penis … on as a minimum two activities.” The oddness of the language struck me. It insinuated that the man had agreed to, instead of initiating, the sexual touch with his stepdaughter. After I left Mark’s house, I tracked down the forty-year-old stepdaughter. In reality, she told me, she had been best 8 when her stepfather had molested her.
“He changed into the adult, and I turned into the kid, so I notion I didn’t have any choice,” she said. She became terrified; she instructed me. “It took me approximately two years to go to my mother.” Her mom immediately went to the congregation’s elders, who later called the female and her stepfather to pray with them. She recalls it as a humiliating experience. Her stepfather turned into finally disfellowshipped for instances that worried “fornication,” “drunkenness,” and “mendacity,” in step with the letters. But in keeping with the stepdaughter, his alleged molestation of her resulted simplest in his being “privately reproved,” a closed-door reprimand that is generally followed through a temporary loss of privileges, which include now not being allowed to provide comments for the duration of Bible examine or lead a prayer.
The letters make no connection with police being notified; the stepdaughter stated her mother became recommended to hold the matter private. No attempt changed made to fit the stepfather far from different youngsters. (Calls to the congregation’s Kingdom Hall—the Witness model of a church—for remark went unanswered.) By the time the letters have been written, the person becomes attending an exceptional congregation and has married every other woman with youngsters; he is still part of that family nowadays. Near the quiet of the final letter in Mark’s possession is a question: “Is there any duty on the part of either body of elders … to inform his modern wife of his records of toddler molestation?”
