Her mother immediately went to the congregation’s elders, who later called the girl and her stepfather in to pray with them. “It took me two years to go to my mom about it.” “He was the adult and I was the kid, so I thought I didn’t have any choice,” she said. In fact, she told me, she had been only 8 when her stepfather had molested her. It insinuated that the man had agreed to, rather than initiated, the sexual contact with his stepdaughter.Īfter I left Mark’s house, I tracked down the stepdaughter, now 40. I was struck by the oddness of the language. 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 have “allowed his 11-year-old stepdaughter to touch his penis … on at least two occasions.”
#Jw daily bible reading schedule series#
(Lexey Swall)Īmong the papers Mark showed me that day was a series of letters about a man from Springfield, Massachusetts, who had been disfellowshipped-a form of excommunication-three times. Over the past couple of years, Mark O’Donnell has been leaking stolen letters and other papers documenting instances of child abuse. Mark’s eyebrows are permanently arched, and when he makes an important point, he peers out above his rimless glasses, eyes widened, which lends him a conspiratorial air. Slowly, over the past couple of years, Mark has been leaking the most damning contents of the box, much of which is still secret. The sins described in the letters ranged from the mundane-smoking pot, marital infidelity, drunkenness-to the horrifying. All the letters in the box had been stolen by an anonymous source inside the religion and shared with Mark.
He pulled an envelope from the Priority Mail box and passed me its contents, a mixture of typed and handwritten letters discussing various sins allegedly committed by members of a Jehovah’s Witness congregation in Massachusetts. He invited me into his densely furnished office, where a fan barely dispelled the wafting smell of cat food. When I first met Mark, in May of last year, he appeared at the front door of his modest home in the same outfit he nearly always wears: khaki cargo shorts, a short-sleeved shirt, white sneakers, and sweat socks pulled up over his calves. (Recently, he has begun using his own name.) Soon after, he became known to ex–Jehovah’s Witnesses as John Redwood, an activist and a blogger who reports on the various controversies, including cases of child abuse, surrounding Watchtower. Mark, 51, is the owner of an exercise-equipment repair business and a longtime Jehovah’s Witness who quietly left the religion in late 2013. That effort has been remarkably successful-until recently.Ī white Priority Mail box filled with manila envelopes sits on the floor of Mark O’Donnell’s wood-paneled home office, on the outskirts of Baltimore, Maryland. Yet all this time, Watchtower has refused to comply with multiple court orders to release the information contained in its database and has paid millions of dollars over the years to keep it secret, even from the survivors whose stories are contained within. Less notice has been paid to the abuse among the Jehovah’s Witnesses, a Christian sect with more than 8.5 million members. In recent decades, much of the world’s attention to allegations of abuse has focused on the Catholic Church and other religious groups. Thus did the Jehovah’s Witnesses build what might be the world’s 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 law enforcement, all scanned and searchable in a Microsoft SharePoint file. Keep a copy of the report in your congregation’s confidential file, the instructions continued, and do not share it with anyone.
#Jw daily bible reading schedule how to#
The letter 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 accused viewed within the community? Does anyone else know about the abuse?-and mail it to Watchtower’s headquarters in a special blue envelope. The organization was concerned about the legal risk posed by possible child molesters within its ranks. congregations, and to many more congregations worldwide. In March 1997, the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, the nonprofit organization that oversees the Jehovah’s Witnesses, sent a letter to each of its 10,883 U.S.
0 kommentar(er)
