SAN DIEGO
— A San Diego judge has found that the governing body of the Jehovah’s
Witness church covered up years of sexual abuse by a local church leader
and continued to put children in danger of being molested, a ruling
likely to echo across the country as alleged victims from other
congregations take similar cases to court.
The
church’s hierarchal body, Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New
York, was ordered Wednesday to pay Jose Lopez $13.5 million in damages
for the abuse he suffered in 1986 at the age of 7 as part of the
church’s Linda Vista Spanish congregation.
Six
other men and one woman who said they also were molested by the same
man, church leader Gonzalo Campos, have also sued the Watchtower but
settled their cases out of court.
Mario
Moreno, associate general counsel for Watchtower, denied the cover-up
allegations in a statement: “Jehovah’s Witnesses abhor child abuse and
strive to protect children from such acts. The trial judge’s decision is
a drastic action for any judge to take given the circumstances of this
case. We will seek a full review of this case on appeal.”
Correction
An
earlier version of this story said there were an estimated 7.9 million
members nationwide. It's been changed to say worldwide.
The
church, known for its door-to-door preaching, has some 14,000
congregations in the United States and an estimated 7.9 million members
worldwide.
The theme of
sexual abuse and cover-ups by the church has appeared in lawsuits from
here to Britain.
In 2012, a court in Alameda County handed down a $21
million judgment in the similar case of abuse against a 9-year-old girl.
The amount was later reduced to $8 million.
Twenty other lawsuits are
pending in California, Ohio, New Mexico, Connecticut and Vermont,
according to the San Diego-based Zalkin Law Firm.
And on Thursday, six
adults filed a lawsuit claiming molestation in North Texas by church
elders in the 1990s.
The
emerging allegations have been compared to the Catholic Church clergy
sex abuse scandal, with at least one major exception: “We were embroiled
with a long slog with the Catholic Church around the country … but they
accepted on some level that they committed these errors, that this was a
problem,” said Lopez’s lawyer Irwin Zalkin, whose firm negotiated more
than $200 million in settlements in Catholic abuse cases. “At least they
said ‘mea culpa.’”
The Jehovah’s Witnesses have not, he said.
“These
guys will deny and deny, they are belligerent, they are arrogant, they
treat victims as adversaries,” Zalkin said. “This is not an organization
that is ready to accept the reality of what they have been doing.”
According
to the church’s policy at the time, there must be two eyewitnesses or a
confession by the abuser before the church can act on a claim. In most
of the cases, members claim the church did not punish the abusers,
allowed them to have contact with children and never warned the
congregations.
Lopez, now
36, attended the Kingdom Hall in Linda Vista with his mother as a child.
Because his father and stepfather were not part of the church, elders
suggested a male leader, Campos, would be a good Bible teacher for the
7-year-old boy.
By then, according to evidence revealed in the case,
church elders knew Campos was a pedophile and had molested a boy as
early as 1982, but they chose to do nothing about it.
In its statement
Friday, The Watchtower disputed that Campos held any responsibility
within the congregation at the time.
