‘Brother Hill’s addiction’: Secret records show Jehovah’s Witnesses tolerated abuse

Somewhere within the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ vast world headquarters, about 45 miles outside of New York City, sit records that the organization’s leaders guard closely.

The documents, known as S-77 forms, contain information about Witnesses who have been disfellowshipped — excommunicated, in other words — for sexually abusing children. The organization is so protective of its knowledge of internal predators that it once incurred $2 million worth of court fines rather than release files that were requested by attorneys for a former Witness who sued in California over sexual abuses that he suffered at the hands of an elder.

But some of those records are now being revealed, as part of the fallout from a Pennsylvania grand jury investigation that led to the October arrests of four Witnesses who are accused of abusing 19 minors. The records recount, in disturbing detail, how Witness leaders were confronted with evidence of appalling crimes — and did nothing, in keeping with a long-standing pattern of secrecy surrounding sexual abuse.

Jesse Hill offers one such alleged example.

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Hill, 52, was charged by the state Attorney General’s Office with molesting two boys he met through Witness congregations in Kutztown and Reading in the 1990s. Investigators alleged that Hill took the boys on trips to malls and movie theaters, and plied them with alcohol, marijuana, and pornography.

One victim testified to grand jurors that, between the ages of 9 and 11, he was sexually abused by Hill. The man claimed Hill told him, “‘[L]et’s just keep that between me and you.’”

Another victim told the grand jury he’d thought that by staying quiet about abuse he had suffered for six years, beginning at age 11, he might have prevented Hill from preying on his younger brother.

During the winter of 1998, Hill allegedly confessed to a committee of Witness elders — the equivalent of parish priests — that he’d had what he described as “affairs” with at least nine children, according to pages of an S-77 form that the Attorney General’s Office obtained as part of its investigation, which began in 2019, and is ongoing.

The committee likened Hill’s crimes to alcoholism: “ … so it was with Brother Hill’s addiction when around young boys,” they wrote on the form, which was later mailed to the Witnesses’ leadership, the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York.

Elders told relatives of Hill’s victims about the allegations of nightmarish abuse — even noting on their paperwork that some parents “became belligerent, angry, others were stunned beyond belief” — but none contacted police, the Attorney General’s Office wrote in a recent court filing.

Hill remains behind bars in Berks County. Earlier this month, a judge agreed to lower Hill’s bail from $1.5 million to $750,000, according to the Reading Eagle. Hill’s attorney, Jay Nigrini, could not be reached for comment.

>>READ MORE: Witness official says to destroy records because ‘Satan’s coming after us’

Elders at a Witness congregation in Kutztown voted to reinstate Hill in 2011, despite his past admission of abusing multiple children.

Hill volunteered, as recently as two years ago, at another congregation in Berks County, but was removed from that position because of complaints about inappropriate contact with 11- and 12-year-old boys, investigators allege.

All of which leads to a simple question: Why hadn’t elders reported Hill to law enforcement?

In a statement to The Inquirer, the Witnesses’ public information office said that while it was “not appropriate” to comment on an active court case, “we want to express our concern for all victims of abuse regardless of faith. We agree with the authorities that any victim of abuse should consider contacting the police.”

For decades, though, the leaders of the organization — which was founded in Pittsburgh in the 1870s — have conveyed a different message to their followers.

>>READ MORE: Suspect in Jehovah’s Witness sex abuse case arrested

A 1989 memo obtained by The Inquirer instructed elders to refuse cooperating if police ever appeared at a kingdom hall with a search warrant; another memo, from 1997, advised elders to withhold information about known sexual predators from congregations.

To Jeffrey Fritz, a Philadelphia attorney who has sued the Witnesses in Pennsylvania and New York on behalf of multiple sexual abuse survivors, even the organization’s policies on S-77 forms are rooted in evading accountability.

“That form is to be kept, literally, in a safe, never to be opened, or shared with anyone at a congregation,” he said. “In some cases, what I’ve seen is, they destroy the records at the local congregation level, and a copy is kept at their headquarters, in New York.”

Fritz argues that transporting written evidence from local cities and counties — where crimes would be prosecuted — to New York is a move meant to stymie investigators.

“It’s somewhat a shell game,” he said. “Local law enforcement doesn’t have the resources to do interstate investigations.”

In 2018, The Inquirer wrote about a Witness official, Shawn Bartlett, who’d been videotaped telling elders at a seminar to destroy documents that could harm the organization in litigation.

“Well, we know that the scene of this world is changing, and we know Satan’s coming after us, and he’s going to go for us legally,” Bartlett said in the video, which was leaked online by an anonymous insider. “We can see by the way things are shaping up. So the organization has said, ‘We’ve run into difficulties in the past because of the records we have.’”

That culture of secrecy, though, is starting to crack.

“The wall is beginning to come down,” Fritz said. “It’s going to take efforts from all states to fully peel it away.”

The Attorney General’s Office asks others who have abuse allegations to contact a special hotline: 1-888-538-8541.