‘We bought a shredder’: Jehovah’s Witnesses accused of destroying teen’s sexual abuse records
A suit says a woman was sexually assaulted at 15 by fellow members of the church.
She needed someone to rescue her.
When Sarah Brooks was 15, living with her family in York in 2003, two adults in her life began sexually assaulting her. They were people she thought she could trust — fellow Jehovah’s Witnesses.
The abuse lasted for more than a year, until Brooks broke down, and confided to her parents. They alerted elders, the equivalent of parish priests, at the kingdom hall where the family worshipped.
Brooks had done what children are taught to do if someone harms them. And then her trauma grew even worse.
One elder warned Brooks that if she contacted police, she would bring “reproach” on Jehovah’s name, according to a lawsuit that she filed in June in Philadelphia Common Pleas Court against the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, the Witnesses’ leadership.
Other elders who investigated Brooks’ claims wrote in a public notice to the Yorkana Congregation Kingdom Hall that she had been “reproved,” which, in the Witnesses’ parlance, meant that she’d done something wrong and repented.
Family members and friends shunned Brooks, who spiraled into depression.
She did, however, report her abuse to authorities, triggering an emergency meeting of Witness elders in 2013, when they learned that the York County District Attorney’s Office had launched an investigation, and would seek records about Brooks’ abuse.
“We bought a shredder,” one York elder told others, according the lawsuit, “and headquarters has told us to shred.”
The Watchtower requires elders to follow a careful process for collecting information about child sexual abuse, compiling their findings in documents, and mailing copies to the Watchtower’s headquarters in New York.
Brooks’ lawsuit accuses Witness elders of destroying many of the records of her case — and of ignoring Pennsylvania’s Child Protective Services Law, which requires leaders of churches or religious organizations to report suspected child abuse to authorities.
» READ MORE: Jehovah's Witnesses: A Silent History of Sexual Abuse
Some of the organization’s internal records show that Witness leaders have for decades instructed elders to instead report abuse allegations to the organization’s legal department — and to resist cooperating with search warrants from police.
“Improper use of the tongue by an elder can result in serious legal problems for the individual, the congregation, and even the Society,” reads part of a July 1989 Watchtower memo.
A spokesperson for the Witnesses did not directly address the allegations in Brooks’ lawsuit, but wrote in an emailed statement that the organization is sickened by news about sexual abuse.
“Child sexual abuse in particular is a twisted act of evil,” read part of the statement. “... Anyone who has been victimized has the full support of the congregation to report the matter to the authorities.”
Brooks, who is now 35, wants the organization’s leaders to face accountability.
“I’ve come to terms with what happened to me, and pieced my life back together a little at a time,” she told The Inquirer. “Sometimes, I’m just doing what I need to do in order to survive. Other times, my backbone is stronger, and I feel like I can fight this fight.”
Her lawsuit comes at a fraught moment for the Watchtower.
Since 2019, Pennsylvania’s Attorney General’s Office has been investigating the organization’s handling of child sex abuse cases. On Friday, the office charged five Witnesses with sexually assaulting minors. Nine other members of the organization were arrested in the spring and fall.
‘There is a time to keep quiet’
Like many ex-Witnesses, Brooks has spent years disentangling herself from the organization’s insular culture and rules, some of which have helped to protect sexual predators.
Leaders of the religion, which was founded in Allegheny County in the 1870s, have long taught that Armageddon is fast approaching, and that only Witnesses in good standing will be resurrected.
Eccentric restrictions further emphasized the divide between Witnesses and the secular world: Followers are forbidden from celebrating birthdays or holidays, and aren’t permitted to vote or receive blood transfusions.
Brooks’ family were devout followers of the religion. At 14, though, she began to sense that the Witnesses’ community might not the safe space that she imagined.
Joshua Caldwell, a 25-year-old family friend, and Jennifer McVey, Brooks’ then-sister-in-law, began plying Brooks with alcohol, according the lawsuit, and then progressed, a year later, to allegedly sexually assaulting her, sometimes in a pickup truck, other times in abandoned homes that Caldwell worked to winterize.
Two elders who questioned Brooks about the assaults were related to Caldwell.
Later, a judicial committee of elders determined that Brooks “admitted to engaging in sexual activities” and needed to be reprimanded, according to the lawsuit — overlooking the fact that she was a minor who’d been taken advantage of by adults.
Caldwell and McVey were disfellowshipped, or kicked out of their congregation, but Caldwell was later reinstated.
Elders, the Watchtower wrote in the 1989 memo, were obligated to shepherd their flocks. But they also needed to be “careful not to divulge information about personal matters to unauthorized persons.”
“There is ‘a time to keep quiet,’” the message continued, quoting Scripture.
A subsequent memo, in 1997, instructed elders to share information with the Watchtower about known pedophiles, but to withhold the information from congregations. A separate policy, meanwhile, required sexual assault victims to have an eyewitness who could corroborate their claims, before elders would take disciplinary action.
“They don’t see that they’re putting children in harm’s way. The rules they have in place are still in place,” Brooks said. “I just wish their eyes would open to the fact that they’re creating a prime breeding ground for pedophiles, and doing nothing for their victims after it happens.”
In 2013, Brooks obtained a small measure of justice. The York County DA’s Office arrested Caldwell and McVey, and each pleaded guilty to corruption of a minor.
Caldwell and McVey are also named in Brooks’ lawsuit, which she said is a final step in her attempt to repair the harm that the Witnesses inflicted on her life.
Jeffrey Fritz, Brooks’ Center City-based lawyer, has represented other former Witnesses who have been assaulted.
Fritz said Brooks is trying to spur changes within the organization “to protect all children from sexual abuse that festers in the secrecy that the organization encourages.”
‘Jehovah’s organization must be kept clean!’
Publicly, Witness officials often emphasize that they abhor child sex abuse and seek to protect children.
And Brooks’ lawsuit notes that, in a 1986 Witness publication, the Watchtower acknowledged that it was aware of episodes of pedophilia.
“Shocking as it is, even some who have been prominent in Jehovah’s organization have succumbed to immoral practices,” it wrote.
The passage went on to note that more than 36,000 Witnesses had been disfellowshipped for immoral behavior, adding: “Jehovah’s organization must be kept clean!”
Yet the organization has been 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 lawyers for a former Witness who sued in California over sexual abuse that he suffered at the hands of an elder.
And 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.
» READ MORE: Watch: Jehovah’s Witnesses official says to destroy records because ‘Satan’s coming after us’
“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 says in the video, which was leaked online by an anonymous insider.
“A lot of these elders don’t even realize what they’re doing is wrong,” Brooks said. “I would like the people involved to get to the point where they understand, ‘Holy crap, what did we do?’ and come to terms with that.”