I spent the afternoon today with my elderly JW mother. My stepfather has Alzheimer's disease, and is hospitalized now due to violent behavior. I brought her to my home for the afternoon, and since I am fresh back from the Northwest Bible Conference, attended mostly by ex JW's, Silentlambs, and a few terrific posters from this board, I couldn't hold back on a few issues. Bill Bowen, silentlambs, spent the night at our home Monday, before flying home, and I just had to share some things he had told us with Mom. I hadn't told her about the newspaper articles or that there would be a Dateline show, because I knew she would make me crazy if I told her. But I told her all of it today.
At first she gave me the same old WT rhetoric, about how that couldn't happen in the organization, but I gave her too many facts and details, and she crumbled. She said that if a parent is so "brainwashed, that they would listen to an elder who told them not to report a pedophile to the police", then there is just no hope for them. I was so shocked!
She read parts of the article on "Child Molestation in the JW's" from the Paducah newspaper, and finally put it down, saying she had read enough, and it was sickening. She didn't read far enough to where she would have read my husband's name (he was interviewed). That might have angered her against us.
I told her a few facts about the older married man who molested me (I should say he tried to molest me, and Mom knows about that situation), and how he impregnated one teenager in the congregation we all attended in the 50's, and he was not disciplined at all, and the girl was disfellowshipped for being pregnant out of wedlock. Now, if he was disciplined, it was privately, but this poor girl took terrible abuse, as you can imagine because of being pregnant this way. And no one was warned about this pedophile, so he moved his entire family to Oregon, where he took it up again, until about 10 years ago, when my repressed memory took over.
I told my husband, and he investigated, and we found about a dozen women who were molested by this man. My husband called his congregation, where he was serving as the WT conductor, and as expected, he denied it. This man's daughter and I were baptized together, and I remembered that he told me that he did "this thing" to her too, and she liked it, so we took a chance and called her. AT that time, she was disfellowshipped, and had not raised her children as witnesses. She had three adult daughters that she suspected he had molested, so one of them talked into a tape recorder detailing what he had done to her from the time she was 3 years old until about age 14, when she stopped it forever. The elders played the tape for him and he confessed, and was disfellowshipped, for exactly one year. If he hadn't confessed, they couldn't have touched him. I assume he is dead now, as he would be about 90, but maybe not. You can believe the congregation never knew why he was df'd.
My point is that if the congregation 50 years ago had been warned, including his own daughter, who had no memories before age 11 at all, he wouldn't have molested again. We can only imagine how many more girls there were.
Mom was nearly in tears, and I decided to drop it, because she had so much on her mind. But I had also told her about Greenlees and Chitty and she was appalled at first, denying it all, and then suddenly said she thought I might be right about that. Her husband is a former Bethelite from the 40's and attended the second class of Gilead, so he may have told her some stories in the past. Hopefully, she has some things to think about now.
Just sharing. Thanks Bill and Alan and "Joan" for a great weekend. And Venice too. You are the best, doll babe.