7/6/25 How the Jehovah’s Witnesses sex abuse crisis in Pennsylvania unfolded
Long after a young woman stepped forward to say she was raped and beaten by a member of a Jehovah’s Witness congregation, law enforcement agents finally confronted Eric Eleam three years ago at his home in Butler County.
They questioned him about the repeated abuse starting when she was just 12, records show.
They asked him about forcing her to perform sex acts in the privacy of his home.
And they pressed him about his own admission to the crimes during a secret meeting with congregation members who launched their own inquiry — but never disclosed the allegations to law enforcement.
Police tried to ask more questions, but Eleam cut the interview short, telling agents that he was afraid of going to jail.
When law enforcement agents returned weeks later — armed with an arrest warrant — he bolted into his bathroom, shut the door, and shot himself in the head.
The 61-year-old man was one of the first suspects to be targeted by a statewide grand jury in Pennsylvania in what's become the nation’s largest probe into sexual abuse by worshippers and elders within the Jehovah’s Witnesses — in many cases involving the rape and molesting of young children.
Not since the Catholic Church crisis unfolded seven years ago in Pennsylvania has a religious institution been singled out for widespread abuse within its ranks, in some cases by the very people who children are taught to trust most: church leaders.
Since 2019, prosecutors have turned up troves of internal files within the confines of worship halls and church computers — each revealing details of abuse dating back to 1990 and as recent as 2014, records show.
In nearly all of the cases, the allegations were never reported to police.
“It really destroyed me,” one survivor of abuse in Butler County told the Post-Gazette on the condition of anonymity because her family is still active in the faith community.
“You realize it’s not just a seed, and it’s not just a little personal thing — it’s rooted all the way up to the headquarters.”
Inside the crisis
Launched by then state Attorney General Josh Shapiro, the investigation so far has led to 16 arrests and 11 convictions in an ongoing probe into congregations in nearly every corner of the state.
At least three alleged abusers are awaiting trials set to start this year. Only one defendant so far has been acquitted.
While the investigation shares remarkable similarities to the Catholic Church scandal, there’s a stark difference: Many of the allegations are buried in tight-knit faith communities where the elders not only lead prayer worship but advise members on some of the most personal matters of their lives.
“Anything that happens in your life," said Brandon Sheffer, a former member, "would come to the elders first. That’s part of the culture.”
Nowhere is the crisis more striking than in the religion’s birthplace: Western Pennsylvania. The Jehovah’s Witnesses were founded by a small group near Pittsburgh more than a century ago. And today, at least nine of the arrests have taken place in the region — including four in Allegheny County.
In one case, Marc Brown, a member of an Allegheny County congregation, assaulted two young girls dozens of times nearly two decades ago while serving as their legal guardian — preying on the victims while they showered or slept alone at night, court records show.
And in one of the probe’s most highly publicized cases, Shaun Sheffer, 47, a member of the Zelienople congregation in Butler County, was convicted this year of repeatedly raping and molesting a young girl with autism who struggled to speak before the age of five.
Both men have been sentenced to prison — Sheffer up to 34 years and Brown, 66, up to 30 years in state prison.
A sex abuse hotline
Like the crisis in the Catholic Church, Jehovah’s Witness leaders were in many cases made aware of the abuse — and even documented the accusations — before burying them in their archives for years to follow, according to court records.
In response to the Post-Gazette, the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York — the powerhouse nonprofit that provides legal support to over 118,000 congregations — said that “matters involving sin,” such as child abuse, are addressed by individual congregations.
Watchtower, which runs bible schools, provides disaster relief and helps build homes abroad, said there’s a national hotline for congregation elders to get legal advice and ensure compliance with all of their reporting obligations.
“This hotline has been available since July 1989,” it said.
Nearly nine years later, Watchtower sent a letter to Pennsylvania's attorney general asking when the elders are required to alert police about child abuse, a document obtained by the Post-Gazette shows.
In response, the agency said it could not legally provide the church with answers, recommending that it seek advice from its own lawyers.
Decades later, the reporting of sex abuse is now at the center of a clash between the institution and the state over whether religious leaders should be given a rare legal exemption from telling law enforcement about suspected abuse.
Under state law, church leaders — like teachers, social workers, and health-care experts — are required with rare exceptions to report suspected child abuse to law enforcement.
“These children deserved a place to grow up in peace, not to be preyed upon,” said Mr. Shapiro three years ago. “This is an abuse of trust, an abuse of power.”
The fight is now unfolding in court after a Philadelphia congregation sued the state in 2020 in a case that could dramatically impact religious institutions accused of abuse and coverup.
The congregation is arguing that its elders are covered by the “clergyman privilege,” a section of Pennsylvania law that protects information shared with church elders in confidence, like secrets divulged in the confession booth.
A lower court tossed the case, but the state Supreme Court has sent the case back to the court for further review.
“[The congregation] wants to know if its elders are covered by state law in penitential conversations in the same way that Catholic priests and Protestant ministers are,” said Philadelphia attorney Matthew Haverstick of the Kleinbard law firm, which represents the congregation.
Nearly all of Pennsylvania’s congregations are represented by the Kleinbard firm, which provided legal advice to the Catholic Church when the state grand jury in 2018 exposed sweeping cases of sex abuse and coverup dating back decades.
Over the past six years, numerous abuse survivors in Jehovah’s Witness congregations, their family members and former members have appeared before the grand jury in Harrisburg to talk about an institution that they said failed to protect its most vulnerable members.
Mark O’Donnell is a longtime advocate for abuse victims who left the church in 2013 and testified twice before the grand jury, which was launched after state officials received a referral from prosecutors in York County.
He said the panel was not just looking at “individual cases” — but the bigger question of how “congregations in the state can conceal child sexual abuse for so many decades.”
Like the Catholic Church scandal, records show that victims stepped forward year after year to alert leaders in congregations across Pennsylvania of allegations of rape, molestations, and, in some cases, physical beatings.
Mapping the state’s investigation
The nation’s largest criminal probe of sex abuse in Jehovah’s Witness congregations has led to 16 arrests — and 11 convictions so far — in counties across the state.
Number of cases filed by county
In at least eight cases, older adults preyed on their younger family members and in other incidents, the abuse was carried out by community members.
Many of the allegations were detailed by the elders years ago and sent to the Watchtower, which has kept a secret database of the accusations, records and interviews show.
As the attorney general’s investigation ramped up, those reports became the target of multiple subpoenas, turning up chilling details of predatory practices in congregations across the state.
Several of the assaults took place in outdoor pools and another in a public park, records show.
One member of a prominent family in the Kutztown Kingdom Hall in Berks County was accused of sexually abusing at least a dozen young boys inside of movie theaters, his family business, his truck, and the kingdom hall throughout the 1990s, grand jury records show.
During many of those sessions, Jesse Hill promised his victims alcohol, pornography, and marijuana.
The 54-year-old man pleaded guilty to two counts of rape in 2023 and was sentenced to 10 to 20 years in prison.
In another case, two victims unexpectedly received $2,500 checks from their abuser after the Butler County congregation member learned that one of the women was “in counseling,” records show. The victim told the grand jury she viewed the payment as “hush money.”
Private calls, hidden confessions
In the case of Sheffer, who was found guilty earlier this year of repeatedly raping a young, autistic girl, an elder from his congregation in Butler County took the witness stand this year and said that he learned of the allegations about a decade earlier.
But instead of alerting police, he said he phoned the Watchtower’s expansive legal department for advice.
“We talk to them and find out exactly what they want us to say,” said the elder, Steve Chappell, on the stand.
In an email to the Post-Gazette, Watchtower acknowledged that it received the call, adding that “by this date, the victim was an adult.”
In the case of Eleam, who was among the first group of congregants to be investigated, the accusations against him emerged when the victim’s mother met with community members.
Also at the meeting was the victim, who said she was repeatedly raped and molested by him for five years starting in 1992, records show.
Since there were no witnesses, the members said they went to Eleam, who “claimed not to remember any of these occurrences but said that the accusations had to be true if [the victim] said so," the internal records show.
After obtaining records of the secret meeting, state agents said they asked Eleam why he indicated that the abuse did in fact occur.
Eleam responded that he had "been taught not to lie," grand jury records show.
Though the attorney general’s office said it found enough evidence to charge Eleam, it was his admissions to members of his own congregation — documented but kept secret for years — that sealed his fate.
According to Mr. O’Donnell, the accusations against members nationwide piled up in paper records maintained by Watchtower for years, and later converted into a massive database — records that are now being sought in courts across the country.
In Montana, a district court fined the organization in 2021 for each day it withheld documents during a four-year civil lawsuit.
Once Watchtower complied with the order, attorneys dubbed the files the “CM” database — short for child maltreatment, according to sources involved in the case.
Excerpts from the CM database, mostly dated around 2015, are detailed: Some include incidents of abuse, when they happened, who was involved, who knew, and how they knew, court filings show.
Multiple entries conclude that there is “no duty to report” the alleged crimes, often because they were shared confidentially with elders, according to court filings.
Some excerpts say that child abuse is a crime, and anyone can report it to police. But others advise church leaders to keep quiet if they’re contacted by authorities and to destroy notes from calls with Watchtower officials.
In Pennsylvania, lawyers have directed congregations to identify all documents — paper or electronic — that show knowledge of sexual abuse allegations and avoid deleting or modifying any records, according to correspondence reviewed by the Post-Gazette.
‘This abuse is happening to me’
For years, the church has followed a protocol that has kept elders from taking decisive action within their congregations.
Known as the “two witness rule,” the standard requires a second person — along with the victim — to witness abuse before elders can oust suspects from congregations, according to an email from Watchtower. But that can be an impossible task, ex-members said.
“When the [expletive] is there going to be another witness?” said the anonymous abuse survivor who spoke to the Post-Gazette and is now an advocate for other victims. “The abuse was happening to me.”
At Sheffer’s trial early this year, it was revealed that the elders received a letter from higher-ups in the assembly regarding accusations against him in December 2016. After that, the case was closed — nothing else happened, according to Brandon Sheffer, who testified against his brother and was once a church member.
“The World Wide Headquarters of the Jehovah Witnesses were quick to dismiss the allegation because it was not supported by a second witness,” investigators said in court filings.
In response to questions from the Post-Gazette, Watchtower said that the two-witness rule “does not apply” to whether congregants report sexual abuse, but whether a member can be punished.
Even without a second witness, the church said its elders provide “ongoing support to any individuals who may have been hurt” and “remain alert” to the actions of alleged abusers.
Still, Brandon Sheffer said that’s not the kind of support victims need at a critical time in their lives.
Church leaders “don’t understand this is exactly what covered-up child abuse looks like,” he said. “It’s not believing victims. It’s refusing to acknowledge things that are difficult to acknowledge.”
Silencing victims
Within his insular Jehovah Witness community, Mr. Sheffer said it was almost natural for abuse to go unreported.
“I grew up with the idea that this happened in most families,” he added.
For survivors, the prospect of leaving the faith comes with high stakes: When Mr. Sheffer and his wife — also an abuse survivor — stopped practicing the religion, they lost lifelong relationships within days.
“Silencing is a huge, common theme where victims are afraid to come forward,” said Deputy Attorney General Alicia Werner, who prosecuted Shaun Sheffer and at least six other suspects.
“If they do come forward, they're afraid that they won't be believed.”
Mr. O’Donnell, a key whistleblower in the state’s probe, recalls trying to warn adults about abuse when he was just 12 years old. But elders at the time relayed his claims to the alleged abuser, who “severely” reprimanded him, Mr. O’Donnell said.
Now, the former member is locked in his own legal fight with the institution in which he was raised.
In 2019, the same year the grand jury probe was launched, Mr. O’Donnell was a key source in a story in The Atlantic that revealed Watchtower’s database of suspected child abuse.
Soon after, he and his wife were officially cut off from the church, he said, a punishment known as being “disfellowshipped.”
His falling out with the institution intensified two years ago, after he dialed into a private call between the elders and their lawyers in the midst of the unfolding crisis — an act the lawyers say broke the state’s wiretap law.
Mr. O’Donnell said he was provided access by an active elder, who invited him to join the call.
Crisis could spark change
Now being sued in federal court in Philadelphia for millions of dollars by congregations over the breach, Mr. O’Donnell said the mishandling of abuse cases in the institution is systemic and stretches far beyond the state’s borders.
In Australia, a government review found that the church’s files in that country contained allegations against 1,006 members — and nearly 600 admissions. Over the last decade, the U.K. and the Netherlands have both launched similar probes.
And in the U.S., the state of Washington in May created a new law that turns elders, priests, and other religious leaders into mandated reporters of abuse, with no exceptions for confessions.
Survivors from Jehovah’s Witness and Catholic congregations rallied behind the landmark bill, which failed twice before it passed.
Meanwhile, sources close to the Pennsylvania investigation said the end is still far off and more arrests could come this year. Trials of suspects in Allegheny County and Lancaster County are set to begin in August, while another trial in Westmoreland County is scheduled for October.
Mr. O’Donnell said he believes the probe, now in its sixth year, could spark lasting change in the congregations as more hidden files are unveiled and victims living in silence step forward.
“If there's a problem in Pennsylvania, there's a problem around the world,” he said. “Pennsylvania is just one state. But it has to start somewhere.”
First Published: July 6, 2025, 1:00 a.m.
Updated: July 8, 2025, 5:20 a.m.