@simon
You are correct - he was posting quite a bit of information online, then privately disparaging the family and stated that the girl was not raped, that the sex was consensual. I was about to post the details but it is not appropriate to do so on this public forum. You have my email address - please contact me privately.
The reason it does not add up is that you are missing vital pieces of the story. What I can tell you right now is that I have more information than anyone on the case with the exception of the actual victim. The information includes police reports,civil case filings, detailed logs of all events, extensive letters of reference written on behalf of the victim's mother and stepfather, and documentation related to the judicial hearings held in relation to this case. I have been entrusted with all of this information by the family, so that once I am permitted to release this information in an article, I will have all of the pertinent facts. Until that time I will honor their wishes and not share this information with anyone. In fact, not even my fellow editors at Survey have this information.
In the matter of objectivity, I actually agree with you and "skittles" on several points. One of those points being that you can't necessarily hold the JW organization responsible for every crime committed by a Jehovah's Witness. There are very specific areas where culpability applies, and if you study the Conti Case, The Padron case, the Lopez case and many similar ones, you will see that those attorneys filing court documents were under pressure to make sure they had evidence that either the crimes were committed on JW owned property, or that the organization was in some way responsible for damages due to lack of proper reporting to the authorities.
There are other areas where I agreed with skittles from the outset, and in fact he acknowledged the changes I made to the JW Survey article once he and the family posted comments on JW Survey. I was not the writer of the article as you know, but I felt responsible to make the necessary changes right away in light of the evidence I received, primarily from the family members.
I would like to further agree with you that problems can arise when bloggers or non-professional journalists cover stories without all of the facts. In fact I will take it one step further and say that I really have a problem with many professional journalists who publish content which is misleading or inaccurate. In fact, this is the main reason we are having this discussion. The writer of the Salt Lake City article initiated the problem with sloppy writing and terminology which was confusing, and in fact was the reason Cover Fade initially interpreted their article to mean that the perpetrator was some person of authority in the congregation (which he was not).
Here is the exact quote from the Salt Lake article:
The woman filed the lawsuit Wednesday in 2nd District Court, accusing the Kingdom Hall of Jehovah's Witnesses church in Roy — as well as naming the alleged perpetrator, several church leaders and the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society (the religion's headquarters located in New York) — of knowingly allowing the "unfit" instructor to rise to a position of authority without warning members of his "dangerous propensities" and past sexual transgressions.
I have spoken to the family about this, and even they are not clear on how this journalist came to use the term "instructor" when referring to the alleged perpetrator.
NOTE: On November 4th, skittles made the following comment on JW Survey:
The family is grasping at straws by calling him an instructor in the lawsuit.
You see my point? The family did not originate this term "instructor" or call him such in court documents. However skittles of course did not know this because he had little knowledge of the case for a person who immediately jumped in and wanted to correct what we quoted from the Salt Lake article.
The article further stated:
The purported assaults escalated from there, according to court documents, as the man three times bound the girl's wrists and ankles with duck tape, placed a sock in her mouth and covered her head with a pillowcase, leaving her alone in the backseat of his car for one to two hours each time.
Aside from the horrendous accusations, it seems clear that no one bothered to edit this article, as you can see from the expression "duck tape" - I mean seriously - how are these people getting paid for this?
As a result of the Salt Lake article, followed by the Survey article, skittles made his argument that some information was not correct, and I agreed with him, and we had several very civil exchanges. However, what happened was that the changes were not made quickly enough for skittles, and Covert Fade made the point that we are not going to accept the comment of a random faceless poster named skittles at face value over the Salt Lake City journalist. It was not until I actually verified the story with the family that we were able to make the changes. However by that point, skittles was engaged in a drawn out duel with Covert Fade, and what started out as pleasant became a dispute over the various facts of the case and the issue that we would not accept his word over the reporter's article.
Clearly his comments were incendiary, as the biological mother of the victim posted the following on JW Survey on November 18th:
In reply to Skittles.Skittles, you are misleading people. Be careful with your little knowledg on the case. Your attempt to minimize JW elders’ uncivilized criminal behaviors is telling. You have tried to misled the readers and discredited the report on the Salt Lake Tribune as well. You are an imposter
Since I was able to verify 100% the identity of both the mother of the victim and the victim's stepfather, it became clear from their statements and all of the written documentation I obtained, that they were trustworthy and they were indeed who they said they were. On the other hand, we had no evidence whatsoever that "skittles" or the name he used in corresponding with Survey was actually involved in any way. In fact he admitted in an email on November 10th that:
I'd be happy to give you the details but I don't know how I can exactly
confirm that they're accurate
In regard to your question about the comments on Lloyd's PDF, I have not looked at that PDF and had no time to compare it with the public posts on Survey. I know he did a quick scan and it's possible that comments are missing, and I do not know how far back he went in all of the posts.
I hope I addressed your questions, however some details can't be discussed publicly, so please
email me and I will try to fill in the missing pieces. At the end of the day, I felt it was necessary to limit his comments (on the rape case) following the requests and facts provided by the victim's family. I believe this was the right thing to do.
However as you can observe, we still allowed him to comment, and he chose the latest Survey article to perpetuate his keyboard anger, and quite frankly it got to the point where he just wanted to argue for the sake of arguing. That's not healthy or beneficial for anyone, and it wasn't going anywhere.
Fortunately this is a fairly rare occurrence (thankfully), and out of the thousands of readers and posters on the site, I can only recall one other person blocked in the past year. I'm sure you run into this yourself periodically.
Regards,
JR
