For any lurkers..
For Jose Lopez, it took almost three decades to find some semblance of justice after he’d been molested – when he was 7 – by a predator who’d operated within a congregation of Jehovah’s Witnesses in San Diego.When his case against the Witnesses concluded in October, a judge awarded Lopez $13.5 million, a remarkably large sum in an era of frequent payouts in abuse cases.
The decision rested in part on the Witnesses’ refusal to hand over documents in the case, prompting the frustrated judge to ban the organization from making a defense.
The Lopez case was remarkable for another reason.
It forced the Witnesses into a rare admission:
Somewhere within the organization, there is a trove of documents with the names and whereabouts of known child sexual abusers in its U.S. congregations.
During the trial, a senior official from the Jehovah’s Witnesses headquarters, Richard Ashe, told Lopez’s attorney, Irwin Zalkin, that the organization had collected and electronically scanned internal documents on decades of known abuse cases. Ashe said that the Witnesses keep their child sexual abuse reports in a Microsoft SharePoint database but that it would take years to extract the information because it was mixed up with millions of other documents.“Honestly, Mr. Zalkin, the efforts that we’ve made up to this point is just trying to figure out how on earth we could ever do that in our filing system,” Ashe said. “You’re talking about 14,000 congregations and over 3 million documents that have been scanned and that would have to be searched. … It would take years to do that.”Zalkin called in a software expert who testified that by using simple search terms, the Witnesses could produce the information in less than two months, or maybe two days. At that point, the Watchtower simply refused to provide the database.www.revealnews.org/article/jehovahs-witnesses-use-1st-amendment-to-hide-child-sex-abuse-claims/