How Watchtower sets up JW elders to take the fall in court

When Lexi Nunez was being sexually abused by her step-grandfather in Thompson Falls, Montana, the elders of her congregation did exactly what the Watch Tower Elders Manual told them to do. They picked up the phone, called the legal department in New York, and a Watch Tower attorney advised them — in a conversation now part of the federal court record — that they did not have to report what they knew to the police. So they didn't. The abuse continued for years. When the lawsuit came, the people on the wrong end of it weren't the lawyers in New York. They were the elders in Thompson Falls.

That is one case, but it isn't a one-off. It's a system working exactly the way it was designed to work. For roughly the last 25 years, Watch Tower has been deliberately engineering a structure — corporate, procedural, and doctrinal — that does one very specific thing: when its policies cause harm, it puts the local elder in the courtroom. Not the legal department that gave the advice. Not the governing body that wrote the policy. Not the corporation in New York. The elder. The unpaid volunteer. The man on the ground. What follows is built from primary sources — federal court filings, leaked Watch Tower documents, government records. I spent 40 years inside this religion, and the mechanism I'm going to walk through isn't speculation. It's documented.

The 2000 Corporate Restructuring That Built the Shield

In October of 2000, Watch Tower did something that almost nobody outside the organization noticed. They restructured.

The corporation that had been running the religion in the United States for nearly a century — the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of New York — was hollowed out. In its place, they spun up three new corporate entities: the Christian Congregation of Jehovah's Witnesses, the Religious Order of Jehovah's Witnesses, and Kingdom Support Services.

The official explanation was administrative. Growth, efficiency, allowing senior ministers who weren't on the governing body to serve as corporate officers. That's what the Watch Tower spokesman told Christianity Today at the time. But in the same article, an ex-Jehovah's Witness named Randall Waters — a former employee and elder at the group's Bethel headquarters in Brooklyn — said something else:

"trying to become less hierarchical to keep liability at a lower level. They think when lawsuits come, they can isolate particular committees."

Raymond Franz, a former member of the governing body who later left the religion and wrote about it, added that the new structure required Bethel workers to sign a formal vow of poverty, reclassifying them as something other than employees. That mattered because the organization had just been ordered in Germany to provide severance pay to staff members who were treated as employees under local law.

So at the moment of the 2000 reorganization, the people closest to the organization said its structural purpose was liability isolation. Watch Tower denied it.

Twenty-five years later, we don't have to guess who was right. Watch Tower has used the 2000 split as a litigation defense repeatedly in court.

How the Shield Was Deployed: The Pedrone Case

The clearest early example is the Pedrone case in California. Esbaldo Pedrone was abused by Gonzalo Campos, a man who later became a Jehovah's Witness elder. When Pedrone's attorney filed discovery requests asking Watch Tower to produce documents about other abusers — documents Watch Tower had been collecting since 1997, mailed into headquarters in special blue envelopes — Watch Tower fought back.

They produced records up to March of 2001. After that, they argued they couldn't produce anything else because Watch Tower and CCJW, the Christian Congregation of Jehovah's Witnesses, were now separate entities. The post-2001 records belonged to a different corporation — a different legal person. Not their problem.

The court rejected this. The judge found that Watch Tower had argued one position — that it did control the documents — when that served them, and the opposite position when that served them instead. The judge called it gamesmanship. Watch Tower was fined $4,000 a day until they complied. The fines eventually exceeded $2 million.

The corporate split that Watch Tower's spokesman in 2001 described as administrative was, by 2016, being deployed as a legal shield: argue the corporate hierarchy when you want to keep documents; argue against it when you don't want to produce them.

The pattern extends across jurisdictions. In a federal lawsuit in Montana — Kaycart v. Watchtower, which we'll return to shortly — Watchtower Pennsylvania, the parent corporation, filed a motion to dismiss arguing it had no jurisdiction over Witnesses in Montana. Its chief counsel swore in an affidavit that the Pennsylvania entity was essentially a copyright holder: it owned the rights to Watch Tower publications and provided humanitarian aid after natural disasters. Nothing to do with how local congregations were run.

Twenty-five years of court filings, multiple jurisdictions, the same defense over and over: We are not those local people. We did not control what they did. Our corporation is a different corporation than that corporation. The agency relationship denial wasn't accidental and didn't emerge organically. It was built that way. The 2000 reorganization is the date the construction was finished.

The Elders Manual and the Procedural Trap

The corporate shield only matters if there's a local elder making the decision that creates the liability. That's the second part of the mechanism, and it's built directly into procedure.

When you become an elder, you're handed a book called Shepherd the Flock of God. It's confidential. Only elders are permitted to see it. You can't show it to your wife, lend it to your brother, or let a non-elder bind it for you without watching them do it. A formal letter to all elders dated October 7, 2010 laid out the handling rules in detail: sisters and non-Witnesses were not permitted to handle the book even under supervision.

The manual has gone through multiple revisions — 2010, 2019, 2020, 2024, and most recently September 1, 2025, the edition leaked to advocates within hours of its release. It replaced a predecessor manual called Pay Attention to Yourselves and to All the Flock, which goes back to 1977.

Here's what stayed the same across all editions. When something serious happens in your congregation — and the manual is explicit that this includes allegations of child sexual abuse — the first call you make is to the branch office. Not the police. Not a lawyer. The branch office.

That probably sounds normal if you grew up in the religion. But step outside it for a moment and look at what's actually happening in that phone call. You are an unpaid volunteer. You're being told what to do and not to do by the legal department in New York, in a conversation that the organization will later argue in court is privileged from the very people whose lives are about to be affected by your decision. And when something goes wrong six months or six years later, whose name is in the deposition? Whose name is on the lawsuit?

Not the legal department. Yours.

The architecture of this is precise: the decision lives at the elder level. The advice lives at the legal department level. The exposure lives with the elder. The privilege lives with the legal department.

The Nunez Case: The Mechanism Running in Real Time

There is a federal court case that documented the entire mechanism operating in practice. The case is Nunez v. Watchtower, decided by the Montana Supreme Court in 2020.

In 2004, an elder named Don Herbison in the Thompson Falls, Montana congregation learned that a man named Maximo Reyes had been sexually abusing two children connected to the congregation. Holly, a young adult at the time, came to the elders to report what had happened to her. Her brother Peter, who had also been abused, came separately. The elders believed both of them.

Herbison did what the manual told him to do. He picked up the phone and called Watch Tower's legal department in New York. A Watch Tower attorney advised him that Montana law didn't require him to report Reyes to the local authorities. Having received that advice, Herbison did not contact the police.

The elders convened a judicial committee — the internal Witness disciplinary panel of three elders meeting privately to hear the case and decide what happens to the accused. They disfellowshipped Reyes. About a year later, Reyes was reinstated. He continued attending congregation services.

What Herbison didn't know, what the legal department in New York didn't ask, and what the manual procedure didn't surface, was that Reyes was already abusing his step-granddaughter, Alexis — Lexi. Lexi was five years old when the abuse started in 2002. She was ten years old when it ended in 2007.

When Lexi was old enough to file suit, she did. The lower court found Watch Tower negligent and awarded $35 million. The Montana Supreme Court eventually reversed it on a narrow technical ground involving Montana's clergy-penitent reporting exception. But the facts on record — the phone call to New York, the attorney's advice, the elder following it — are primary source material. They're in the published Montana Supreme Court opinion.

What that case shows structurally is this: the elder is in the chair where the legally consequential decision gets made. But the advice is coming from a lawyer in New York whom the elder can't name in his own defense, in a conversation Watch Tower will later argue is privileged. The elder doesn't have legal training. He's a volunteer. He's been told for his entire adult life that his loyalty is to Jehovah's organization — loyalty to Jehovah personally, not merely to an institution. The cost of disobeying the legal department's advice, even questioning it, is removal as an elder, which in this religion doesn't just mean losing a position. It means losing your standing in the community, sometimes within your own family.

So the elder follows the advice. And eventually, when a victim files suit, the elder's name is on the complaint.

What Federal Court Found When It Examined the Architecture

The case is Kaycart v. Watchtower, United States District Court for the District of Montana, case number 1:20-CV-52, filed in 2020. It is one of the most thoroughly documented examinations of Watch Tower's corporate architecture ever to occur in federal court.

Tracy Kaycart and Camilla Mapley, two adult women, sued Watch Tower over years of child sexual abuse they had suffered in the Hardin, Montana congregation in the 1970s and 1980s. They named three defendants: the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of New York, the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania, and an individual co-defendant named Bruce Mapley Sr.

Watch Tower Pennsylvania, the parent corporation, filed a motion to dismiss. In support of that motion, Watch Tower's chief counsel, Philip Brumley, filed sworn affidavits. The substance of those affidavits was that Watch Tower Pennsylvania had no operational role in the conduct of local congregations during the period of the abuse. The Pennsylvania corporation, Brumley swore, was essentially a copyright holder — it owned the rights to Watch Tower publications and provided humanitarian aid after natural disasters. That was more or less all it did.

Then discovery surfaced documents that contradicted those sworn affidavits.

Judge Susan Waters looked at the documents, looked at the affidavits, and concluded that Brumley's representation to the court had been made with what she called reckless disregard for the truth. She imposed sanctions totaling more than $150,000. Watch Tower appealed. The Ninth Circuit affirmed the sanctions on July 7, 2025.

A separate finding in the same case: Watch Tower of New York had engaged in spoliation of evidence — destroying or withholding evidence that should have been preserved for litigation. The judge indicated she would have instructed the jury that they could infer Watch Tower had intentionally destroyed key documents.

Now here is the detail that captures the entire architecture in a single court filing.

When Kaycart and Mapley sued Watch Tower of New York, Watch Tower Pennsylvania, and Bruce Mapley Sr., Watch Tower of New York filed a cross-claim against Bruce Mapley Sr. — their own co-defendant. A cross-claim is when one defendant asks the court to allocate liability to another defendant. In plain English: Watch Tower of New York told the court that if anybody has to pay these plaintiffs, the bill should go to him — the man they appointed as an elder, the man whose conduct ran through their internal judicial committee procedure.

That's not a hypothetical mechanism. That's a federal court filing.

The case eventually settled. Settlement amounts are confidential. What isn't confidential is what's in the public docket: a sanctioned chief counsel, a spoliation of evidence finding, and a cross-claim against a co-defendant who had been a local elder. When Watch Tower's corporate architecture went under oath in federal court, the court found the affidavits supporting it weren't honest, that the documents contradicting it had been destroyed or withheld, and that the procedural mechanism for shifting liability onto local people was real enough that Watch Tower deployed it in an actual court filing.

The architecture is real. It just isn't legally legitimate.

Who Ends Up Paying

In 2023, a Hawaii circuit court awarded $40 million to a woman who was sexually abused at age 12 by Kenneth Apana, an elder in the Makana congregation of Jehovah's Witnesses. The abuse occurred in 1992. Court records showed Apana had been sexually assaulting girls for at least 23 years. The verdict held Apana personally accountable for the full amount.

Court records and follow-up reporting from firms tracking the case confirmed that claims against Watch Tower itself resulted in a confidential settlement that resolved before Apana's damages trial.

Apana's name is on the public judgment. Watch Tower's settlement with the same survivor is sealed. The elder absorbs the public verdict. The organization absorbs an undisclosed payment in private.

That is one case. Here is a pattern.

Since 2022, the Pennsylvania Office of the Attorney General has been operating a statewide investigating grand jury into child sexual abuse within Jehovah's Witnesses congregations — one of the most aggressive state-level investigations into the religion ever conducted in the United States. As of mid-2025, that grand jury has produced charges against at least 17 members of Jehovah's Witnesses in Pennsylvania. Some have already been sentenced:

• Norman Aviles Garriga: 11½ to 23 years in state prison, sentenced November 2024
• Luis Manuel Ayala Velasquez: 14 to 46 years
• Mark Brown: 12 to 30 years

These are men, most of them elderly, most of them serving their first prison sentences, going to a Pennsylvania state correctional facility for what is likely the rest of their lives.

What these men did isn't excused by anything in this article. They sexually abused children. The judgments they are serving are theirs, and they earned them. But the structural question remains: when the abuse was happening, what was the system around them designed to do? Was it designed to surface them, refer them, stop them? Or was it designed to handle them internally — file the report in a special blue envelope, send it to New York, tell the elders not to discuss it with the congregation?

It was designed to handle them internally. That's documented in the elders manual. It's documented in the 1997 letter that established the blue envelope database. And it's confirmed by what happened in Australia, where in 2015 a Royal Commission obtained the Australian branch's complete internal abuse records and found 1,006 alleged perpetrators of child sexual abuse — more than 1,800 victims dating back to 1950 — and not a single one had been reported by the organization to the police.

As for the equivalent records in the United States — the post-2001 files Watch Tower has been collecting at headquarters — those still aren't public. Watch Tower spent four years and $2 million in California fighting to keep them out of court. They paid the sanctions rather than produce the records. That choice tells you something on its own.

When the architecture finally fails and the public legal system finally reaches the case, the man going to prison is the local elder. The organization that designed the system that handled him for decades pays a confidential settlement, if it pays anything at all.

The Counterargument — and Why It Falls Short

There is a serious counterargument here, and it deserves airtime.

Religious organizations can't be held liable for the actions of every local volunteer in every local congregation. That's a real principle with real legal weight. The Catholic Church was eventually held liable for what its priests did, but the framework for that liability rested on direct evidence of central involvement — knowledge of specific abusers, decisions about their placement, supervision of clergy as employees. Extending the same framework to Watch Tower requires showing the same level of central operational control.

Local elders, the defense would say, aren't employees. They're not paid, not on a payroll, not supervised the way a Catholic priest is supervised by a bishop. They're local volunteers making local decisions. The organization's central role is doctrinal and publishing. To treat doctrinal authority as operational responsibility for every conversation in every Kingdom Hall is to redefine what a religious organization is.

That is the argument I had to examine carefully before making this case. There is a real version of religious governance in which doctrinal authority and operational responsibility don't track each other one-to-one.

But here's where the defense argument runs into a problem — and the problem isn't my argument. It's Watch Tower's own statements about itself.

Around 2010, Watch Tower directed the Menlo Park congregation in California to dissolve and merge with Redwood City, and to give up their Kingdom Hall — the local meeting place, the building local Witnesses had paid for and maintained. Three of the elders objected. They were removed and eventually disfellowshipped, and over the next two years they filed a series of lawsuits. In open court, Watch Tower's general counsel stood up and described the religion this way:

"I am general counsel for the national organization of Jehovah's Witnesses out of Brooklyn, New York. We are a hierarchical religion structured just like the Catholic Church."

Hold that quote next to the affidavit Brumley filed in Kaycart — the affidavit the Ninth Circuit affirmed had been filed in reckless disregard for the truth — in which he swore the Pennsylvania corporation had no operational role in local congregations.

When Watch Tower wanted to take a Kingdom Hall away from local elders, it was a hierarchical religion structured just like the Catholic Church. When Watch Tower didn't want to be sued by abuse survivors, it was a publishing entity with no jurisdiction over Witnesses in Montana. Same organization. Same decade. Different posture in court, depending on what the litigation required.

There is one more piece of evidence that closes the argument. In July of 1998, Watch Tower's headquarters sent a letter to all bodies of elders in the United States. The letter warned elders that appointing former child abusers to positions like elder or ministerial servant:

"Could result in costly lawsuits. Court officials and lawyers will hold responsible any organization that knowingly appoints former child abusers to positions of trust."

That is Watch Tower in 1998, in a letter to its own elders, stating that the organization is legally responsible for the people it appoints — internally, to its own people. The same organization has spent the last 25 years arguing the opposite in federal court.

The defense argument requires Watch Tower's own internal statements to be wrong. They aren't wrong. The organization knew what its actual relationship to local elders was. It just argued something different in court when arguing something different was what protected its assets.

What the Evidence Shows

Watch Tower has, across roughly 25 years, deliberately constructed an architecture in which doctrinal authority flows downward from headquarters to elders; procedural compliance is enforced at the local level by threat of removal from privileges; financial assets flow upward into central corporate entities; and legal liability is engineered by design to remain with the local elder when something goes wrong.

The 2000 corporate reorganization is on the public record — critics flagged the liability isolation purpose at the time, and Watch Tower used the new corporate boundaries as a litigation defense within 16 years of the restructuring. Shepherd the Flock of God, across all its editions, instructs elders to call the branch before law enforcement. The legal department's advice is documented in federal court — Nunez — as the actual reason a Montana elder didn't report a child abuser. Federal court — Kaycart — found the chief counsel's affidavits in support of the corporate shield were filed in reckless disregard for the truth, with the Ninth Circuit affirming. Watch Tower of New York filed a cross-claim against its own co-defendant elder. And the asymmetry of outcomes — public personal verdicts against elders, sealed settlements with the organization — is documented across multiple states.

But here is what that evidence doesn't prove. It doesn't prove that every elder is innocent of every act they committed. Some elders made horrific personal decisions. Some elders sexually abused children themselves. The men currently serving prison sentences in Pennsylvania earned those sentences. Nothing here is a defense of them.

This is a structural argument. The system around those men was designed in a way that protected the people giving the advice and exposed the people who were taking it. Both things can be true: the men can be guilty of what they did, and the structure can be designed to make sure they're the only ones in the room when the verdict is read.

The 2025 Manual That Changed Nothing

After Kaycart, after the Ninth Circuit affirmance, after the Pennsylvania convictions, after the leaked manuals and the sanctioned affidavits, Watch Tower issued a revised edition of Shepherd the Flock of God on September 1, 2025.

I read it carefully when it leaked, looking for any structural change to the procedure that put Don Herbison on the phone with Watch Tower's legal department in 2004 — any change to the instruction that elders contact the branch office first when a serious matter arises.

It had not changed.

Twenty-five years of litigation, federal court sanctions on the chief counsel, spoliation findings, personal judgments against elders, Pennsylvania prison sentences — and the architecture that produced all of it, the procedural mechanism that puts the elder in the chair where the legally consequential decision gets made, was left structurally in place.

If you're a current elder, consider what that means. When the lawsuits land — and they keep coming — your name is the one in the complaint. The protection of being inside the organization is structural protection for headquarters. It is not structural protection for you. You are the structural absorber. The 2025 revision didn't change that, because changing it would change the whole design.