Watchtower Is Scrambling to Protect Itself from Ex-Jehovah's Witnesses

At the 2025 annual meeting, Governing Body member Jeff Winder stood at a podium in front of a room full of Watchtower dignitaries and elders and asked: "Might some have too much association with ones who have been removed from the congregation?"

Sit with that phrase. A Governing Body member just publicly worried that rank-and-file Jehovah's Witnesses might have too much contact with their disfellowshipped family and friends. About four months after Winder said that, Watchtower's lawyer stood in front of the Norwegian Supreme Court and argued that shunning family members is not a rule, not enforced, and is a personal decision made by each Witness based on their conscience. That is the organization's official legal position. So if there's no rule — if it really is just personal conscience — what would "too much" mean? Too much compared to what standard? Whose threshold is being crossed? Winder's phrasing only makes sense if there's a rule everyone is expected to follow. There is one. Watchtower has been carefully writing their publications to pretend it doesn't exist for decades, and the reason they are scrambling to reinforce those publications right now in 2026 is because they are genuinely afraid of what Jehovah's Witnesses do when they leave.

I was inside the system for 40 years. Every meeting, every convention, every assembly, every field service shift — I was there. In the eight years since I've left, I've gone through their publications obsessively. Not because I'm bitter, but because the paper trail tells a story that the people inside the organization will never see. And once you see it, you can't unsee it.

The Weasel Word Architecture

In the ex-Jehovah's Witness community, we have a name for what I'm about to show you. We call them weasel words.

Weasel words are what happens when an organization writes one thing on paper and operates another way in practice. The sentence on the page sounds reasonable, measured, even generous. A lawyer can hold it up in court and say, "See, we never told anyone to do that. That's a personal choice." But every baptized Witness who reads the exact same sentence understands what they're really supposed to do. The public layer is the legal armor. The operational layer is the actual rule. And the gap between the two is where the weasel lives.

My thesis is this: Watchtower isn't writing their publications this way because they're confused. They're not softening their positions because Jehovah revealed new light. They're writing their publications this way because they're afraid. Specifically, they're afraid of Jehovah's Witnesses who leave the organization, figure out they were harmed, and seek legal accountability.

Ex-Witnesses are suing. Ex-Witnesses are testifying in front of government commissions. Ex-Witnesses are petitioning state administrators. Ex-Witnesses are connecting to district attorneys. And Watchtower's entire corporate strategy right now is to build a paper trail that says, if any court ever looks at it, "We never told anyone to do what you say we told them to do."

What follows are two completely independent lines of evidence that prove this is happening. One is about shunning. The other is about child sexual abuse. Both follow the exact same pattern, and both are being reinforced right now in real time because of specific court cases Watchtower is currently fighting.

Watchtower's Official Position, In Their Own Words

To be fair: let me give you Watchtower's public position in their own words before I start pulling it apart.

On shunning, Watchtower says that people who simply leave the faith are not shunned and that family bonds remain intact. Their website specifically says:

The religious ties he had with his family change, but blood ties remain. The marriage relationship and normal family affections and dealings continue.

On child sexual abuse, Watchtower says that Jehovah's Witnesses abhor child abuse, that elders are trained to respond compassionately to victims, and that anyone who reports abuse to elders is informed that they have the right — or, in the latest edition of their elder manual, that they are free — to report the matter to secular authorities. Their official 2019 Watchtower study article on this topic explicitly stated that elders do not shield perpetrators from the legal consequences of their actions.

If those were the only documents you read — and for most journalists and judges, they are — Watchtower would look like a religion navigating difficult internal matters with care and legal compliance. Members have freedom of conscience. Victims have rights. The organization respects both.

That's the official story. That's what gets quoted in court filings. That's what ends up in newspaper articles. That's what shows up in the frequently asked questions on jw.org.

Here's where the story falls apart.

What Watchtower Actually Teaches in Kingdom Halls

Pick up any Watchtower study edition from the last 15 years — the one that gets read aloud in every Kingdom Hall on Earth — and search the topic of disfellowshipped family members. Here's what you actually find.

Watchtower study edition, October 2017, page 16:

Despite our pain of heart, we must avoid normal contact with a disfellowshipped family member by telephone, text messages, letters, emails, or social media.

Watchtower study edition, January 15, 2013:

Do not look for excuses to associate with a disfellowshipped family member, for example, through email.

Watchtower study edition, July 15, 2011, page 31:

Parents who maintain contact with a disfellowshipped son or daughter are putting Jehovah to the test.

And the Watchtower study edition, September 2021, page 27, featured three detailed experiences about faithful Witnesses who cut off their disfellowshipped sons, mothers, and fathers — held up as positive examples of loyalty to God.

One organization publishes a website saying normal family affections continue. The same organization publishes monthly magazines telling members to cut off disfellowshipped family by phone, text, email, and social media. Both can't be true at the same time — unless the point isn't truth. The point is which audience is reading.

That's the weasel. And once I recognized it in one document, I saw it in every document. This isn't a one-off contradiction. This is architecture, and it has been running institutionally for a very long time.

Inside the Elder Manual: The Operational Rule

Open the elders' manual. It's called Shepherd the Flock of God. It's a confidential document — only elders are supposed to have it, and the rank-and-file are never supposed to see it. Leaked copies have circulated since the first edition came out in 2010, and it has been revised six times since, with the last revision coming in September 2025.

Every one of those editions contains this instruction:

Willful, continued, unnecessary association with disfellowshipped or disassociated non-relatives despite repeated counsel would warrant judicial action.

Non-relatives. One word doing all the heavy lifting.

The same section states that if a publisher is known to have unnecessary association with disfellowshipped relatives who are not in the household, elders should give him counsel — not disfellowship him, no judicial action, just counseling. The manual explicitly says a member would not be dealt with judicially unless:

Despite repeated counsel, an individual persists in associating with a relative who is promoting apostate teachings or wrong conduct.

So on paper, in the one document Watchtower trusts to its own internal judges, associating with a disfellowshipped family member is not a disfellowshipping offense on its own. And that is exactly what Watchtower's lawyers point to when they go to court.

The Canada Supreme Court Case and the 2022 Norway Letter

In May 2018, the Supreme Court of Canada heard Highwood Congregation of Jehovah's Witnesses v. Wall. Randy Wall, a realtor in Calgary, was disfellowshipped. His 15-year-old daughter had been disfellowshipped before him — the crisis that led to his drinking, which is what got him disfellowshipped. His entire family was required to shun him, and half of his real estate clients were Witnesses who refused to do business with him anymore.

Watchtower's lawyers argued before the highest court in Canada that the organization does not sever family ties. Only spiritual fellowship changes. They pointed to the exact same elder manual language. They won — on jurisdictional grounds, not on the merits. The court decided it wasn't allowed to get involved in a religion's internal discipline, so it never actually ruled on whether Watchtower's practices had harmed Randy Wall. Watchtower walked out with a win without the court ever examining what they actually do inside the congregation.

In February 2022, the Norwegian Jehovah's Witnesses, facing deregistration by the state administrator of Oslo and Viken, sent a formal letter describing their practices. I'm quoting verbatim because you need to hear this sentence:

The religious community does not control, nor can it control, whether those who belong to congregations answer calls from someone who has withdrawn, drink coffee with them, eat a meal with them, or greet them on the street. Each individual in the congregation who limits or ceases to socialize with a person who has withdrawn does so voluntarily and of his own volition based on their own religious conscience.

Voluntarily and of his own volition. As if there's no rule, no expectation, no congregational pressure, no consequence for breaking it. As if the study articles telling Witnesses to cut off disfellowshipped family by phone, text, and email — the ones being read aloud in Kingdom Halls the exact same month that letter was being drafted — don't exist. As if the elders' manual doesn't say that non-relatives will be brought up on judicial charges if they associate with disfellowshipped people.

And then you have Governing Body member Jeff Winder at the 2025 annual meeting: "Might some have too much association with ones who have been removed from the congregation?"

That sentence is an admission. It's an admission that the rule exists, that there's a threshold everyone is expected to know, and that the Governing Body is worried people might be crossing it.

The Conviction That Watchtower's Strategy Could Not Prevent

Watchtower publishes two layers of language on shunning. The outer layer sounds reasonable, points to freedom of conscience, and goes into legal filings. The inner layer gives the operational rule that every Witness follows and gets read aloud in every Kingdom Hall. That's one line of evidence — one doctrine, one strategy. But if it were isolated to shunning, you might tell yourself Watchtower just has a complicated internal position on a complicated topic. It isn't isolated. The exact same strategy shows up somewhere far more serious.

Shawn Sheffer was, until very recently, an active Jehovah's Witness attending the Zelienople Kingdom Hall in Butler County, Pennsylvania. In January 2025, a jury found him guilty on seven counts of raping and sexually assaulting a girl identified in court only as K.S. The abuse began when she was 7 years old and continued until she was 12. K.S. testified that Sheffer raped her between 30 and 50 times. On June 3, 2025, he was sentenced to 14 to 34 years in state prison.

Here's the part that matters. The reason Shawn Sheffer was convicted is because his own brother, Brandon Sheffer, left the Jehovah's Witness organization. After Brandon left, he heard about the Pennsylvania Attorney General's grand jury investigation into Jehovah's Witnesses, picked up the phone, and called them. According to court reporting, neither the elders who knew about the abuse nor any of the family members still in the organization ever reported Shawn Sheffer to law enforcement — not in 1995 when the abuse began, not in 2000 when it ended, not in any of the years since. The conviction happened because a man left the organization and connected with the state prosecutor.

That is exactly what Watchtower is afraid of. That is the thing the entire corporate legal strategy is built to try and prevent.

"Call the Branch Office First": What the Elder Manual Actually Says

The same Shepherd the Flock of God manual. The 2010 edition, chapter 12, paragraph 18:

You should immediately call the branch office for direction if you learn of an accusation of child abuse, regardless of the age of the victim now or at the time of the alleged abuse.

Not the police. The branch office. That's the organization's headquarters — the building that houses the service department, the writing department, and the legal department. An elder calling about a child abuse accusation can be routed to any of those, and in abuse cases the legal department is frequently involved.

That instruction has appeared in every edition of the manual for at least 15 years. The 2019 and 2020 editions evolved the language:

To ensure that elders comply with child abuse reporting laws, two elders should immediately call the legal department for legal advice when the elders learn of an accusation of child abuse.

In 2016, the Oregon law firm Du Mass and Von, which has litigated child abuse cases against Watchtower for years, analyzed a released policy document on this subject and counted at least 17 separate instructions for elders to call the legal department. Reporting to secular authorities was mentioned only briefly, and only in the context of jurisdictions where mandatory reporting laws already legally required it.

"You Are Free to Report": A One-Word Rewrite

Watch what happens to the language describing a victim's rights between editions.

In the 2019 and 2020 editions, when an elder receives an allegation, the elder is supposed to clearly inform the person reporting that they have the right to report the matter to secular authorities.

In the September 2025 edition — the most recent revision — one word was changed. Right was replaced with free. The instruction now reads that anyone reporting should be clearly informed that they are free to report the matter to secular authorities.

The change is tiny, but it's a master class in weasel words. "You have the right to report" is a statement about moral entitlement — you can do this and nobody is allowed to stop you. "You are free to report" is a statement about permission — somebody is allowing this; somebody could potentially not allow it. The phrase quietly positions Watchtower as the entity granting the freedom, which is a softer, more defensible legal posture. If this ever shows up in court, the lawyer's argument is: "See, we told them they were free to report. We didn't prevent anyone from doing anything."

What Actually Happens When You Report Abuse to Elders

The public layer says victims are free to report. The operational layer is what actually happens when someone walks into a Kingdom Hall back room and tells two elders they were abused as a child.

Those two elders pick up the phone and call the branch office in New York. They don't call the police. The legal department then determines, based on the specific mandatory reporting laws of the victim's state or county, whether the elders have a legal obligation to pass the information along. If they don't, in most cases the allegation goes into an internal database — the existence of which was revealed at the Australian Royal Commission in 2015 — and the matter is handled as an internal judicial proceeding.

Behind that operational reality sits a cultural reality every Witness knows without being told. Bringing a matter to the authorities is treated as bringing reproach upon Jehovah's name. You're not just accusing an abuser; you're putting the organization on trial. You're handing ammunition to apostates. You're making Jehovah look bad.

I'm not speculating about this. At the 2015 Australian Royal Commission into child sexual abuse, a survivor testified that an elder discouraged her from going to the commission by asking: "Do you really want to drag Jehovah's name through the mud?"

Survivor Chessa Manion told NBC News in 2018 that when her parents told elders about her rape at age five, the response was: "Let bygones be bygones for Jehovah's sake. Don't ruin his name by taking this public."

And in 2015, also at the Australian Royal Commission, acting Watchtower Australian branch overseer Terry O'Brien was asked directly by Commissioner Nicholas Weakland whether Jehovah's Witnesses, as an organization, would report child abuse to the police when they learned of it. O'Brien answered no. He said:

It is the victim's absolute right and privilege to decide whether they want the matter reported.

Read that alongside the Norwegian letter: each individual…does so voluntarily and of his own volition. It's the same sentence. It's the same weasel, applied to a different doctrine. Victims have rights. Witnesses have conscience. Each individual decides voluntarily. Watchtower doesn't control. Watchtower doesn't require. Watchtower respects the freedom of the individual.

The exact same two-layer legal strategy Watchtower uses to insulate itself from shunning lawsuits is also what it uses to insulate itself from child sexual abuse lawsuits.

The Best Defense of Watchtower's Position — and Why It Fails

To be fair: defenders of Watchtower will say the organization genuinely has moved toward greater protection of children. The elder manual now contains more explicit instructions about mandatory reporting. The branch office does tell elders to report when required by law. Watchtower has published articles condemning child abuse as a gross sin. The May 2019 Watchtower study article explicitly described child sexual abuse as a "especially repugnant wicked deed." The organization's official position is that it does not shield perpetrators from legal consequences.

That's the strongest version of the defense. It doesn't hold up against the evidence.

The Australian Royal Commission obtained internal case files from the Australia branch of Jehovah's Witnesses. Between 1950 and 2015, that branch had records of 1,006 alleged perpetrators of child sexual abuse associated with more than 1,800 victims. Not one of those cases was reported by the organization to police. The commission's own officers had to refer information on 514 alleged perpetrators to police because the organization hadn't. That's the Australia branch alone — one country, 65 years, more than a thousand abusers in the organization's internal database, not one of whom the organization itself turned over. Jehovah's Witnesses are in hundreds of countries. How large do you think this problem might be globally?

In 2016 in Ireland, two Jehovah's Witness elders were removed from their positions as punishment by Watchtower for reporting a child molester to the police. The London branch legal department had told them not to. That's according to BBC reporting. That doesn't look like a religion trying to comply with the law. It looks like an organization enforcing an unwritten rule that contradicts its own public statements.

The proof that the pattern is still operational in 2026 is Shawn Sheffer. At least two elders in the Zelienople congregation were told about the allegations back in 2016 — confirmed in trial testimony. Multiple family members also heard about them over the years. Nobody reported Sheffer for over two decades. The system didn't protect K.S. in 1995. The system didn't protect her in 2005 or 2015. The only thing that broke that silence was a Jehovah's Witness leaving the organization and finding the Pennsylvania Attorney General.

The Four-Step Playbook

The mechanism operates in four steps. Once you see it, you'll recognize it in every major Watchtower legal battle.

Step one. Watchtower faces external legal pressure — a lawsuit, a government inquiry, a deregistration threat, a grand jury investigation, something where a court or regulator is about to examine a specific practice.

Step two. Watchtower publishes a softer version of the relevant doctrine in a public-facing document. The softer language includes hedges, qualifications, conscience language, rights language, or freedom language. The public version sounds reasonable and defensible.

Step three. The operational reality inside the congregation doesn't change. Study articles continue teaching the original stricter position. Elders continue enforcing it. Cultural pressure around bringing reproach on Jehovah's name continues to operate. Members who cross the unwritten threshold continue to lose privileges, face judicial committees, or get disfellowshipped themselves.

Step four. When the court case finally arrives, Watchtower's lawyers hold up the softer public document and argue that the organization never required any of the behavior the plaintiff is describing. It was a personal decision. It was a matter of conscience. It was a right. It was a freedom. The organization respects individual autonomy. The organization does not enforce.

You can apply that four-step model to Paul v. Watchtower in 1987. You can apply it to Bulgaria in 1998. You can apply it to the Australian Royal Commission in 2015. You can apply it to Highwood v. Wall in Canada in 2018. You can apply it to Jehovah's Witnesses v. Norway in 2024. And you can see the same pattern across the child abuse cases Watchtower has faced, from the Australian Royal Commission testimony to the Pennsylvania grand jury investigation still unfolding today.

The 1987 Court Win That Wrote the Template

The template was written in April 1988, less than 10 months after Watchtower won a landmark federal court case in the United States.

In 1975, a woman named Janice Paul disassociated herself from the Jehovah's Witnesses. She wrote a letter and resigned. Years later, she returned to her hometown to visit family. Childhood friends refused to speak to her. At a Tupperware party at the home of a fellow Witness, she was informed she couldn't stay because the elders had instructed the congregation not to speak with her. She sued the organization in Washington state, alleging emotional harm from the practice of shunning.

On June 10, 1987, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Paul v. Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society. Watchtower won. The court held that shunning is a religiously protected practice and that the emotional harms Janice Paul suffered were not enough to override the First Amendment. Lawyers still point to that decision almost 40 years later, including in briefs filed with the US Supreme Court as recently as 2024.

But here's what Watchtower did less than a year after winning. The April 15, 1988 Watchtower ran an article titled "Discipline That Can Yield Peaceable Fruit." That article contains a statement Watchtower has been using in its legal defense ever since:

A man who is disfellowshipped or who disassociates himself may still live at home with his Christian wife and faithful children. Since his being disfellowshipped does not end their blood ties or marriage relationship, normal family affections and dealings can continue.

Normal family affections and dealings can continue. That framework and that specific phrase has been echoed in Watchtower's public statements for almost four decades. Watchtower's lawyers made essentially the same argument to the Canadian Supreme Court in 2018. The Norwegian Jehovah's Witnesses rephrased the same idea in their 2022 letter to the state administrator. And the language sits on the frequently asked questions section of jw.org today. One sentence written in 1988 still doing the public-facing work in 2026.

Bulgaria 1998: The Same Playbook, A Different Doctrine

Bulgaria in 1998 is the clearest international example of the pattern applied to a completely different doctrine.

In an agreement brokered through the European Commission of Human Rights, Watchtower signed a document stating that Jehovah's Witnesses would have free choice in medical treatment, including blood transfusions, without any control or sanction on the part of the association. That language helped the organization win recognition as a registered religion in Bulgaria.

Within weeks of signing, Watchtower issued a press release explicitly stating:

The terms of the agreement do not reflect a change in the doctrine of Jehovah's Witnesses.

Anyone taking a blood transfusion would be considered disassociated — no judicial committee needed, they were simply out. Same punishment. Same shunning. Different paperwork. Freedom of conscience. Personal decision. Same sentence, different country, two decades before Norway.

Why Watchtower Cannot Simply Tell the Truth: Theocratic Warfare

The obvious question at this point is why Watchtower doesn't just fix the problem. Why not change the doctrine honestly — say clearly and publicly, "We've looked at this, we were wrong, we're changing it, here's the new rule"? That would end the lawsuits. That would end the European court cases. That would end the grand jury investigations.

The answer lives in a specific theological framework that Watchtower has been teaching its members for 70 years. It's called theocratic warfare.

Watchtower teaches that the entire world — every government, every court, every non-Witness institution, every secular authority, every other religion — is under the direct control of Satan the Devil. They back this up with one scripture they quote constantly, 1 John 5:19:

The whole world is lying in the power of the wicked one.

That sentence appears throughout Watchtower literature. It's in the field service handbook Reasoning from the Scriptures, still in circulation and still on jw.org. Under the entry titled "Government," that book puts it in black and white: every human government is part of the political system that the Bible clearly says is under the control of Satan. Not some governments. Not corrupt governments. Every government — including the court system of your country, including the police, including the regulators. All of it.

So when a Jehovah's Witness looks at a Norwegian court, or a Pennsylvania grand jury, or an Australian Royal Commission, or the European Court of Human Rights, they don't see a neutral authority trying to weigh evidence and do justice. They see Satan's institutions. They see wolves. They see the enemy.

The Doctrine in Watchtower's Own Words

Back in the 1950s, Watchtower formalized the idea that when God's people are up against Satan's world, deception isn't just permitted — it's a Christian virtue. The Watchtower of February 1, 1956 said this:

It is proper to cover over our arrangements for the work that God commands us to do. If the wolfish foes draw wrong conclusions from our maneuvers to outwit them, no harm has been done to them by the harmless sheep, innocent in their motives as doves.

The following year, the Watchtower of May 1, 1957 ran an article titled "Use Theocratic War Strategy." It told the story of a Jehovah's Witness woman in East Germany who swapped her red blouse for a green one in a hallway so that a communist officer would believe her when she said she hadn't seen a woman in a red blouse. Then it explained the principle:

Lies told to harm others are sin, but hiding the truth which he is not entitled to know from an enemy does not harm him. So in time of spiritual warfare, it is proper to misdirect the enemy by hiding the truth.

Who is the enemy? Anyone Watchtower considers to be outside God's organization. Who decides whether someone is entitled to the truth? Watchtower does.

And Watchtower's own internal encyclopedia, Insight on the Scriptures, volume two, defines lying this way:

Saying something false to a person who is entitled to know the truth and doing so with the intent to deceive or to injure him.

Entitled to know the truth. That's the escape hatch. If the person asking isn't entitled — in Watchtower's framework — telling them something false isn't technically lying. It's theocratic war strategy.

From inside this framework, a Watchtower lawyer who tells a Norwegian Supreme Court justice that shunning is a personal conscience decision, not an enforced rule, isn't lying. He's protecting God's organization from Satan's court. The court isn't entitled to the truth because the court is Satan's instrument. The truth is holy. Protecting the holy from the unclean is an act of faithfulness.

A fair objection: Watchtower doesn't publish articles titled "Use Theocratic War Strategy" anymore. The last article with that blunt framing was from 1957. Does that mean the doctrine's been dropped?

The framework hasn't been retracted. The Insight on the Scriptures book, with its "entitled to know the truth" definition of lying, is their currently published reference work. The Reasoning book's government entry, teaching that every secular authority is under Satan's control, is still on jw.org. The foundation hasn't changed. What's changed is that the organization no longer names the doctrine explicitly in its study articles. But the architecture remains. When an organization's behavior in court matches a doctrine it published openly in the 1950s, still references in its current reference works, but stopped naming out loud — that's not a retraction. That's a playbook that learned to operate quietly.

This is why weasel words aren't a bug. They're a feature. Not a moral failure by a religion that fell short of its ideals — a moral success, from inside the system, by a religion doing exactly what its theology tells it to do.

Tested Under Oath: Hayden Covington, 1954

This isn't abstract theory. It has been tested under oath.

In 1954, in a Scottish court case called Walls v. the Lord Advocate, the Watchtower Society's then-chief legal counsel, Hayden Covington, was cross-examined on the record. He admitted under oath that Jehovah's Witnesses are required to believe prophecies the organization had issued, even when those prophecies later turned out to be wrong. He admitted that a member who openly said a specific prophecy was wrong would be disfellowshipped. He was asked directly whether the organization's unity was based on an enforced acceptance of false prophecy. His answer: "That is conceded to be true."

He was asked whether a person who breaks that unity would be worthy of death. He answered: "I will answer yes, unhesitatingly."

That is Watchtower's own chief lawyer, under oath, in a British court, 72 years ago. The theological machinery isn't new. It has been running the whole time.

Norway's Supreme Court, February 2026

From February 5 through February 9, 2026, the Norwegian Supreme Court heard the final appeal in the deregistration case of Jehovah's Witnesses versus the state of Norway. The Norwegian government had deregistered the organization in 2022 over the practice of shunning, cutting off roughly 1.5 million US dollars in annual state subsidies and removing the organization's legal right to perform marriages. Lower courts split — the Oslo District Court ruled against Watchtower, the Borgarting Court of Appeal reversed in Watchtower's favor. The state of Norway appealed to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court agreed to hear it.

On February 6, 2026, Watchtower's lead attorney, Anders Ryssdal, stood before the Norwegian Supreme Court and argued: "It is not a legal call. It is not enforced. It is a personal decision." He also acknowledged during the same hearing that the organization has spoken too much about the term translated as avoid in its publications.

The state's attorney pointed out that this language has been used for decades, that Jehovah's Witnesses publications use the word avoid to describe how Witnesses should treat disfellowshipped members, that the elders' manual contains the unnecessary association provisions, and that the practice is directly taught to every baptized member.

During the earlier lower court proceedings, prosecutors played a 2017 Jehovah's Witnesses video titled "Loyally Uphold Jehovah's Judgments, Shun Unrepentant Wrongdoers." The video — which had been shown at conventions worldwide and hosted on jw.org for years — dramatized a young woman named Sonia being disfellowshipped and shunned by her entire family, who refused to take her phone calls, held up as a positive example of loyalty to Jehovah. The video was quietly deleted from jw.org in 2024, mid-litigation, with no announcement and no explanation.

At the February 2026 Supreme Court hearings, when the state submitted a web page printout still referencing the video, the Jehovah's Witness representative testified that it was "never meant as any kind of instruction, advice, or any learning for the common JW from Watch Tower. It was just a random example showing how some families would choose to handle things."

A video produced by the organization, broadcast to millions of Witnesses worldwide, quietly deleted mid-litigation, and then minimized as a random example in a European courtroom. Theocratic warfare at work.

The hearings concluded February 9, 2026. Avoidjw.org's reporting at the time indicated a verdict should arrive within approximately eight weeks. Ryssdal's own earlier prediction, given on a podcast in November 2025, was that the ruling would come in mid-March. As of April 2026, ten weeks had passed since the hearings ended with no verdict issued. A ten-week delay on a Norwegian Supreme Court ruling is not unusual, but there are three plausible explanations. First, the court is fractured, and a split decision takes longer to write. Second, the court is crafting a carefully limited ruling — not a clean win or loss, but a legal clarification designed to send the case back to the administrative layer with guidance. Third, and most likely: the Norwegian Supreme Court knows that if Watchtower loses, Watchtower will file a complaint with the European Court of Human Rights. Ryssdal himself, during the February hearings, said openly that "the last word lies with Strasbourg." That's not a throwaway line. Watchtower has said on the record, through their own lead attorney, that they are prepared to take this to Strasbourg if they don't get the ruling they want domestically. Every word of the Norwegian Supreme Court's decision has to be written knowing it could be scrutinized by the highest European human rights tribunal.

Every Publication Since Has Been Building Tomorrow's Defense

While the Norway case moved through the courts, Watchtower was simultaneously rewriting its publications.

In March 2024, 11 days after losing in the Oslo District Court, the Governing Body issued a letter to elders worldwide — letter S-395 — softening how disfellowshipped people could be greeted at meetings. Cosmetic change; operational rule unchanged.

In August 2024, the Watchtower study edition announced that the word disfellowshipped would no longer be used. Going forward, the term would be removed from the congregation. Identical doctrine, softer vocabulary.

In 2024, the 2017 shunning video disappeared from jw.org.

In September 2025, the new edition of Shepherd the Flock of God was released, with "right to report" softened to "free to report."

In October 2025, Jeff Winder's annual meeting talk acknowledged the unwritten rule by asking whether some members might have too much association with those removed from the congregation.

And then there is the Watchtower study edition scheduled for the week of September 28 through October 4, 2026, containing an article titled "Help Others Come to Know Jehovah." On page 21:

We want our Bible student to dedicate himself not to us, not to a set of teachings, not to an organization, but to Jehovah.

Not to an organization. That is a direct contradiction of the baptism question every Jehovah's Witness has had to answer publicly for the last 40 years — the second question of which asks whether the candidate understands that by being baptized they are becoming identified with Jehovah's organization.

It's also exactly the kind of sentence that could be held up in front of the European Court of Human Rights: look, we don't require members to be loyal to the organization. The organization isn't the focus. The weasel words being written today are the legal defenses of tomorrow.

What Watchtower Is Really Afraid Of

Watchtower isn't quietly softening its positions because of theological growth. It isn't reforming out of compassion for its members. It isn't responding to new light from Jehovah.

Watchtower is scrambling. They're scrambling because eight years of Norwegian litigation is ending in a Supreme Court ruling that could go against them. They're scrambling because the Pennsylvania Attorney General has a grand jury that keeps handing down indictments sparked by Jehovah's Witnesses who left the organization and picked up the phone. They're scrambling because the Australian Royal Commission, the New Zealand Royal Commission, the British IICSA inquiry, the Belgian Court of Cassation, and the Hamburg Regional Court have all pulled at different threads of the same two-layer fabric. They're scrambling because the architecture they built in 1988 — the architecture that was meant to last forever — is finally being read by courts that have the evidence to see through it.

And what is the evidence in every one of those courts? Their own publications. Their own videos. Their own internal documents. Their own people who left the organization, learned they were harmed, and decided to speak.

If Watchtower loses in Norway, the next stop is Strasbourg, and Watchtower knows the European Court of Human Rights has in past cases ruled in their favor on religious autonomy grounds — so they're not bluffing. If Watchtower wins, the case ends at the domestic level but the publications keep coming, the strategy keeps running, and the next country is already forming its own concerns. In France, the state anti-cult agency MIVILUDES has been accusing Jehovah's Witnesses of harmful practices for years, and after multiple courtroom losses, France passed a new anti-cult law in April 2024 that lowers the evidentiary bar and expands prosecutorial tools. The playbook isn't ending. It's accelerating.

The people Watchtower is afraid of aren't critics or apostates in the cartoonish sense the organization teaches its members to imagine. They're Brandon Sheffer. They're K.S. They're Janice Paul, 39 years ago, and every plaintiff since. They're the Norwegian ex-Witnesses who testified in Oslo. They're the elders in Ireland who reported to the police despite the legal department telling them not to. They are ordinary Jehovah's Witnesses who left the organization, realized that what happened to them wasn't their fault, and figured out that the corporation that caused it can be held legally accountable. Because free people tell the truth. And the truth is in the paper trail.