Will This Lawsuit Stop Jehovah's Witnesses From Shunning?

A forensic psychiatrist describing what happens to a child who has been turned against the safe parent put it this way: when a child rejects a parent not because that parent is dangerous, but because they have been manipulated into it, that child has murdered part of themselves—and then is forced to live with it. The worst consequences don't show up right away. They show up years later, when that child becomes an adult and starts to realize what was taken from them.

I spent 40 years inside the Jehovah's Witness organization. I've watched that exact thing happen to families over and over: parents shunning their own children, children taught to cut off a mother or father who left, families destroyed not by one manipulative parent but by an institution that demands it. For decades, every attempt to hold Watch Tower legally accountable has failed. The First Amendment, religious freedom, case closed. But those lawsuits were asking the wrong question. There is a legal theory—built from case law, clinical science, and new legislation—that sidesteps the wall that has blocked every previous attempt. What follows is my analysis of that theory, drawn from clinical psychology journals, family law case records, three landmark court rulings, state legislation, and international court decisions. I'm not an attorney or a psychologist, and nothing here constitutes legal or psychological advice. I lived this system from the inside for four decades and have spent the last eight years researching it from the outside.

Watch Tower's Official Position—and the 1987 Ruling That Closed the Door

If you ask a Jehovah's Witness about shunning, you'll hear something like this: it is a sincere religious practice rooted in scripture—First Corinthians 5:13,

remove the wicked person from among yourselves

—and members who leave or are removed can still attend services. Watch Tower's own website states that when a family member is disfellowshipped,

blood ties remain and normal family affections and dealings continue.

That sounds reasonable. For decades, courts accepted it at face value.

In 1987, the Ninth Circuit ruled in Paul v. Watch Tower that shunning is protected religious exercise under the First Amendment. The court acknowledged that the harms plaintiff Janice Paul suffered were

real and not insubstantial

—but held that allowing her to recover damages would unconstitutionally restrict free exercise of religion. For almost 40 years, that ruling has been Watch Tower's legal armor. Every time someone asks whether Watch Tower can be sued for shunning, people point to Paul and say no. Game over.

But Paul is not the only case, and the cases that went the other direction tell a very different story about where the First Amendment wall actually is.

The Clinical Framework: Parental Alienation as Child Abuse

There is a field of clinical psychology that examines exactly the pattern Watch Tower produces in families: a child systematically turned against a safe parent through loyalty manipulation. Specialists don't call it a religious practice. They call it parental alienation, and they classify it as psychological abuse.

A PIMO contact shared with me a documentary featuring multiple forensic psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, and researchers—all describing the mechanics of how this system works. They were talking about custody disputes between divorced parents, not Jehovah's Witnesses. But every pattern they identified, every diagnostic marker, every behavioral signal, described the system I lived inside for 40 years. The specialists haven't made the Watch Tower connection explicitly. But once you lay the two systems side by side, the overlap is impossible to ignore—and that overlap is the first building block of a lawsuit that might actually work.

The Four Diagnostic Criteria

Parental alienation has four specific diagnostic criteria. All four must be present. The bar is set high deliberately, so that genuinely abused children are never misidentified as alienated from an abusive parent.

1. The child is rejecting a parent for a non-protective reason—that parent is safe, and the child is not in danger.
2. The rejection is unreasonable given the actual relationship history.
3. There is an alienating influence: another parent or authority figure is actively undermining the child's relationship with the rejected parent.
4. The child is strongly aligned with the alienating party—not merely closer to one parent, but pathologically enmeshed, defending them with unusual intensity.

Specialists explain how this plays out: the child's greatest anxiety is that the favored parent will become emotionally unavailable if the child shows any loyalty to the rejected parent. So the child learns to perform rejection. They mirror the alienator's language, parrot the alienator's accusations, and do it with a vehemence that looks genuine to anyone who doesn't know what they're looking at.

One critical warning from these specialists: non-specialists—therapists, judges, lawyers who haven't trained specifically in this area—almost always mistake pathological enmeshment for healthy bonding. They see a parent and child sitting together, the parent rubbing the child's back, the child praising that parent and condemning the other, and they walk out of the interview thinking it's a great relationship. They don't see the cage.

A forensic psychologist also noted that alienating parents use the same loyalty-inducing strategies as people who groom children for sexual abuse—isolation, progressive commitment, emotional dependency, framing the outside world as dangerous. That is not a description of one bad parent in a custody fight. That is a description of a system.

How Watch Tower's System Matches Every Marker

The Loyalty Bind

The core mechanism of parental alienation is the loyalty conflict: the child's deepest fear is that the favored parent will become emotionally unavailable if the child shows any connection to the rejected parent. Watch Tower produces this at institutional scale—and more sophisticatedly than most people realize.

Watch Tower's internal manual for elders, The Shepherd the Flock of God, states that when a family member's wrongdoing is known to believing relatives, those relatives

will likely determine to limit family associations severely, viewing the relative as bad association.

Watch Tower doesn't need to issue a direct command to shun your own child. What it does is more effective and more insidious. It creates a theological and social environment where every Jehovah's Witness parent arrives at that conclusion on their own. The total social annihilation of a disfellowshipped person—every friendship, every relationship built inside the organization, explicitly severed—creates the pressure environment. The Armageddon theology tells family members that the disfellowshipped person is under divine judgment. The bad association doctrine tells them contact is spiritually dangerous. And the implicit threat to their own standing, privileges, reputation, and ultimately their own survival at Armageddon seals it.

The organization sets the conditions, and families enforce the shunning themselves. Watch Tower can then point to that compliance as evidence it was a voluntary personal choice. This is the parental alienation parallel at its most precise: the most effective alienators don't issue direct orders. They create an environment where the child concludes on their own that rejection is necessary, and believes it was their own idea. Watch Tower does exactly that at institutional scale. The loyalty bind isn't just similar to parental alienation—it's parental alienation with existential stakes bolted on and plausible deniability engineered in.

The Armageddon theology reaches children early. In a peer-reviewed study published in PMC, one former Jehovah's Witness reported knowing since the age of five that they would die at Armageddon. Researcher Jerry Bergman, who studied JW custody cases across multiple academic papers, documented children telling their own non-JW father that unless he became a Witness, he would be destroyed at Armageddon and that only they and their mother would survive. In a Kansas custody case, the court found the child believed that people who celebrated Christmas are going to die. One non-JW father described his five-year-old daughter telling him she was afraid he would die at Armageddon because he wasn't a Witness. These are not isolated anecdotes. They are a pattern documented across decades of custody cases, academic research, and first-hand accounts—children absorbing a theology that teaches them their other parent is marked for destruction by God.

How Alienation Presents in Court

Parental alienation specialists describe how the alienating party typically presents in legal proceedings as cool, calm, charming, and convincing, while the targeted parent presents as anxious, agitated, angry, or afraid. Consider how Watch Tower presents in a courtroom: measured, Bible-focused, articulate, with a full-time, well-funded legal team. On the other side stands an ex-JW who has lost their family, their friends, their entire social network—emotional, desperate, coming across as the unstable one. Without specialty-level training, courts will read this situation backwards every time.

The Grooming Pipeline: Enjoy Life Forever, Lesson by Lesson

Watch Tower's Bible study program follows the same progressive commitment pattern that parental alienation specialists identify as characteristic of predatory recruitment. You can trace it step by step through Enjoy Life Forever: An Interactive Bible Course, the 60-lesson curriculum that every JW Bible student works through today.

Stage one: initial warmth. The publication opens with lessons about how the Bible gives hope, answers life's questions, and offers comfort. JW.org explicitly tells prospective students they are not obligated in any way to become a Witness. The early lessons are about God's love, the promise of paradise, and answers to life's big questions. Nothing threatening, nothing that would set off alarm bells. Parental alienation specialists would recognize this immediately as the love-bombing phase: establishing trust, meeting emotional needs, creating a bond before any demands are introduced.

Stage two: gradual isolation. Lesson 13 teaches that all religions other than Jehovah's Witnesses are false religion—collectively called Babylon the Great—and that God will destroy them. Lesson 48, titled "Choose Your Friends Wisely," teaches that people who don't love Jehovah are bad association, stating directly:

Close friends outside the congregation can cause us to draw away from Jehovah.

The student is taught to view their pre-existing relationships through a new lens. Friends, family members, even a spouse who doesn't share their new beliefs become spiritually dangerous. Lesson 58, "Remain Loyal to Jehovah," warns students to stay away from apostates—former members who criticize the organization—and instructs them not to read their materials, visit their websites, or consume their content. The student's information environment is being narrowed at the same time their social world is being restructured.

Stage three: escalating demands. Lesson 10 encourages meeting attendance. Lesson 14 introduces active participation—singing, commenting, preparing for meetings. The publication's appendix then lays out the requirements for becoming an unbaptized publisher: regular Bible study, prayer, meeting attendance, withdrawal from any other religious or political organization, living according to Watch Tower standards, and willingness to preach to others. Baptism requires all of the above plus regular participation in the preaching work and a commitment to support and follow the direction of the Governing Body—forever. Each step feels like a natural progression, but each step deepens the investment, narrows the exit options, and increases the social cost of leaving.

Stage four: fear installation. Woven throughout the entire curriculum is the Armageddon theology. Lesson 3 teaches that we are living in the last days. Later lessons teach that God's kingdom will soon destroy all human governments and all wicked people at the war of Armageddon. A student who doesn't progress is described internally as "not rightly disposed for everlasting life"—meaning, in Watch Tower theology, they will be destroyed. By the time a student reaches baptism, they have internalized a worldview where leaving equals death—not metaphorical death, but actual destruction by God. The exit cost isn't just social. It's existential.

Compare this to what parental alienation specialists describe: the most effective alienators create an environment where the target concludes on their own that rejection of the outside world is necessary, and believes it was their own idea. The Enjoy Life Forever curriculum does exactly that, lesson by lesson, over the course of months or a year.

Reunification therapists also describe how alienated children, freed from the loyalty conflict by a court order, reconnect with the rejected parent almost instantly—like flipping a switch. The rejection wasn't real; it was performed under duress. Every ex-JW who has woken up knows that feeling precisely. The moment the organizational hold breaks, the shunning impulse evaporates.

The Legal Graveyard: Why Every Lawsuit Failed

Clinical science alone doesn't win lawsuits. To understand why the theory I'm going to describe might actually work, you need to understand why every previous attempt failed—and what each failure revealed about where the wall actually is.

***Paul v. Watch Tower*, 1987 (Ninth Circuit).** Janice Paul was raised as a Witness, left, and was shunned. She sued for defamation, invasion of privacy, and emotional distress. The court ruled that shunning is protected religious exercise under the First Amendment. The harms were real but couldn't justify restricting free exercise. For almost 40 years, that has been Watch Tower's legal armor.

Belgium. A criminal court convicted Jehovah's Witnesses of incitement to discrimination in 2021. The court of appeal reversed it. Belgium's highest court confirmed in 2023 that shunning is lawful.

Norway. In 2022, Norway revoked Watch Tower's registration as a religious community—the first time Norway had ever deregistered a faith group—based on shunning practices that exposed children to psychological harm. The Oslo District Court upheld the deregistration in January 2024. Just eleven days after that ruling, on March 15, 2024, the Governing Body announced changes to their shunning terminology, stopping use of the word "disfellowshipping" and slightly softening the greeting policy. The underlying system remained intact. In March 2025, the Court of Appeal reversed the lower court's decision, and Watch Tower was awarded over $800,000 in legal costs. The Norwegian government appealed to the Supreme Court, and that case was heard in early 2026 with the outcome still pending. Whatever it decides, the evidentiary record built during these proceedings—expert testimony, former member accounts, clinical documentation—becomes part of the global foundation for future litigation.

And every time someone asks whether Watch Tower can be sued for shunning, people point to Paul and say no—case closed. But two cases that went the other direction establish that the First Amendment wall isn't where most people think it is.

The Two Cases That Cracked the Wall

Bear v. Reformed Mennonite Church (1975)

Twelve years before Paul, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court decided Bear v. Reformed Mennonite Church. Robert Bear was shunned by the Reform Mennonites after questioning doctrine. His wife and children were ordered to shun him completely. His farming business collapsed because no members would work for him. The lower court dismissed his case on First Amendment grounds. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court reversed it. The court ruled that shunning could be so severe as to interfere with the state's compelling interest in maintaining marriage and family relationships, and that a tort claim for alienation of affection could proceed.

In 1975, a state supreme court said: the First Amendment does not automatically shield you when your shunning practice destroys a family.

Gwen v. Church of Christ of Collinsville (1989)

Two years after Paul, the Oklahoma Supreme Court decided Gwen v. Church of Christ of Collinsville. Marion Gwen was a Church of Christ member. When elders confronted her about her personal life, she wrote a letter withdrawing her membership and asked them not to mention her name publicly. They ignored her withdrawal, continued disciplining her as if she were still a member, and read a letter about her private life to four other congregations. A jury awarded her damages. On appeal, the Oklahoma Supreme Court made a distinction that changes everything.

The court held that discipline of current members is constitutionally protected—but once someone withdraws their membership, the church loses its First Amendment shield. Continuing to impose discipline on a former member who has clearly resigned can constitute intentional infliction of emotional distress, the tort of outrage. The key passage from that ruling:

No real freedom to choose religion would exist in this land if under the shield of the First Amendment, religious institutions could impose their will on the unwilling and claim immunity from secular judicature for their tortious acts.

The unwilling. That word is the crux. Religious institutions imposing their will on people who have left—and claiming immunity. That distinction between current and former members is directly relevant to every disfellowshipped or disassociated Jehovah's Witness. When you leave, or when Watch Tower removes you, you are no longer a member. But Watch Tower continues to impose its discipline on you through the shunning of your own family. They treat you as subject to their authority long after you've withdrawn consent. Under the Gwen framework, that is potentially actionable.

The precedent is in conflict: Bear says the state has a compelling interest in family preservation that can override free exercise. Gwen says post-withdrawal discipline isn't protected. Paul says shunning is protected, period. Unsettled law is law that is still being written.

The Composite Lawsuit That Hasn't Been Filed Yet

Here is what the lawsuit that might actually work would look like—assembled from pieces that already exist in case law, but that no one has put into a single case.

The foundation is the Gwen post-withdrawal framework. The plaintiff is someone who clearly left the organization—disfellowshipped, formally removed, or disassociated. They are no longer a member. They did not consent to continue being subject to Watch Tower's discipline. And yet Watch Tower's institutional system continues to impose consequences on them: not by directly contacting them, but by creating the theological and social conditions under which their own family members conclude that cutting them off is necessary.

The evidentiary backbone is the parental alienation science. The plaintiff demonstrates that their relationship with their child was systematically destroyed through the clinical markers every specialist in the field recognizes: loyalty manipulation, grooming-style progressive isolation, the child taught that the rejected parent is dangerous, evil, or destined for destruction. The harm matches the diagnostic criteria for parental alienation, which the American Psychological Association's own custody guidelines now list alongside physical abuse and neglect as a threat to children's well-being.

The legal theory is intentional infliction of emotional distress—the tort of outrage. The conduct was extreme and outrageous, beyond all bounds of decency, and carried out by an organization demonstrably aware that its practices generate custody conflicts. Watch Tower's own elders manual includes a specific section on child custody, instructing elders to contact the legal department whenever a publisher is involved in a custody lawsuit where religious beliefs are at issue. That is a formal protocol built into their operational manual for routing custody disputes to headquarters. They know their practices produce these conflicts. They have built institutional infrastructure to manage the legal fallout. Researchers documented that as far back as the mid-1980s, Watch Tower's legal department was receiving 80 to 90 custody-related inquiries per month from its own members.

The statutory framework comes from new legislation. In 2017, New Jersey became the first state to define predatory alienation in law: extreme undue influence or coercive persuasion that disrupts a parent-child relationship, leads to a deceptive or exploitative relationship, or isolates a person from family and friends. The law explicitly names cults and religious sects among the groups that use these tactics. California's undue influence statute defines the standard as excessive persuasion that overcomes free will and explicitly lists spiritual advisers among those who can exert it. A Rutgers University study commissioned under the New Jersey law mapped the exact tactics cults use, and the overlap with Watch Tower practices is precise.

This lawsuit would not attack Watch Tower's beliefs. It would not ask a court to interpret scripture. It would not try to ban shunning as a religious practice. It would ask one narrow question: can an organization that continues to impose discipline on former members—people who have clearly withdrawn their consent—be held liable when that discipline systematically destroys family relationships in ways that match the clinical definition of child abuse?

Bear says the state has a compelling interest in preserving families. Gwen says post-withdrawal discipline isn't protected. The parental alienation science provides the diagnostic framework. The New Jersey and California statutes provide the legal vocabulary. The custody case record—researchers have documented patterns across more than a thousand JW custody cases per year, with children routinely being alienated from non-JW parents—provides a mountain of documented harm.

Where This Fight Is Already Live

Family Courts

Parts of this framework are already producing results, most visibly in family courts. Judges in custody disputes don't need to rule on whether shunning is constitutionally protected as a general religious practice. They need to rule on whether a specific child's best interest is served by a system that teaches them their other parent will be destroyed by God. That is a question they can answer.

In a Kansas case, a court removed a child from a Jehovah's Witness custody arrangement because the child was becoming increasingly alienated from the father and extended family, having come to believe that non-Witnesses who celebrate Christmas are going to die at Armageddon. The court found this harmful to the child's best interest. In case after case, researchers have documented children openly telling custody evaluators that they learned from the Kingdom Hall or their Jehovah's Witness parent that the opposing parent is "of Satan" and shouldn't be associated with.

Watch Tower knows exactly what is at stake in these cases. The elders manual custody protocol—formally routing disputes to the legal department—is operational guidance, not informal advice. If the Witness parent loses at the trial level, Watch Tower is known to assist aggressively with appeals; in some cases, a Watch Tower lawyer may be sitting at the opposing counsel's table. That institutional investment implies organizational awareness that its practices routinely produce custody conflicts—awareness formalized in their own published manual.

Four independent lines are converging on the same point: clinical psychologists have built a diagnostic framework that identifies Watch Tower's shunning system as matching the criteria for child abuse; two state supreme courts have ruled that the First Amendment does not automatically shield shunning when it destroys families or targets former members; state legislators are writing laws that name the coercive system and define the harm; and Watch Tower has built a legal department that implicitly acknowledges its practices routinely collide with family law.

Professor Robin Boyle Laser and the Emerging Legal Theory

There is one figure in academic law who has been building precisely this framework. Professor Robin Boyle Laser at St. John's University School of Law has spent over 20 years developing the legal theory connecting predatory alienation to cult accountability. She has published more than 40 articles and book chapters on undue influence, coercive control, and human trafficking as applied to high-control groups, and she sits on the board of the International Cultic Studies Association. Her book Taken No More, Protect Your Children Against Traffickers and Cults, published through Bloomsbury, lays out the legal framework that could underpin exactly the kind of case described here—not attacking beliefs, but holding coercive systems accountable. That work is happening right now.

What This Means If You're Living It

If you are being shunned, you now have clinical vocabulary: parental alienation, predatory alienation, undue influence. These are not just emotional descriptions of what happened to you. They are recognized terms that therapists use, that attorneys can deploy in a courtroom, and that judges take seriously. If you are in a custody dispute with a Jehovah's Witness ex-spouse, the parental alienation framework gives your attorney a recognized clinical basis for arguing that Watch Tower's indoctrination is harming your child's relationship with you. The case law exists. Document everything. Seek a custody evaluator who understands high-control groups, and talk to a qualified attorney about the legal theories described here.

For 40 years, every legal challenge to Watch Tower shunning has asked the same question: can you sue a church for not talking to you? The answer has always been no, because that is the wrong question. The right question is whether an organization that is aware its practices create custody conflicts—aware enough to build a formal protocol for routing those conflicts to its legal department—can be shielded from liability when it continues imposing those practices on people who are no longer its members. Bear and Gwen suggest it cannot. The clinical science and the new legislation now give that argument a foundation it has never had before.