$13.5m for Jehovah’s Witness Sex Victim

By Kristina Davis
U-T San Diego
October 31, 2014

http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2014/oct/31/jehovahs-witness-sex-abuse-judgment-lopez/

Lawyer Irwin Zalkin (left) and Jose Lopez speak to the media about a $13.5 million settlement against the governing body of the Jehovah's Witness church. Lopez was a boy when a church leader molested him. Kristina Davis — U-T San Diego

A San Diego judge has found that the governing body of the Jehovah’s Witness church covered up years of sexual abuse by a local church leader and continued to put children in danger of being molested, a ruling likely to echo across the country as alleged victims from other congregations take similar cases to court.

The church’s hierarchal body, Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, was ordered Wednesday to pay Jose Lopez $13.5 million in damages for the abuse he suffered in 1986 at the age of 7 as part of the church’s Linda Vista Spanish congregation.

Six other men and one woman who said they also were molested by the same man, church leader Gonzalo Campos, have also sued the Watchtower but settled their cases out of court.

Mario Moreno, associate general counsel for Watchtower, denied the cover-up allegations in a statement: “Jehovah’s Witnesses abhor child abuse and strive to protect children from such acts. The trial judge’s decision is a drastic action for any judge to take given the circumstances of this case. We will seek a full review of this case on appeal.”

An earlier version of this story said there were an estimated 7.9 million members nationwide. It's been changed to say worldwide.

The church, known for its door-to-door preaching, has some 14,000 congregations in the United States and an estimated 7.9 million members worldwide.

The theme of sexual abuse and cover-ups by the church has appeared in lawsuits from here to Britain. In 2012, a court in Alameda County handed down a $21 million judgment in the similar case of abuse against a 9-year-old girl. The amount was later reduced to $8 million. Twenty other lawsuits are pending in California, Ohio, New Mexico, Connecticut and Vermont, according to the San Diego-based Zalkin Law Firm. And on Thursday, six adults filed a lawsuit claiming molestation in North Texas by church elders in the 1990s.

The emerging allegations have been compared to the Catholic Church clergy sex abuse scandal, with at least one major exception: “We were embroiled with a long slog with the Catholic Church around the country … but they accepted on some level that they committed these errors, that this was a problem,” said Lopez’s lawyer Irwin Zalkin, whose firm negotiated more than $200 million in settlements in Catholic abuse cases. “At least they said ‘mea culpa.’”

The Jehovah’s Witnesses have not, he said.

“These guys will deny and deny, they are belligerent, they are arrogant, they treat victims as adversaries,” Zalkin said. “This is not an organization that is ready to accept the reality of what they have been doing.”

According to the church’s policy at the time, there must be two eyewitnesses or a confession by the abuser before the church can act on a claim. In most of the cases, members claim the church did not punish the abusers, allowed them to have contact with children and never warned the congregations.

Lopez, now 36, attended the Kingdom Hall in Linda Vista with his mother as a child. Because his father and stepfather were not part of the church, elders suggested a male leader, Campos, would be a good Bible teacher for the 7-year-old boy. By then, according to evidence revealed in the case, church elders knew Campos was a pedophile and had molested a boy as early as 1982, but they chose to do nothing about it. In its statement Friday, The Watchtower disputed that Campos held any responsibility within the congregation at the time.

Campos spent months grooming Lopez — touching him on the leg, hugging him and building trust — before bringing him to a La Jolla home and assaulting him, Lopez’s lawyer said. The boy told his mother, who immediately confronted the church leaders. But Lopez said the church told his mother to keep her faith, saying that they’d take care of the situation and directed her not to report it to law enforcement. She decided to leave the church.

According to trial evidence, the church judicial committee looked into the allegations and found that Campos was repentant. It monitored his behavior for a period of nine months but did not expel him from the church.

In fact, Campos went on to rise through the ranks of the church, continuing to teach Bible studies to young children and ultimately becoming an elder in 1993. At one point he left the Linda Vista congregation and moved to one in La Jolla. He was ultimately kicked out of the church in 1995, after another victim surfaced, but was reinstated in 2000, court records show.

In a deposition, Campos later confessed to abusing at least eight children between 1982 and 1995 — abuse that included sodomy and oral sex. A ninth victim has since come forward.

Zalkin said Campos is currently believed to live in Mexico, where he fled around 2010 after the case was reported to San Diego police.

In her ruling on Wednesday, San Diego Superior Judge Joan Lewis called the Watchtower’s inaction and cover-up “reprehensible and reckless.”

“This is an organization grounded in secrecy,” Zalkin said at a news conference at his offices Friday. “It’s hide and deny.”

The Watchtower was not allowed to put on a defense during the six-day trial because the judge ruled the governing body had repeatedly ignored her court orders to produce documents in the case, and had failed to produce the longest serving member of the organization for a deposition.

Both the state appeals court and state Supreme Court upheld Judge Lewis’ rulings on the court orders, which the Watchtower continued to rebuff.

Lopez’s lawyers still put on a trial with evidence, and the judge concluded they proved their case. She issued a default judgment of $10.5 million in punitive damages and $3 million in compensatory damages.

Watchtower officials said Friday the judge was wrong in barring them from putting on a defense in the trial and said they would be appealing.

At Friday’s news conference, Lopez called his molester a “coward” for fleeing to Mexico.

“I want him to be behind bars where he belongs,” Lopez said.

“I don’t wish this on anybody. It was a horrible thing what happened to me. It’s never going to be over. It’s life-changing.”

He said he has tried to not let the ordeal shake his faith in God. He has attended other Christian churches since his childhood. But he says the one thing continues to scare him: leaving his three sons alone at any church.