UNITED STATES/CANADA
Toronto Star
Wendy Gillis
Staff Reporter
Candace Conti says the abuse began when she was 9 years old, distributing Bibles door to door with a fellow churchgoer, a loud, hulking man named Jonathan Kendrick.
It was the mid-1990s in Fremont, Calif. Conti’s parents were having marital problems, her mother was sick and distracted. So the little girl found family in her tight-knit Jehovah’s Witness congregation — and Kendrick found a victim.
For two years, Conti says, Kendrick repeatedly molested her, most frequently when she went out with him to proselytize. When he hugged her, she was afraid of being crushed.
“I was very scared,” Conti, now 26, told the Star from California.
She later learned she was not Kendrick’s first victim, that he had been convicted in 1994 of child molesting. That led to her suing the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York Inc. — the corporation that oversees Jehovah’s Witnesses — on the grounds that the elders of her congregation knew of Kendrick’s record and did nothing to protect her.
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