UNITED STATES
Reveal: The Center for Investigative Reporting
By Trey Bundy / January 11, 2016
A panel of judges in Philadelphia has ruled that Jehovah’s Witnesses used an “abusive tactic” to delay a trial in which a woman accused the religion’s leaders of covering up her abuse as a child.
The Witnesses’ parent corporation, the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, had won a motion in a lower court to move the case from Philadelphia to York County, which currently has the largest backlog of civil cases in Pennsylvania.
The Watchtower argued that holding the trial in Philadelphia would burden witnesses who would have to travel to testify. The appellate panel overruled the lower court, calling the Watchtower’s motion a “last-minute gambit to delay trial.”
In her opinion, Judge Patricia Jenkins refers to the Watchtower and other defendants as “the Congregations.”
“The facts strongly suggest that the motion to transfer venue was the product of bad-faith collaboration between the Congregations and the four York County witnesses,” she wrote.
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