Watchtower’s attorneys, as they did in the Lopez case, filed an appeal.Īttorney Storey from the Zalkin Law Firm, says the Watchtower is back to its old tricks in the Lopez case, once again producing heavily redacted documents and failing to produce others despite orders from a court-appointed mediator. In a separate case, but one following a similar pattern, San Diego Superior Court judge Richard Strauss imposed a $4000-per-day penalty against the Watchtower for failing to turn over documents in a case filed by Padron, another one of Campos’s alleged victims.
MIRA MESA JOSE PATTERNO TRIAL
Appellate court judges remanded the case back to the trial court, providing the church another chance to turn over the requested documents. A state appellate court ruled that the judge did not give the Watchtower enough opportunity to turn over the documents. In 2015, Superior Court judge Joan Lewis awarded Lopez $13.5 million after Watchtower repeatedly failed to turn over documents and provide access to witnesses. To date, seven San Diego residents have sued the Watchtower Tract Society regarding sexual abuse of minors. In the United States, during the past five years, the Watchtower has paid out numerous settlements to people who claimed they’d suffered child abuse at the hands of church elders. Last year, a Royal Commission in Australia found that Jehovah’s Witnesses had hidden more than a thousand reports of child abuse from that country’s law enforcement. Watchtower’s policies of requiring more than one eyewitness to the abuse before launching an investigation of forcing the abused, often young children, to confront their abuser and of prohibiting members from contacting law enforcement with complaints of sexual abuse have created what one former member and outspoken critic of the Watchtower Tract Society, William Bowen, calls a “pedophile’s paradise.” The struggle for documents is not isolated to San Diego courtrooms but is playing out in several countries.
In a June 17, 2017, email, Lopez’s attorney Devin Storey accuses the Watchtower of withholding documents that his client needs to “establish Watchtower’s practice of protecting molesters from prosecution.” This is despite the fact that two San Diego County Superior Court judges have imposed millions of dollars in sanctions for similar conduct. Attorneys for José Lopez and Osbaldo Padron - both alleged victims of molestation by an elder from the Linda Vista congregation named Gonzalo Campos - say Jehovah’s Witnesses’ governing body, the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, refuses to turn over documents. The second directive is unfolding in two San Diego courtrooms.
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