The Society has defined a lie as “withholding the truth from anyone deserving to know it.” And who determines who is deserving? With this definition, (which I challenged when I was an elder), liars are bred within the cloak of the organization’s protection.

Following the direction of the Organization at the time, as presiding elder, I personally covered up the indiscretions of a fellow elder, who went on to great responsibilities within, and was always great friends with circuit and district overseers.
He has even since contacted me to persuade me to come back into the “truth”.

Fear within this organization is akin to the fear that the USSR
maintained among members of it’s countries. Reading about this is what assisted me to get out. But why, I ask myself,
did it take me so long?

My own experience suggests that JW leadership and legal teams are perfectly capable of and willing to lie, hide, and destroy evidence when facing a slam to their credibility. They have millions of people working for them for free and believing that the gang in New York is actually “God’s channel.” To protect themselves from “persecution,” this group regularly employs what they call the “theocratic strategy” of withholding information and lying to “worldly authorities” of “Satan’s system of things.”

JWs on the internet have helped to provide information and hope for justice before, when their conscience spoke. That’s why the email address for legal counsel is given. The identities of such current Jehovah’s Witnesses with conscience are not going to be distributed – for obvious reasons. I have no reason to distrust the Silent Lambs, who have stood up in court to defend some of the victims that the JW leadership ignores. No, I couldn’t judge whether or not records are actually being destroyed, but if Silent Lambs send out an alert, they have good reason to do so. Whether obstruction of justice or destruction of evidence has happened will be found out in time. I think it’s a credible high-risk, given their previous policies on such matters. It does no harm to ask for information or appeal to a higher sense of conscience among those JWs who really do seek the truth and to please their God (one must assume for sanity’s sake that such a God does not approve of abuse, rape, or child molestation, yes?)

When the leadership hides known child molesters and other abusers, when they allow other children and second wives and others to be put into dangerous (and sometimes even deadly) situations, when they keep such people in positions of power, and move them from between congregations, they share culpability. They have not been interested in the victims, especially women and children. It’s a bit sickening to see them condemn other religions that have, like the Catholics, at least admitted their culpability and tried to address it.