Barbara Anderson , a former Jehovah’s Witness who worked at the Watchtower, runs a website called WatchtowerDocuments.com from her Tennessee home. She told the Star that since the Conti ruling, her 10,000-member discussion board, which includes many Canadians, has lit up with people telling their own stories of abuse and wanting to know how to pursue action.
In a hurried interview with Ms. Gillis, I told her about Canadians expressing themselves about the Conti case and sent her a link to one of the threads on JWN where a discussion was underway. I also told her that through my own website I was receiving many stories of abuse including some from Canadians wanting to know how to pursue action. Afterwards I sent her the links to both websites, plus, gave her contact information for many people she could interview for the article.
Somehow or the other, the reporter became confused when she wrote her story and now www.watchtowerdocuments.com is my 10,000-member discussion board that many Canadians frequent.
Too bad about the mix-up, but it's easy to understand why it happened. For the reporter it's too much information; too little understanding of the JW religion; too little time to put together an article before publication. My sympathy goes out to all the sincere reporters I've spoken to throughout the years, most of whom found it difficult to understand the obscure and often confusing issues related to the JW religion, and then try to sort through the maze of information received in interviews with people like me and then write a comprehensible article. I know that I'm not alone in expressing my appreciation for all they have done during the past ten years to help us expose Watch Tower leaders' deceitful cover-up of child abuse that is now an enormous blight on the JW religion.
A special thanks goes to reporter, Wendy Gillis, for her overall excellent article in the Toronto Star, yesterday, about the recent,
"...astounding $28 million jury verdict in favor of an Oakland, Calif., woman [Candace Conti] who was sexually molested as a child by a member of the Jehovah's Witnesses, whose national policy was to keep sex-abuse allegations secret." (As stated in an article, "Deadlocked or not, the priest sex-abuse jury did its job" by reporter Ronnie Polaneczky published in the Philadelphia Daily News on June 21, 2012.)
Barbara