From the Las Vegas Sun - the biggest Newspaper in the city if memory serves me ...
http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/lv-crime/2003/jan/10/514500287.html
Today: January 10, 2003 at 9:56:19 PST
Lawsuit accuses church of hiding sexual abuse
By Timothy Pratt
<[email protected]>
LAS VEGAS SUN
The Jehovah's Witnesses are not reporting allegations of sexual abuse to authorities in a timely fashion, according to a lawsuit filed in Las Vegas.
The issue was spotlighted by a protest held outside one of the religion's local congregations Thursday.
The suit and the protest center on the case of Daniel Steven Fitzwater, a member of a Jehovah's Witnesses congregation in Yerington accused of sexually molesting four young women in the congregation from 1974 into the 1990s.
Fitzwater was arrested in 1997 and found guilty of two counts of sexual lewdness. He is in prison at Northern Nevada Correctional Center in Carson City and eligible for parole in 2005.
A nonprofit group called Silent Lamb is behind the lawsuit and the protest.
Founded in May 2001, the group provides information to plaintiffs in lawsuits involving the church, as well as counseling help to alleged victims of abuse, said its founder, Bill Bowen, a former member of the Jehovah's Witnesses in Kentucky.
The group said that a pattern of abuse exists within the church, and that its policies inhibit authorities from investigating the cases.
At issue is the practice of internally investigating any allegations of abuse before reporting them to authorities, and related practices such as the church requiring two witnesses to any incident in order to establish guilt.
Ray Gutierrez -- who identified himself as a member of the Las Vegas congregation on Mojave Road, where the protest took place -- declined to comment on the group's charges.
He said he was witnessing the protest Thursday "just in case anything got out of hand."
A spokesman at the Jehovah's Witnesses headquarters in New York declined to comment on the Las Vegas lawsuit and other allegations. He offered a copy of a statement sent to the organization's congregations nationwide in May 2002.
The statement said the church's "Bible-based position" included investigations of any allegations by the church's elders, but that they "are not authorized ... to take congregational action unless there is a confession or there are two credible witnesses."
The statement also said that elders -- those in a position of leadership in the church -- are instructed to report allegations of abuse to the authorities where required by law to do so, but it does not address the timeline in which they must do so.
The statement did not address any guidelines on notifying other members of a congregation about allegations of abuse while the allegations are being investigated, nor did it address the issue of the status of a suspect during the course of an investigation.
The Las Vegas lawsuit filed in District Court seeks unspecified damages. Lawsuits seeking damages for alleged victims of abuse have also been filed in Minnesota, New Hampshire, Washington and California. With four plaintiffs, Nevada's is the largest.
Bowen said 5,000 alleged victims of abuse from Jehovah's Witnesses have contacted his group from more than 30 countries around the world. He said he is not encouraging the alleged victims to file lawsuits against the church, but hopes to "win support for the victims to such an extent that the church opens its eyes to the fact that it has a problem and needs to change its policies."
He said he became aware of the issue when he was an elder in a congregation near Paducah, Ky., and uncovered allegations of abuse against a member in February 2000.
"I called the national office and was told to ask the man if he was guilty. If he said he wasn't, I was told to leave the issue in God's hands," Bowen said.
This put him in violation of Kentucky state law, which requires religious organizations to report alleged cases of abuse.
After questioning the policy, he was excommunicated from the church in August 2000 "for causing dissension," Bowen said.
Phil Benson, who was at Thursday's protest and said he was a member of Jehovah's Witnesses for 40 years before leaving the church in 1992, said the organization had "dropped the ball" on the issue of child abuse.
