Yup.
One difference, though…
…say what you will about those OG guys, but at least they had the balls to own that shit. How they still acquired tax-exemption after that fiasco is beyond me.
I think it’s the main reason WT Legal seems to have bent over backwards to shield the WT leadership from the courts.
I suspect that today’s GB - convinced God’s got their back - would try to lie through their teeth, get caught doing so (because of all the WT internal correspondence and documentation any legal opposition would have by then), and would be eviscerated on the stand, or worse.
If they’re forced to acknowledge, under oath, how wrong they really are about everything, it - like the testimonies of the Walsh Trial - becomes a matter of Public Record, and therefore way, way harder to hand-wave away as “apostate lies” or Satanic propaganda (particularly in the Information Age, where - like the Aussie ARC inquires - we’d have full audio and video).
I think they’d sell their souls to avoid that kind of exposure, because the inevitable loss of legitimacy and authority in the eyes of any rank-and-filer with half a brain who sees it (and I suspect there’d be a lot) would be a fucking disaster.