State court reverses decision

The Montana Supreme Court last week reversed a $35 million judgment against the Thompson Falls congregation of the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the church’s parent organizations.

The decision came Jan. 7, with the court determining that the church was exempt from Montana’s mandatory reporting law for reporting child abuse because “the undisputed material facts in the record show that Jehovah’s Witnesses canon law, church doctrine, or established church practice required that the reports of abuse in this case be kept confidential,” Justice Beth Baker wrote in the Supreme Court’s decision.

In 2016, two women sued Jehovah’s Witnesses, alleging negligence under Montana mandatory reporting law. The 20th District Court determined “defendants failed to report” and were liable for damages. A jury in October 2018 was tasked with determining the amount of damages, and handed down a $35 million judgment, finding that Watchtower New York, the Christian Congregation of Jehovah’s Witnesses (CCJW) and the Thompson Falls congregation of Jehovah’s Witnesses were negligent in the case.

During the 2018 trial at the Sanders County Courthouse, witnesses detailed how the man accused of the abuse, Maximo Reyes, was removed from the Jehovah’s Witness congregation, but reinstated a year later. Reyes’s step-granddaughter told the court that Reyes molested her repeatedly over a two-year period after his return to the church, starting when she was 8 years old. Her attorneys argued during the trial that the church had an obligation to report the abuse to authorities.

Representatives of the local and national Jehovah’s Witnesses organizations argued during the trial that a report of past sexual abuse in 2004 by Reyes’s stepchildren was kept confidential as an established church practice, and therefore the church was exempt to the Montana mandatory reporter law.

The organizations appealed the District Court ruling last year, with oral arguments held in September in Billings.

Judge Baker wrote that “under the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ established procedures for responding to allegations of serious sin, such as child molestation, they will report child abuse to authorities only if required by state law. As

with other disclosures, however, the Jehovah’s Witnesses deal with such communications in a confidential internal process through what is known as a ‘judicial committee’ of elders. This process led to the church’s 2004 disfellowship of Maximo Reyes, the strongest form of scriptural discipline the Jehovah’s Witnesses impose, though he was later reinstated.”