BishopAccountability.org

Church leader abused kids, lawsuit says

The Register-Guard
December 2, 2014

http://registerguard.com/rg/news/local/32500527-75/church-leader-abused-kids-lawsuit-says.html.csp

PORTLAND — A woman and a man who allege they were sexually abused as children by a leader in a suburban Portland Jehovah’s Witnesses congregation have filed suit, seeking $10.5 million.

Lawyers for a 39-year-old woman and the unidentified man filed suit Monday in Multnomah County Circuit Court, The Oregonian reported. They contend Jehovah’s Witnesses’ leadership has covered up sexual abuse against children by leaders.

An attorney for the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mario Moreno, said he hadn’t seen the lawsuit and couldn’t comment.

The lawsuit alleges that a man who held the equivalent position of an ordained minister in the North Hillsboro Congregation of Jehovah’s Witnesses molested the female plaintiff in the mid-1980s when she was 11 or 12 years old. The suit claims the man also molested a boy who was 8 to 10 years old. The woman said she eventually told her mother, who went to the Hillsboro congregation’s elders but was told to tell no one.

Oregon’s statute of limitations doesn’t allow criminal prosecution because too many years have passed. Lawyers filing the suit say they don’t know where the man lives now.




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