NEW YORK (NY)
Newsweek
August 13, 2019
By Daniel Avery
Two lawsuits being filed this week are targeting the leadership of the Jehovah’s Witnesses for what the plaintiffs claim is a history of child sexual abuse.
Heather Steele, 48, and John Michael Ewing, 48, were abused as children, but they’re filing suits this Wednesday, when New York’s new Child Victims Act goes into effect. Signed earlier this year, the measure removes the statute of limitations on abuse suits, no matter how long ago the abuse occurred.
Steele was still a toddler when, she says, a Jehovah’s Witness elder started molesting her in the mid-1970s, when her family lived in New York.”My first memory would be of him fondling me when I was just about 2 or 3 years old while he held me in the back seat of my dad’s car,” Steele told The New York Post.
When she was 10, Steele finally told her mother. But rather than tell police, her mom went to the elders. “It was basically them trying to convince us it was in our minds, that none of this stuff actually happened or that we had bad dreams,” Steele said. The elders “told us that we should pray for [Nicholson].”
After Steele’s parents finally went to secular authorities, Nicholson was arrested and served three-and-a-half-years in prison. But when he got out, he was quietly placed in a New Jersey congregation where few knew of his past.
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