How The Telegraph presented the case of pedophile Peter Stewart is different from how a British judge assessed it.
by Massimo Introvigne
Article 2 of 5. Read article 1, article 2, article 3, article 4, and article 5.
To prove that the Jehovah’s Witnesses have a bad habit of not properly warning their members against sexual abusers of children, The Telegraph focuses at length on the case of Peter Stewart. This is understandable, because on June 19, 2015, the London High Court of Justice found that the Jehovah’s Witnesses were negligent in handling the case and had to pay damages to one of Stewart’s victims. The decision concluded that the local elders knew of Stewart’s problems and failed to adequately inform and warn their congregation, and in particular the victim’s mother, about him.
It would seem that here The Telegraph has its smoking gun proving that its general theory as true. However, the fact that the 2015 decision of the High Court has been published is actually very useful. It allows a study in contrast of how Mr. Justice Globe, in his decision, assessed the facts and the behavior of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, as opposite to how The Telegraph presented them.
Understandably, a journalistic podcast privileges drama, and there is nothing wrong about it—unless drama is used to slander a whole religious community. The Telegraph introduces us to Daria (not her real name) who in the late 1980s was a small girl living with her Jehovah’s Witness mother after her father had left them. A well-liked and gentlemanly Jehovah’s Witness came to their home to offer spiritual guidance. Daria, now in her thirties, tells in graphic details the story of how she was abused and raped for years by this man, Peter Stewart, and was too terrorized to inform anybody, including her mother.
In 1994, Daria heard that Stewart had been arrested for his sexual abuse of another girl. She still kept silent. Then, in 2000, she claims she saw Stewart at the back of the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Kingdom Hall during a meeting, and she finally told her mother of the abuse. The mother wrote to Stewart and he wrote back, admitting his guilt and expressing repentance. He called himself a “pervert” and told Daria’s mother that he was undertaking “mechanical operations” that would prevent him from abusing other children. Daria’s mother informed first an elder and then the police. When the latter moved to investigate the case in 2001, they found Stewart dead in his home.
Another woman then appears in the podcast, “Michelle.” She describes her emotion when she learned about the case of Daria, as she had also been abused by Stewart. Reportedly, she told the elders about the abuse and their immediate reaction was that she had misconstructed what happened. However, she later learned that Stewart had been investigated and demoted from his position as ministerial servant. She blames the Jehovah’s Witnesses for not having taken harsher action against Stewart on her case and informed immediately the police, which might have protected Daria. Michelle testified before the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), whose 2021 report is discussed in the previous article of this series, and blamed in particular an elder called Alan Orton (now deceased).
According to The Telegraph, the story of Peter Stewart proves “what elders in the Jehovah’s Witnesses do when someone in their community is accused of sexually abusing a child. The system’s a closely guarded secret.” The Telegraph understands that its use of the present simple (“what elders… do”) is problematic. It notes that “The Jehovah’s Witnesses told IICSA that Michelle’s abuse took place more than 30 years ago and is not a reflection of its current child safeguarding policies. But that’s small comfort to Michelle.”
Here, the lack of context I noted in my first article emerges again. As mentioned there, IICSA agreed that today “Jehovah’s Witnesses now have a policy to report allegations of abuse to the statutory authorities, even when it is not mandated by local laws, and ‘even if there is only one complainant and no other corroborating evidence’ (p. 65, par. 6.3).” That policies were different in the 1980s or 1990s is not only true for the Jehovah’s Witnesses. It is also true for the Roman Catholic Church, the Church of England, or secular organizations such as the Boy Scouts. Simply, the social awareness and the understanding of sexual abuse of children was not what it is now.
In the court case of “Daria,” Mr. Justice Globe acknowledged (at paragraph 116) that different experts who testified before him agreed on three points. First, “The level of understanding of child sex abuse in 2015 [when the case was decided] is very different to [sic] the level of understanding in the late 1980s and early 1990s.” Second, “In the late 1980s and early 1990s there was an emerging awareness of child sexual abuse, which was a long way short of a developed understanding of the complexity of the issue.” Third, “The Jehovah’s Witness organisation could be viewed as ahead of its time in terms of its educative publications addressing the issues of child sexual abuse.” This is not the position of the Jehovah’s Witnesses only, which The Telegraph derisively dismisses as being of little comfort to the victims. This is the conclusion of the court. Judging cases of the 1980s and 1990s with the standards of today is not only unfair. It does not make sense.
The court records also adds details not mentioned by The Telegraph, and helps reestablishing a correct chronology. As the court reconstructs the case, in 1990 an elder was informed that Stewart had molested a young girl (the one The Telegraph calls Michelle) “by touching her through her underwear” (paragraph 29). Stewart admitted this was true. “The judicial committee decided that, because he was remorseful and genuinely repentant, he should not be disfellowshipped. Instead, he was given scriptural reproof and counsel admonishing him that he should never be alone with children in any circumstances and was removed as a ministerial servant” (paragraph 30). The congregation was informed that Stewart had been disciplined (but not for what reason, as usual among the Jehovah’s Witnesses), and warned to watch their children against possible abuse. The two announcements were not directly connected, and whether those who heard them would be able to make the connection is a matter of dispute.
Meanwhile, unbeknownst to the elders and to everybody else except him and the girl, Stewart was routinely abusing Daria since 1989. He continued until 1994 when he was “arrested and later convicted of and imprisoned for sexually abusing a young female relative and a young boy in the congregation” (paragraph 25). On January 7, 1995, Stewart disassociated himself as one of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Still, Daria did not mention to anybody that she had been abused by Stewart until she “found out about his imminent release. It affected her badly and eventually she told her mother what had happened” (paragraph 26). This was in 2000, and at that time Stewart was no longer a Jehovah’s Witness, as he had disassociated himself in 1995.
Daria sued based on the claim that, had the elders disfellowshipped Stewart rather than simply demoting him, and personally warned her mother and other relatives about what was going on, she would have been saved from further abuse. Daria was awarded damages based on the current British laws, and precedents concerning the Catholic Church. The judge derived from them that the elders had been negligent in not advising Daria’s family specifically and unequivocally about the threat represented by Stewart.
Does this mean that The Telegraph reported the story correctly? Not exactly. We only hear the voices of Daria and Michelle, and of a lawyer, Kathleen Hallisay, described as “a thorn in the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ side.” Clearly, the Telegraph reporters root for her. “In a way, Kathleen’s job mirrors ours in the investigation team. She has been trying to hoover up every detail she can about the Jehovah’s Witnesses, collecting documents, speaking to survivors. We have been doing the same.”
One who tried to be fairer was Mr. Justice Globe in Daria’s case. One can even perceive a certain reluctance in rendering a decision in her favour, as if he knew beforehand it would be used to tarnish the reputation of the elders, who would be presented as protecting abusers and mistreating victims.
This was not the impression the judge had of elder Alan Orton, who looks so much like the villain in the podcast, and his colleagues. “I found them,” wrote Mr. Justice Globe, “all to be honest, upright, loyal, and devout men for whom being a Jehovah’s Witness is and has been for many years a way of life for them and their families. In that there were differences of recollection between them or hesitation in their answers, it was not borne out of any ulterior motive. All are horrified by the sexual abuse that occurred and are extremely remorseful that a Jehovah’s Witness should have caused such harm to the claimant” (paragraph 121). The judge also mentioned Orton’s “obvious honesty,” and characterized him as a “completely honest” man (paragraph 35).
These “honest, upright, loyal and devout men” acted by the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ standards of 1990, more than thirty years ago, which, while being “ahead of their time” with respect to other religious and secular organizations, cannot be compared to those of 2022. Orton and his colleagues navigated between protecting the confidentiality of their ecclesiastical judicial proceedings and warning congregation members they should protect their children. They testified that in fact they did warn the parents privately. However, the judge concluded that either their recollections of events that happened decades before the court case were not accurate, or they had not given a clear enough warning. As a consequence, Daria got her damages. However, those who present men of “obvious honesty” as evil protectors of pedophiles are themselves not honest.
Massimo Introvigne (born June 14, 1955 in Rome) is an Italian sociologist of religions. He is the founder and managing director of the Center for Studies on New Religions (CESNUR), an international network of scholars who study new religious movements. Introvigne is the author of some 70 books and more than 100 articles in the field of sociology of religion. He was the main author of the Enciclopedia delle religioni in Italia (Encyclopedia of Religions in Italy). He is a member of the editorial board for the Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion and of the executive board of University of California Press’ Nova Religio. From January 5 to December 31, 2011, he has served as the “Representative on combating racism, xenophobia and discrimination, with a special focus on discrimination against Christians and members of other religions” of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). From 2012 to 2015 he served as chairperson of the Observatory of Religious Liberty, instituted by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in order to monitor problems of religious liberty on a worldwide scale.
