A Californian judge has ordered the Jehovah’s Witnesses to pay $13.5m to a man who was sexually abused in the 1980s by a church leader, the attorney for the victim said on Friday.
Church elders had assigned a man to work with Jose Lopez on Bible studies, even though they knew he had admitted to molesting another boy in 1982, because they felt he was “repentant”, Lopez’s attorney, Irwin Zalkin, said.
Lopez, who filed the civil suit in 2010, first went to the Spanish-speaking Kingdom Hall church in San Diego in 1985 at the age of seven, according to the complaint.
Mario Moreno, a lawyer for the church – whose parent group is the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York – told the San Diego Union-Tribune newspaper that the church will appeal against superior court judge Joan Lewis’s judgment.