JEHOVAH’S
WITNESSES
More than 11 years revealing secrets because there is no excuse for secrecy in religion – w1997 June 1; Dan 2:47; Matt 10:26; Mark 4:22; Luke 12:2; Acts 4:19, 20.
JEHOVAH’S
WITNESSES
More than 11 years revealing secrets because there is no excuse for secrecy in religion – w1997 June 1; Dan 2:47; Matt 10:26; Mark 4:22; Luke 12:2; Acts 4:19, 20.
Watchtower Headquarters in WarWick, New York
Article written by: Miss Usato on November 26th, 2025
A blistering new lawsuit filed in the Southern District of New York has placed the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ corporate structure under a forensic spotlight, and the picture emerging isn’t exactly the serene pastoral image featured in Watchtower’s glossy literature. You can find the Court Documents discussed in this article here: Court Documents on Lawsuit of Souza
Warning: this article discusses instances of abuse.
The sound of silence
The case, brought by Stella Cristina Gomes de Souza, alleges that when she was twelve years old in Brazil, beginning in 2011, she was repeatedly raped and assaulted by Circuit Overseer Angelo Roviezzo, a man entrusted with spiritual authority, whose role has a lot of organizational influence. She also had a severe, traumatic experience in 2012 because of Roviezzo’s actions. According to the complaint, what followed wasn’t justice, compassion, or even basic human decency. It was silence, industrial-grade silence.
The lawsuit asserts that this wasn’t an isolated moral failure but a system feature. Something former Jehovah’s Witnesses come to realize upon waking up. Watchtower Pennsylvania, Watchtower New York, and the Governing Body — the organization’s apex decision-making entity- are described as orchestrating a global information-control pipeline where reports of sexual abuse were routed upward for containment, not outward for protection.
Internal policy documents cited in the filing allegedly required elders to call branch offices before calling police. Accused abusers were often reassigned, a kind of “spiritual reshuffling” that might sound benign in a committee meeting but becomes catastrophic when the product being “protected” is institutional image and the collateral damage is children.
No less than $100,000,000
Gomes de Souza’s suit outlines lifelong harm: infertility, PTSD, profound depression, and ongoing disability resulting from both the abuse and the organisational suppression that followed. The damages sought? Not less than $100,000,000. That number isn’t ornamental. It signals the magnitude of harm and the scale of institutional responsibility the lawsuit seeks to illuminate. Our hearts go out to Souza and all of the other Survivors of Abuse who have endured the harmful Practices of Watchtower.
Watchtower has survived many CSA suits before, but this lawsuit is a ledger of a very different kind.
If this case gains traction, Watchtower won’t just be dealing with a legal crisis. It’ll be navigating a brand implosion engineered by its own policies.
This summary is grounded entirely in verified legal documents and factual records.
Again, you can find the documents on the lawsuit that was filed on November 12th, 2025, here:
Court Documents on $100,000,000 Lawsuit
It’s worth stressing, because the Organisation has a long history of teaching members that anything outside its own publications is unreliable — even when the evidence is public, documented, and undeniable.
You can find additional covers about this topic with Watching Watchtower on YouTube and Fixing My Faith.
