A 2012 letter told elders to call lawyers first, and left out the police

A confidential letter dated October 1, 2012, addressed "To All Bodies of Elders" in the United States, told congregation elders how to handle allegations of child sexual abuse. It instructed them to telephone the organization's own lawyers first, apply a scriptural evidentiary standard before taking internal action, and refer the hardest judgment — whether a person should be treated as a "predator" — up to the branch office. On the question of contacting police, the letter was silent.

The document was issued on Christian Congregation of Jehovah's Witnesses letterhead by the U.S. branch of the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society. It surfaced publicly within months and was later relied upon in litigation and public inquiries into how the religion responds to abuse. It remained the standing direction until it was superseded by a new letter to all bodies of elders dated August 1, 2016.

Call Legal, then Service

The letter set out a two-step call chain for an elder who learns of an allegation. Elders were directed first to telephone the Watch Tower Legal Department for legal direction, then to contact the Service Department for direction on how to proceed in the congregation and how to protect children.

That routing placed the organization's attorneys at the front of the process, before any congregation-level judicial decision. The structure was not new. It extended the call-headquarters, keep-it-internal architecture set out in an earlier confidential letter of March 14, 1997, which had directed U.S. elders to report accused molesters to headquarters and fed a central internal file of names.

The two-witness rule

For internal congregational action, the letter reiterated the religion's long-standing two-witness rule. As transcribed by ex-Witness researchers who published the leaked document, it stated that "in evaluating the evidence for internal congregational purposes there has to be two credible witnesses." Absent a confession or a second witness, no congregational judicial action would follow — regardless of what elders believed had happened.

Nearly a full paragraph of the letter was devoted to adherence to that standard, according to those analyses.

"The branch office will decide"

The letter addressed a separate scenario: a confessed or convicted molester who shows "undue interest in a child or children" not his own. In that case, elders were told to inform the branch office, which would then decide whether the person should be viewed as a "predator."

Critics seized on that clause. The ex-Witness outlet JW Survey headlined its coverage "We will decide who is a predator" — a characterization attributed to critics, not a phrase the letter uses of itself.

A widely quoted tone-setting line — "We abhor the sexual abuse of children and will not protect any perpetrator of such repugnant acts from the consequences of his gross sin" — also circulated, but the most-quoted lines come from secondary transcriptions of the leaked scan rather than a verified first-party image, and are presented here as transcribed, not as confirmed verbatim.

Silent on the police

What the letter did not say drew as much attention as what it did. It did not address when elders should contact secular authorities. Analysts noted that in states without a mandatory clergy-reporting duty, the direction effectively left the reporting question to Watch Tower's legal desk rather than requiring elders to notify police. The documented point is the letter's silence on secular reporting; it did not forbid reporting.

How it became public

The letter reached the public largely through Steven Unthank, a former Jehovah's Witness in Australia, who legally published it on an official Australian government portal in connection with a child-abuse inquiry. It also circulated on ex-JW research sites from late 2012 onward. Some hosted copies were later removed for legal reasons.

Unthank was the same complainant behind a separate Victorian tribunal case over the religion's "mentally diseased" characterization of apostates.

Where it fits

The 2012 letter sits inside a longer records history. The internal reporting system traced to the 1997 letter and the name file it built became the discovery battleground in California litigation: in Padron v. Watchtower, a San Diego court imposed $4,000-a-day sanctions — reaching more than $48,000 — after the organization refused to produce internal abuse documents, and the organization lost its appellate challenge before settling. Lopez v. Watchtower, over abuse by a known offender, produced a multimillion-dollar award later reduced on appeal, then settled. The letter itself was issued months after the Candace Conti jury verdict in Alameda County had put the religion's internal handling of abuse before a California jury.

JW Files is reporting on a leaked internal document that has since been entered into public inquiry and litigation records. The organization's superseding August 1, 2016 letter left the two-witness rule and the call-Legal-first routing as the framework elders worked within for the intervening four years.