California's top appeals court threw out the punitive damages in the Conti abuse case

In 2012, a California jury delivered what was then a landmark verdict against the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society: roughly $28 million to Candace Conti, who had been sexually abused as a child by a fellow member of her Northern California congregation. Three years later, a state appeals court took most of it away.^[1][2]

The reversal is worth understanding precisely, because it drew a line that still governs how far an American court will hold a religious organization responsible for the conduct of its members.

The verdict

Conti sued the Watchtower and her former congregation over abuse she suffered as a child of about nine and ten, in the mid-1990s, at the hands of Jonathan Kendrick, an adult member of her congregation whom local leaders knew had previously molested a child.^[1] What made the case more than a claim against the abuser was where the abuse happened: the jury heard that he had taken Conti out in the congregation's organized door-to-door ministry, the very activity the elders arranged and oversaw.^[2]

In June 2012, an Alameda County jury found the organization negligent and awarded about $7 million in compensatory damages and roughly $21 million in punitive damages — a headline total near $28 million that would shrink at nearly every stage that followed. The jury apportioned fault three ways: about 60 percent to the abuser himself, 27 percent to the Watchtower, and 13 percent to the local congregation.^[2] The punitive figure was, at the time, without precedent in such a case, and it reflected the jury's view of how the organization had handled what it knew. And what it knew was the crux: the abuser's earlier molestation of a child was not hidden from congregation leaders — they were aware of it, and he was given access to children in the ministry anyway. A post-trial order soon trimmed the award, but the verdict had already made Conti a national story.

What the appeal did

The award began shrinking almost at once — the trial court cut the $21 million punitive award to about $8.6 million after the verdict, a reduction Conti accepted — and in April 2015 the California Court of Appeal went further still. It made a split decision that mattered. It affirmed that the Watchtower had been negligent in one specific respect: failing to supervise a known abuser during the congregation's organized door-to-door ministry, where he was paired with children. But it eliminated the punitive damages in full, and it rejected the broader theory that the organization had a legal duty to warn the congregation about him.^[1]

The reasoning

The court's logic on the duty to warn is the core of the decision. Warning the congregation might well have prevented harm — "it is readily foreseeable that someone who has molested a child may do so again," the court acknowledged. But it held that imposing a legal duty to warn would carry burdens and "adverse social consequences" that outweighed it.^[1] A religious body, in other words, could be liable for negligently supervising a known abuser in an activity it directed — but not for declining to broadcast his history to its members.

The ministry connection

The detail that anchored what liability remained was the field ministry itself. Jehovah's Witnesses organize their members into a structured preaching work — pairing publishers, assigning territories, keeping records of hours. It was within that organized activity, the jury found, that a known abuser had been given recurring access to a child.^[1] Because the congregation directed the ministry, the court reasoned, it bore a duty to take reasonable care in how it deployed someone it had cause to know was dangerous. That was the negligence that survived appeal: not a failure to confess what the elders knew, but a failure to manage it.

What survived, then, was a fraction of the original verdict — the compensatory award tied to the supervision claim — and the case settled later in 2015.^[1]

What it left unresolved

The verdict sharpened the deeper question rather than resolving it. Jehovah's Witnesses hold that what an elder learns of a member's sins is a matter of spiritual confidence, handled within the congregation; the organization has long resisted any legal rule that would turn its elders into informants. Conti did not touch that confidence directly. It said only that when the organization takes a man it knows to be dangerous and places him, through its own organized ministry, in the company of children, it cannot disclaim responsibility for what follows. The confidentiality survived; the supervision did not.

That distinction would be tested again and again, each time from a different direction. In the San Diego cases, the fight moved upstream — to whether the organization even had to disclose its internal records of abuse at all. In Montana, it moved to whether elders had a legal duty to report abuse to the authorities in the first place. Conti drew the first clear line of the organization's civil liability in the United States; the cases that followed pushed at exactly where that line fell.

Why it matters

Conti became a reference point. In the largest of the early American Witness abuse cases, it established two things at once: that the organization could be held to account for negligence, and that the most expansive theories of its liability — punitive damages, a sweeping duty to warn — would not survive appellate review. Candace Conti, for her part, did not retreat into the settlement's confidentiality; she spoke publicly about her case, becoming one of the most visible American survivors to have taken the organization to trial.

For Jehovah's Witnesses, the part of the ruling that endured cut to a sensitive point of practice. The court did not fault the organization for keeping an abuse report confidential; it faulted it for putting a known abuser in a position of contact with children during an activity it ran. That is a narrow holding, but a pointed one — it located the organization's legal exposure not in its secrecy but in its supervision.

Plaintiffs' lawyers in the cases that followed, from the San Diego fights over the organization's internal abuse records to the Montana suit over mandatory reporting, would press at the same boundary, with mixed results.^[3] The Watchtower, for its part, has consistently said it abhors child abuse and that its procedures are designed to be both scriptural and lawful. What Conti settled was narrower than either side's framing: the precise distance between negligence a court will punish and a duty it will not impose.