A Hawaii Judge Awarded $40 Million Against a Former Jehovah's Witnesses Elder. It Was Not a Verdict Against the Organization.

On July 18, 2023, a Hawaii state judge awarded a woman identified in court records only as N.D. roughly $40 million in damages against Kenneth L. Apana, a former elder of the Makaha Congregation of Jehovah's Witnesses on Oahu who had sexually abused her as a child.^[1] The award, entered by Circuit Court Judge Dean Ochiai of Hawaii's First Circuit, breaks down into $15 million in compensatory damages and $25 million in punitive damages.^[2]

The figure is large, and it has been widely repeated. It has also been widely misdescribed. The award was entered against Apana as an individual — a defendant who did not defend the suit — and not against the Jehovah's Witnesses organization. The congregation and its affiliated entities resolved the claims against them through a separate, confidential settlement whose terms were never disclosed.^[3] Understanding the difference is the whole story.

What the judge actually decided

The $40 million was not a jury's verdict after a contested trial. Apana, reported to be about 78 years old and living on Hawaii Island at the time, failed to respond to the lawsuit and did not contest it.^[4] With the defendant absent, the proceeding functioned as a damages determination — the court's assessment of what Apana owed, entered without opposition — rather than a jury's finding of liability weighed against a defense.

That procedural posture matters for two reasons. First, the sum reflects one judge's calculation of harm against a single, non-appearing individual, not a contested finding tested through cross-examination. Second, it is not a measure of what the Jehovah's Witnesses organization paid to resolve its own exposure. That amount remains sealed under the confidential settlement.^[5]

The Honolulu Star-Advertiser, the regional paper of record, and KITV, an ABC affiliate, both reported the award with that distinction intact. Some law-firm marketing pages and aggregators later blurred it, describing a "$40 million settlement against the Jehovah's Witness Church." On the public record, that framing is inaccurate.^[6]

The abuse the record describes

According to court documents as reported by the Star-Advertiser, N.D. was 12 years old in 1992 when Apana, then a Makaha congregation elder, raped and repeatedly abused her.^[7] The abuse occurred during sleepovers at his home, with the record describing roughly 30 incidents that year alone.

Apana's conduct was not limited to one child. He admitted abusing four girls over a 23-year span, from 1988 to 2011, including a member of his own family.^[8] N.D. is not named here, consistent with the practice of court records and mainstream newsrooms, which do not identify child sexual-abuse victims who have not publicly identified themselves. Apana, an adult defendant named by reputable press and by the court's own judgment, is named.

How the congregation handled the report

The most consequential portion of the court record, as reported, concerns what happened after the abuse came to the congregation's attention. When N.D.'s mother and another victim's parent confronted the Makaha Kingdom Hall, elders opened an internal investigation.^[9]

The outcome of that investigation, as described in the reported record, followed the pattern documented in numerous other jurisdictions:

- Apana was "disfellowshipped" for one year — expelled from the congregation as a disciplinary measure; - he was then required to apologize and was allowed to return to the congregation; - elders discouraged the plaintiff from reporting the abuse to police, and later told the family to "move on."^[10]

Disfellowshipping is the Jehovah's Witnesses' internal ecclesiastical discipline, distinct from any secular criminal process. In this account, the congregation's own machinery investigated, disciplined, and then reinstated the abuser, while steering the family away from law enforcement.

This aligns with a broader, extensively documented pattern in which allegations of child sexual abuse are routed first through congregational judicial committees of elders, with secular reporting discouraged or delayed. One doctrinal mechanism frequently cited in that pattern is the "two-witness rule," under which an accusation generally requires two witnesses or a confession before the congregation acts — a threshold critics say leaves many single-victim allegations without internal remedy. That specific rule was not cited in the Star-Advertiser's coverage of the Hawaii case; it belongs to the general documented policy, not to this case's reported record.^[11]

The organization's response

The Jehovah's Witnesses organization addressed the award directly. In a reported statement, it emphasized that "the judgment was against Mr. Apana, the person who perpetrated the abuse," and stated that its elders "comply with reporting laws."^[12]

That statement restates the central legal fact: the $40 million judgment names Apana, not the organization. Whether the confidential settlement with the congregation and its entities reflected a comparable acknowledgment of harm — or a fraction of it — is unknowable from the public record, precisely because the parties agreed to keep it sealed.

No appeal, no reduction — a contrast with Montana

As of publication, no appeal, reduction, or reversal of the $40 million Apana award has been reported. This is legally consistent with the case's posture. A defendant who did not defend a suit has limited standing to appeal the resulting damages, and Apana — elderly, and having admitted the abuse — had little apparent incentive or means to do so.^[13] The separately settled claims against the church, being resolved by confidential agreement rather than judgment, are not the kind of ruling that gets appealed at all.

That durability distinguishes the Hawaii award from a case it is easily confused with. In Montana, a jury in 2018 returned a $35 million verdict against Jehovah's Witnesses entities in a separate child-abuse suit — a verdict that was later overturned on appeal, with the state's high court ruling on the scope of the organization's duty to report. That case was a contested jury verdict against the organization that did not survive review. The Hawaii award is an uncontested damages ruling against an individual that has not been challenged. Readers who encounter both should not conflate them; the outcomes, defendants, and procedural histories differ.^[14]

The primary document

The judgment itself exists as a filed court record. The scanned "Judgment Against Kenneth Apana" (docket entry 675-0) has been posted publicly by an abuse-survivor advocacy repository, alongside related case filings; the caption reads N.D. v. Makaha, Hawaii Congregation of Jehovah's Witnesses et al.^[15] The document appears to be a genuine First Circuit filing and corroborates the existence of the case and the terms of the individual judgment, independent of any news account or advocacy commentary.

What the case establishes, and what it does not

Stripped to its verified core, the Hawaii record establishes several things. A former Jehovah's Witnesses elder, Kenneth Apana, sexually abused a 12-year-old girl in his congregation in 1992 and admitted abusing four girls between 1988 and 2011. A Hawaii judge, after Apana declined to defend himself, assessed $40 million in damages against him personally. The congregation and its affiliated entities resolved the claims against them through a separate settlement kept confidential. The organization has stated that the judgment was against Apana and that its elders comply with reporting laws.

What the record does not establish is a $40 million verdict against the Jehovah's Witnesses organization. That number attaches to one man who did not contest it. The organization's own financial resolution of the matter is, by the parties' agreement, unknown. The precise, and less dramatic, truth is the one the court file supports: a survivor of childhood sexual abuse was awarded $40 million against her abuser, a former elder, while the congregation's role was closed behind a confidential settlement — and, unlike a comparable award in Montana, the Hawaii judgment has stood without reported challenge.