Brooklyn suit alleges 1980s abuse at Bethel, using New York City's new gender-violence look-back window

A woman who says she was sexually abused as a child by a Jehovah's Witness elder in the 1980s sued three Jehovah's Witness organizations in Brooklyn on 16 June 2026, using a New York City law that was amended in January of this year to reopen the courthouse door to decades-old claims. The verified complaint in D.B. Doe v. The Governing Body of Jehovah's Witnesses, Index No. 522573/2026, was filed in the Supreme Court of the State of New York, County of Kings, at 4:48 PM.^[1]

The defendants are The Governing Body of Jehovah's Witnesses, the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, the Christian Congregation of Jehovah's Witnesses, and seventy-five unidentified individuals listed as "John and Jane Does." The complaint pleads six causes of action and asks for compensatory and punitive damages. No dollar figure is demanded.^[1]

What makes the filing notable is not only what it alleges but that it exists at all. The alleged abuse is pleaded as having happened between roughly 1985 and 1988, when the plaintiff was between five and eight years old.^[1] Under ordinary rules that claim would be far too old to bring. The suit is brought under § 10-1104.1, the January 2026 amendment to New York City's Victims of Gender-Motivated Violence Protection Law — an amendment that permits claims which would otherwise be too late, and that extends liability to institutions, not only to the accused individual.^[2]

Every allegation in the complaint is an untested claim in a pending case. Nothing described below has been proven, and the court has made no findings on any of it. One of the three organizations, Watchtower, has appeared through counsel. As of 21 July 2026 the docket shows no answer and no motion responding to the allegations from any defendant.^[3]

What the complaint alleges

The plaintiff files under the pseudonym D.B. Doe. She is pleaded as having been born in 1980 and as living in Montana. She is anonymous in the court record and remains so here.^[1]

According to the lawsuit, her family belonged to the Sherwood Park Congregation of Jehovah's Witnesses in Philadelphia, where they met Preston Green. Green is pleaded as having been an elder — one of the unpaid men who govern a local congregation, teach, and handle discipline — from about 1985 to 1988. Green and his wife, Joan, are alleged to have visited the family home to help care for the plaintiff and her siblings. The complaint alleges, on information and belief, that Joan Green had been assigned by congregation elders to help the family; she is not accused of any wrongdoing.^[1]

Beginning in or around 1985, when the plaintiff was five, the complaint alleges Green began sexually abusing her, typically weekly, and typically at his home or hers. The complaint describes the alleged acts explicitly, including penetrative abuse. Those descriptions are not reproduced here.^[1]

Preston Green is not a defendant in this lawsuit. He is the man the complaint accuses of the abuse, and is pleaded as having acted as an agent of the three organizations at the relevant times. JW Files located no criminal conviction of Green.

The Brooklyn allegations

The claims that anchor the case in Brooklyn concern Bethel, the name Jehovah's Witnesses give their world headquarters, which at the time was located in Brooklyn. The complaint alleges that on at least five separate occasions Green took the plaintiff to Bethel without her parents, and that abuse occurred on Bethel property on every one of those occasions.^[1]

It further alleges, on information and belief — a legal formality meaning the plaintiff believes the fact to be true but does not claim first-hand knowledge of it — that Watchtower and the Governing Body knew Green was bringing a minor of the opposite sex, not related to him, onto Bethel property unaccompanied by her parents.^[1]

Those allegations do double duty. They are the factual core of the negligence claims, and they are also the reason the case sits in Kings County: the complaint pleads venue under CPLR § 503, the New York rule that fixes where a case may be heard, on the grounds that Watchtower's principal office was in Kings County when the alleged acts occurred and that the alleged conduct occurred there.^[1]

The 1992 disclosure

The complaint alleges the abuse stopped in or around 1988, around the time the plaintiff's father himself became an elder.^[1]

Four years later, in or around 1992, at age twelve, she began the process of becoming baptized. As part of that process, according to the lawsuit, she told the congregation's elders about the alleged abuse.

That allegation is the pivot from the individual claims to the institutional ones. The negligence and emotional-distress claims turn on the argument that the organizations' own structures and instructions, rather than one man's conduct alone, produced the harm.

The policies the complaint puts on trial

To connect an individual elder in Philadelphia to three organizations headquartered in New York, the complaint pleads a set of internal Jehovah's Witness policies as background. These are the plaintiff's characterizations, offered as allegations.

• The two-witness rule: the complaint alleges that under Jehovah's Witness policy, where there are not at least two witnesses to wrongdoing and the accused denies it, the accused is treated as innocent and no corrective, protective, or punitive action is taken. Where there are two witnesses or a confession, a judicial committee — a panel of three elders that hears the matter and imposes discipline — is convened. Outcomes range from private reproof (a private censure, usually with a temporary loss of congregation privileges), to public reproof announced to the congregation, to disfellowshipping, or expulsion.^[1]
• A July 1989 policy letter, which the complaint alleges required elders to contact Watchtower's Legal Department about child-abuse allegations rather than cooperating with police, and which it alleges remained in place. The complaint further asserts that Watchtower's Service Department — the branch office department that oversees congregations and elders — "has never made a mandated child abuse report to law enforcement."^[1]
• A March 1997 letter the complaint alleges Watchtower sent to every U.S. body of elders, requiring nearly 14,000 congregations to report men who served or had served in an appointed position — elder, ministerial servant (an assistant to the elders), or pioneer — and who were known to have molested a child. A July 1998 follow-up letter is alleged to have reminded elders to send the reports.^[1]

The complaint alleges those responses were retained by Watchtower and the Governing Body and that no effective new preventive policy followed. It also pleads that in or about April 2001 the Christian Congregation of Jehovah's Witnesses took over operation of the Service Department of the U.S. branch and became Watchtower's successor in interest — the entity that inherits the predecessor's obligations — which is how a 2001-era corporation is pleaded into liability for 1980s conduct.^[1]

The Governing Body is pleaded as an unincorporated association with perpetual existence — a group acting collectively without incorporating as a company, which matters because whether and how such a body can be sued is itself contested ground. The complaint names eleven men as its members: Kenneth E. Cook, Jr.; Gage Fleegle; Samuel Frederick Herd; Geoffrey William Jackson; Jody Jedele; Mark Stephen Lett; Gerrit Lösch; Jacob Rumph; D. Mark Sanderson; David H. Splane; and Jeffrey Winder. None of the eleven is named individually as a defendant, and the complaint does not accuse any of them of abuse; they are identified because the Governing Body is sued as a collective body rather than as a company. The complaint then pleads eleven mutually exclusive alternatives as to which of them serves as coordinator — a standard pleading device used when a plaintiff does not yet know a fact and asks the court to accept whichever version proves true. It is not an assertion that any particular member holds the role.^[1]

The law that makes the case possible

Most claims are governed by a statute of limitations — the legal deadline for bringing a lawsuit. A claim over conduct in 1985 would normally have expired decades ago. What revives it is a look-back window: a temporary period during which the legislature lets people sue over conduct that would otherwise be too old.

The suit is brought under the New York City Victims of Gender-Motivated Violence Protection Law, N.Y.C. Admin. Code § 10-1101 and following, and specifically invokes § 10-1104.1, added by amendment in January 2026.^[1]

Independent legal commentary describes the amendments as taking effect on 29 January 2026 and creating an eighteen-month look-back window for claims arising from conduct before 9 January 2022, with filings permitted until 29 July 2027. Litigants who filed between 1 March 2023 and 1 March 2025 but were ruled time-barred may amend or refile. The amendments were enacted over the veto of former Mayor Eric Adams.^[2]

The second change is the one that puts three organizations rather than one man in the caption. The law reaches "any party who commits, directs, enables, participates in, or conspires in the commission of a crime of violence motivated by gender." Courts had previously read that so-called abettor provision as reaching only crimes committed after 2022; the 2026 amendments clarify that institutional liability applies retroactively within the look-back window.^[2] The complaint pleads its timeliness on that provision.^[1]

The six counts

The complaint pleads six causes of action:

• Violation of the Victims of Gender-Motivated Violence Protection Law, against all defendants.
• Negligent supervision — the claim that an organization failed to properly oversee someone it was responsible for — against all defendants.
• Negligent hiring and retention, the claim that it appointed or kept him in position when it should not have, against all defendants.
• Negligent failure to warn, train, or educate relating to sexual abuse, against all defendants.
• Intentional infliction of emotional distress, against Watchtower, the Christian Congregation, and Does 1-50.
• Sexual abuse and battery, against Watchtower, the Christian Congregation, and Does 1-50. This count is not pleaded against those defendants as direct abusers. It alleges instead that by failing to prevent, detect, report or investigate, they aided and abetted the abuse, and that by failing to respond once they learned of it, by concealing it, and by declining to contact law enforcement, they ratified it — a legal term meaning approving another's act after the fact and so becoming answerable for it.^[1]

The first four counts are pleaded against every defendant. The fifth and sixth are narrower: they run against Watchtower, the Christian Congregation and Does 1-50 only, and not against the Governing Body.^[1]

The complaint seeks judgment on each count "in a sum that exceeds the jurisdictional limits of all lower courts" — a New York formula that signals the claim belongs in the higher trial court without stating an amount — plus punitive damages, money awarded to punish conduct rather than to compensate a loss, along with interest and costs.^[1]

What has happened since the filing

The case is docketed as Active in Kings County Supreme Court, classified as a gender-motivated violence tort, with Aaron Maslow listed as the assigned judge.^[3]

Ten days after filing, on 26 June 2026, the plaintiff asked the court for permission to keep her name out of the case. She applied by order to show cause — a procedure for getting a matter before a judge quickly, in which the court itself sets the hearing date and directs how the other side must be notified — supported by her own affidavit, filed in redacted form, and by an affirmation from her lawyer. The application rests on New York Civil Rights Law § 50-b, the statute that shields the identity of victims of sex offences.^[3]

It asks the court to let her file and prosecute the case under the pseudonym D.B. Doe, to keep the case file under that caption, and to direct that only those initials appear in documents filed in the case.^[3]

The court signed the order to show cause on 7 July 2026, setting the application down for 24 July 2026 at 9:30 a.m. and directing that the papers be served on all defendants by personal delivery on or before 13 July.^[3]

On 13 July 2026, the firm Feinberg & Gasbarro, LLP filed three notices of appearance — one each for Glen Feinberg, Ashley Pona and Jeffrey W. Gasbarro — all on behalf of a single defendant, Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York. No lawyer has entered an appearance for the Governing Body or for the Christian Congregation of Jehovah's Witnesses. The court's own record lists the case's electronic-filing status as partial participation, so filings made on paper by a defendant not taking part in the electronic system would not necessarily appear in the electronic document list.^[3]

An appearance is not a defence. It records that a party has entered the case and identifies who will receive its papers; it takes no position on the allegations. Nothing on the docket indicates that any defendant has yet answered the complaint or moved to dismiss it, and the only motion the docket shows before the court is the plaintiff's own application to remain anonymous.^[3]

Counsel and related coverage

The plaintiff is represented by Elizabeth Klein Hiller of The Zalkin Law Firm, LLP, 305 Broadway, New York. Because the plaintiff does not live in New York County, the complaint is verified by her attorney rather than by her.^[1]

JW Files has previously covered two earlier California cases brought by the Zalkin firm against Watchtower over the disclosure of abuse records, Lopez and Padron, and has separately covered the March 1997 letters to bodies of elders and the 2026 New York disputes over abuse records. Those pieces are background to this filing, not part of it.

The case was filed on 16 June 2026 and assigned Index No. 522573/2026 in Kings County. The plaintiff's application to keep her name out of it is returnable on 24 July 2026. The look-back window under which the case was brought closes on 29 July 2027.