A California court fined the Watchtower $4,000 a day for withholding abuse records

On November 9, 2017, a California appeals court affirmed an unusual penalty against the Watchtower: a fine of $4,000 for every day it refused to hand over its internal records of child sexual abuse.^[1]

The case, Padron v. Watchtower, was the second San Diego lawsuit in which the organization had fought to avoid producing responses to a single document — a letter dated March 14, 1997, that directed congregation elders to report known child molesters to the organization's headquarters.^[1] A trial court, met with the Watchtower's refusal to comply with its discovery order, had structured the daily sanction in two halves: $2,000 for each day the organization failed to search for the records, and $2,000 more for each day it failed to produce them.^[1]

The Watchtower appealed, arguing that the court had no authority to impose such a coercive daily fine. The appeals court disagreed — and it found the organization estopped from even making the argument. In an earlier San Diego case, Lopez v. Watchtower, the organization had itself urged the court to impose daily monetary sanctions rather than the harsher penalty it faced there.^[1] Having argued for exactly this kind of remedy when it suited them, the court reasoned, the Watchtower could not now object to it.^[1]

The ruling was a small but telling episode in a larger, recurring pattern: the same 1997 letter, and the same refusal to disclose what it produced, at the center of one San Diego abuse case after another.

The estoppel point was more than a lawyer's technicality. It captured a bind the Watchtower had built for itself: in Lopez, facing a case-ending sanction, it had argued that a daily fine would be the fairer, more measured remedy; when a court in Padron imposed exactly that, it objected. Having praised the tool when it was the lesser threat, the organization could not disown it when it bit. The daily sanction stood — and the records the Watchtower had fought for years to keep sealed came a step closer to the light.