A Massachusetts congregation's confidential abuse files were leaked online in 2018

On January 9, 2018, a transparency website called FaithLeaks published 33 confidential documents — 69 pages of internal correspondence — taken from a Jehovah's Witnesses congregation in Brimfield, Massachusetts.^[1] The documents had been removed from the congregation the year before, by what FaithLeaks described as a whistleblower. The documents detailed how the organization's elders and its headquarters had handled allegations of child sexual abuse within the Palmer congregation over nearly two decades.^[1]

FaithLeaks was a new venture at the time, founded by the people behind MormonLeaks, who were extending their document-transparency model to other religious organizations.^[1] The Palmer files were among its first major releases.

According to the documents, as reported by outlets including Gizmodo and Rolling Stone, a committee of elders in 1999 found allegations against a congregation member credible but declined to convene a judicial committee — the internal panel that weighs accusations — because a survivor was unwilling to make the accusation in the accused's presence, as the organization's policy then required.^[1][2] Journalists who reviewed the correspondence reported that it showed leaders discouraging those involved from taking the matter to secular law enforcement.^[2]

FaithLeaks said it had redacted the names of the survivors, who were children at the time. The Watch Tower would later pursue legal action against the site over the disclosure.^[1] The episode became one of the more widely reported examples of the organization's internal abuse records reaching the public — not through a court, but through a leak.

The correspondence stretched back to 1999, the date of the earliest letters in the cache; it captured elders weighing accusations, consulting headquarters, and — in the journalists' account — steering the matter away from the police, seeking to keep it from what one letter reportedly called the "worldly court of law."^[2] Coverage in Rolling Stone and Newsweek framed the documents as a rare, unmediated look at how the organization handles such cases when it believes no outsider is watching. The Watch Tower disputed the disclosure and pursued FaithLeaks legally; the documents, with the survivors' names redacted, stayed online.