A Quebec class action over child abuse was filed against the Jehovah's Witnesses in 2017

In September 2017, a former Jehovah's Witness filed a motion in the Superior Court of Quebec seeking to launch a class-action lawsuit against the organization over child sexual abuse.^[1]

The representative plaintiff, Lisa Blais, alleged that she had been sexually assaulted as a child by a member of her congregation, and that the organization's culture had worked to keep such abuse hidden.^[1] The proposed class was broad: current and former Jehovah's Witnesses who say they were sexually abused as minors in Quebec, whether by an elder or by a fellow congregant. The suit named the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania — the religion's principal United States legal entity — along with the organization's Canadian branch.^[1]

Blais's filing alleged a "culture of silence" within the religion, and sought $150,000 in moral damages and $100,000 in punitive damages for each member of the class.^[1] Those were the sums requested, not amounts any court had awarded.

The motion was a request for permission to proceed, not the case itself. It took hold: in February 2019, the Superior Court of Quebec authorized the class action, dividing it into two subclasses — those who say they were abused by elders, and those abused by other members.^[2] The pleadings alleged, among other things, that leaders had sought to discourage Blais from reporting her assailant to the police for fear of tarnishing the religion's image.^[2]

The Quebec action was part of a widening front of abuse litigation against the organization in Canada and beyond, as former members increasingly turned to the civil courts over abuse they said the congregation had buried. Certification is only a threshold — it lets a case proceed on behalf of a group without deciding the underlying claims — and class actions are hard to authorize at all. But the 2019 ruling meant that, for the first time in Quebec, the organization would have to answer such claims collectively rather than one plaintiff at a time, the very prospect the Witnesses had long worked to avoid.