A US man serving in various administrative roles for the Jehovah’s Witnesses sexually molested a child whom he met while working for the Christian religious sect in New Orleans – then continued his career virtually unimpeded and moved to North Carolina after completing a disciplinary suspension of less than a year, he has admitted in writing and in a sworn deposition.
The stunning revelations about Joseph Fitzgerald Hall and how he has been managed by the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York that runs the Jehovah’s Witnesses are contained in a lawsuit that the abuse survivor has been pursuing against both the group and the administrator.
In a recent interview, the survivor, Barry Davis, explained that one of his main reasons for coming forward was to ensure the congregation that Hall later joined in Charlotte, North Carolina, knew the full truth about him. Hall, while testifying under oath in the course of the lawsuit, acknowledged that“there is no requirement to tell someone why you were disfellowshipped”, which is the term to describe the suspension he served over his abuse of Davis.
“They should know out there,” Davis said. “This needs to be exposed to anybody it needs to be exposed to.”
Davis, now 46, also said he shed his anonymity to support others who for years have been speaking out about child abuse within the Jehovah’s Witnesses. He contended that the evidence in his case “just kind of drives the nail in” about the reality of the issue.
In his opinion, he said: “Nothing’s changed.”
About 8.5 million people globally are active members of the denomination, a primary tenet of which is that the world’s destruction is imminent.
Hall, now 60, did not respond to requests for comment about his admissions. In a statement, an attorney representing the Watchtower Society, Billy Gibbens, maintained “the actions of the accused in this lawsuit were his own and contrary to the beliefs and practices of Jehovah’s Witnesses”.
“The alleged criminal acts occurred outside the scope of any religious activities assigned to the accused by the local congregation,” Gibbens’ statement said.
Gibbens said his side could not elaborate while the case was pending in court. But he also wrote: “It is deeply distressing whenever anyone falls victim to such a heinous crime and sin. My clients deeply empathize with all victims of abuse.”
As he tells it, Davis was about nine when he met Hall, roughly aged 24, through a Jehovah’s Witnesses congregation in New Orleans’s Central City neighborhood. Hall promised Davis that he would mold him into one of the so-called Dryades congregation’s “next great” leaders if the boy listened properly, according to the plaintiff’s lawsuit.
But instead, the lawsuit argued, Hall exploited his positions as a ministerial servant and later as an elder within the congregation to get close to Davis. Hall held private Bible studies with Davis, brought him along as he proselytized to potential new converts and shared religious articles from the Watchtower Society with him.
The lawsuit said Hall ultimately took advantage of that proximity to rape Davis and inflict other sexually abusive acts on him from 1990 to 1996, beginning when the boy was 11. Hall would tell Davis that 12 “was the age of accountability”, and therefore the boy bore fault for his molestation, the lawsuit said.
Davis recalled disclosing his abuse to his mother – who was a single parent – along with another elder at their congregation – by 1998. In February of that year, the elder initiated a type of disciplinary hearing that the Jehovah’s Witnesses refer to as a “judicial committee”.
Multiple congregation elders who formed part of the committee heard Davis deliver an account of the molestation he endured at the hands of Hall. The committee subsequently disfellowshipped Hall for 11 months – during which time he was in effect suspended from the congregation – before he was allowed to return, the lawsuit said.
Meanwhile, the lawsuit added, the committee instructed Davis to “repent” and quit his “homosexual lifestyle”. The group prohibited Davis from carrying the microphone at congregation gatherings, working behind the literature counter or leading trips to proselytize to prospective new members, along with other privileges.
And crucially, the lawsuit said, it ordered Davis to cooperate with the Jehovah’s Witnesses in keeping what Hall had done to him secret because it would impugn the sect if word got out. The lawsuit asserted such an instruction violated laws in Louisiana which require religious organizations such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses to report any suspected child abuse to state authorities.
Davis said he complied with the committee’s wishes for years – even after he was kicked out of standing in a friend’s wedding when news of his having tried to hold Hall accountable circulated among the congregation.
But Davis said he eventually left the Jehovah’s Witnesses and moved to the Dallas area in Texas. There, in 2014, about six years after his mother died, he decided to revisit Hall’s abuse and the resulting treatment he got from the Jehovah’s Witnesses after seeing a local news story about an attorney filing a lawsuit against the sect on behalf of five clients with their own abuse allegations.
Davis said he reached out to that lawyer, who could not assist him because his case unfolded in Louisiana rather than in Texas. Then, in 2019, he contacted New Orleans-based attorney Kristi Schubert, who has represented a number of religious abuse survivors – but, initially, she couldn’t help because Louisiana laws in effect at the time meant Davis had only until his 28th birthday to sue over his molestation by Hall.
Davis was about 40 at the time.
Nonetheless, in 2021, Louisiana’s legislature enacted a law that in part temporarily allowed child molestation victims to file lawsuits seeking damages for their abuse no matter how long they had waited.
The law’s constitutionality was challenged. But Louisiana’s supreme court upheld it as constitutional on 12 June 2024.
That very same day, Schubert filed a lawsuit in New Orleans’s civil district courthouse on Davis’s behalf. It demanded damages from Hall and the Watchtower Society, including for the mental and physical trauma with which the plaintiff was left.
The lawsuit has generated exceptionally compelling evidence against Hall, who – as of a deposition in March – said he was representing himself without an attorney.
In his mandatory response to the lawsuit, Hall wrote that he is “guilty of have [sic] an inappropriate relationship” with Davis.
“We fondled each other and played with each other sex organs and laid on each other buttocks,” said Hall’s response, which was replete with typos. He added that he and Davis engaged in oral sex, though the plaintiff at the time could not legally give consent to that act or any of the others Hall mentioned.
Furthermore, Hall wrote that a book which Davis authored and self-published about his abuse “speaks truthfully to a large degree about [the] encounters”.
Schubert interrogated Hall under oath during a 27 March videoconference deposition. Hall invoked his constitutional right against self-incrimination – colloquially known as pleading the fifth amendment – at least 48 times.
But he did answer when Schubert asked him if the letter was true and whether he wrote it of his “own free accord”. Hall’s answer to both questions: “Yes.”
Hall additionally testified about how he had a wife as well as a son – and how since 2003 he had belonged to a Jehovah’s Witnesses congregation on Monroe Road in Charlotte. He said he was considered what is known as a regular “publisher”, by which he was regularly participating in organized preaching at his congregation.
Despite his being disfellowshipped after Davis reported his molestation, Hall said he does not “know of any rule” prohibiting from proselytizing around children. He also said there was no mandate for him to disclose the reason for his disfellowship to anyone, including fellow members of his congregation.
Speaking in the weeks after the deposition, Davis said Hall’s statements evidently contradict the Jehovah’s Witnesses claims in their policies that “children are a sacred trust” – and their “protection … is of utmost concern and importance”.
Davis said he hopes Hall and the Jehovah’s Witnesses make him whole for his ordeal. But furthermore, he said he hopes the Jehovah’s Witnesses rethink the way they have let Hall carry on his business within the denomination.
“It’s upsetting – it’s infuriating,” Davis said. “I just think that is ludicrous.”
