You’re sixteen. You had sex. Someone snitched.
Now, you’re sitting, nervous, at a conference table in the back room of a church. Three older men in suits are facing opposite you. One is the head honcho. Two are hunched over a yellow legal pad. None of them have been laid since the Dust Bowl. They proceed to ask graphic questions about your body and first sexual experience. You’re humiliated, and they don’t care. You’re denied the presence of a parent, or even another woman.
Jehovah’s Witnesses have their own judicial system run exclusively by male judges, and every trial ends the same way: you a hoe. If you’re a former Witness reading this, it’s no secret that women are disproportionately punished in comparison to the men who fuck them, then fuck them over. Whether he fessed up, moved on, or in the rare case, cares about her, seeing the guy publicly shamed and excommunicated for premarital sex is like a Bigfoot sighting—as elusive as the orgasm we know she didn’t have.
And, they don’t just target high schoolers. Girls who haven’t even begun to menstruate are told to cover their shoulders lest they lead grown men into temptation. Back in the seventies and eighties, married couples were chastised in front of the same tribunal of geriatrics for “unclean acts”, anything where he showed some love to the wrong hole. It’s a misogynistic tale as old as time, a system designed to control women and protect a line of perpetrators that start at the top.
Jehovah’s Witnesses have a chronic, systemic child sexual abuse problem. Eleven men, known as the Governing Body, or ruling board of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, are complicit in the obstruction of justice. They are: Stephen Lett, Gerrit Lösch, Geoffrey Jackson, Samuel Herd, David Splane, Kenneth Cook, Jr., Gage Fleegle, Jody Jedele, Jacob Rumph, Mark Sanderson, and Jeffrey Winder. I imagine Jeffrey Epstein would’ve been a welcome addition. Like Epstein, I’m guessing more than one of these names are on the list of sex offenders that have yet to see the light of day, a database that has been amassed for decades.
In 2024, Taylor Swift wrote a song about another loser she dated, this time, a loser in “a Jehovah’s Witness suit.” I couldn’t care less who the guy is. I have zero interest in decoding the subject of her cryptic jabs. My only hope is the whispery hit ballad doesn’t encourage clueless, pubescent Swifties—in some counterintuitive twist— to crush on their own loser Jehovah’s Witness boy. It would have been nice to see the indisputable Queen of Pop use her influence to address a few of the scarier things about the Witnesses if she was already going out of her way to burn them. Maybe she could sing about the countless Jehovah’s Witness women who have been raped, then excommunicated for reporting it to law enforcement. Or, she could collaborate with Serena Williams—celebrity Jehovah’s Witness and ambassador for the Allstate Foundation’s domestic violence program, Purple Purse—to allocate funds to Jehovah’s Witness women who are being beaten, then coerced into staying with their abusers. Maybe on the next album.
Of course, there are men who are not immune to the trigger-happy whims of authority. One guy in my congregation—we’ll call him Scott—became a widower at thirty-five. After the death of his wife left him a single father with five boys to raise, Scott developed a heroin addiction. Instead of extending compassion and facilitate his rehabilitation, the elders disfellowshipped him. Young boys have been preyed upon and abused in the Jehovah’s Witnesses. And, sometimes, women who are unhinged or calculated manage to get away with bad behavior; the congregation politics were such that the stars aligned in her favor, and when this sort of thing happens, you can bank on it that it’s a case of the elder having reason to protect his ass, not hers.
Young women around the globe continue to be subjected to purity culture and double standards. They were born into a world of criminals, men who have made it their goal to keep her sexually repressed and silent. To the young woman in that back room who had to sit there and eat it, you’re not alone. As more Kingdom hoes unite and courts lose patience, the only thing he’ll be eating is subpoena.