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Barbara Andersen is an author residing in the Western United States. Her work has primarily centered on her involvement with and eventual dismissal from the religious organization named Watchtower (www.jw.org) and commonly known as Jehovah's Witnesses.

From 1982-1993, Barbara and her husband were two of the almost 4,000 volunteer workers who lived and worked at the world headquarters of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Brooklyn, New York. They were there for almost eleven years. Barbara was assigned to work in their Engineering Department as a secretary and then administrative assistant to a Watchtower architect. She was there until 1989 when she was transferred to their Writing Department to do research for a new history book, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Proclaimers of God’s Kingdom, which they published in the summer of 1993.

In October of 1991, the Witness journal, Awake!, featured a series of articles that dealt with the effects of child sexual abuse upon victims. These articles offered suggestions to caregivers and others for dealing with the effects of such abuse. Due to a close working relationship with the editor of the Awake! magazine, Barbara learned about what precipitated the writing and publishing of the October 8, 1991 Awake! articles and about the results after it was published.

In May of 2002, Barbara appeared on the NBC Dateline program along with Mr. William Bowen of www.silentlambs.org. Mr. Bowen discovered local abuses in his home state. Barbara uncovered the international aspects of the cover-up of molestation within the Watchtower (www.jw.org) organization. (Also, see her website, www.watchtowerdocuments.com.)

On her Website one can view media coverage of Watchtower's pedophilia problem (http://www.watchtowerdocuments.com/jw-media.html), including a segment on NBC Nightly News that discussed the nine sexual abuse lawsuits involving Jehovah’s Witnesses and sixteen victims which were settled by that group in 2008. It was then that she revealed what was in the filed court documents, which she had purchased after the settlement, and published in a CD titled, Secrets of Pedophilia in an American Religion, Jehovah’s Witnesses in Crisis. (http://www.watchtowerdocuments.com/docs/jw-secrets.html) This can be read about in a lengthy article that appeared on MSNBC’s Internet website. The link to that article is also included with the others on Barbara's website.

In 1992 a Report to the Governing Body of Jehovah's Witnesses was made where Barbara spoke of her last work project in the Writing Department—it is that package of material that the Awake! editor, Harry Peloyan, gave to the Governing Body a few weeks after Barbara left JW headquarters to return to my home in Tennessee.

The package was broken down into three parts and consists of over 200 pages. The package contained a record of phone calls Barbara made to around nineteen mental health clinicians in the field most of whom were also Jehovah's Witnesses. Her purpose in calling them was to ask if they were treating Jehovah's Witness (JW) victims of child abuse and what kind of problems they may have encountered doing so. The leaders of JWs did not at the time (many maintain they still do not) subscribe to their members going to therapists for assistance with their emotional problems.

After requesting a letter from each person containing their observations, Barbara made a brief outline of all the conversations to be included with other material for the Governing Body. After receiving the replies, she did a synopsis of each reply which she included along with copies of the letters from those who she contacted. Then Barbara included copies of quite a number of letters which the Watchtower Writing Department received from JW victims of child abuse committed by JW molesters detailing their accusations and problems, plus, material from secular sources that detailed the entire issue from many different angles. Since so many JW child abuse victims spoke of “repressed memories” and “Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD), now called Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID),” she included material about these subjects too.

In 2001, she provided this material as well as other documentation to producers at NBC. In 2002, she provided this same package to producers at BBC and CBC, and reporters at Newsweek and New York Times to back up her story. This way they could be sure that she was not making fraudulent accusations and could proceed with hour-long documentaries or newspaper articles without worry. Further, Barbara provided this material to attorneys who were involved in the lawsuits filed by JW victims against Jehovah’s Witnesses corporate arm, the Watch Tower and its many other corporate entities.

The media organizations agreed not to publish the material given them, but it was the prime evidence of child abuse within the Witness group that they needed to be convinced of her story. Barbara also included a copy of a letter to her from the Awake! editor, Harry Peloyan, which is extremely enlightening. Although all of this material concerns itself with events preceding 1992, as the court documents show, which she included in her “Secrets” CD, the cover-up by the Witness organization was still on-going through 2004. Revelations continue to surface.

Barbara was personally connected with trying to overhaul the Watchtower’s child sexual abuse policies from within for five years without success and then left the organization at the end of 1997 because of the devious misleading misrepresentation of the facts by JW leaders when they wrote in the Watchtower journal that no molester could hold a position of power in JW congregations. This was absolutely not true. In reality, they did not change in any way their policies that always ends up protecting pedophiles and not children.

Barbara was disfellowshipped and shunned by family and friends shortly before Dateline aired in 2002, which act would make it appear to JWs that she was guilty of some sort of secret sin, so, subsequently, when I appeared on the program, the Witnesses wouldn’t believe her expose’, hence the children would still not be protected.