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A Pennsylvania woman is suing the Jehovah’s Witnesses of Fort Kent and the New York-based headquarters of the church for alleged sexual abuse committed decades ago by church members.
Shannon Simendinger, 45, alleges that three church members sexually abused her from approximately 1985 to 1993, when she was between the ages of 6 and 14. She and her family lived in Fort Kent at that time and attended the Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Fort Kent.
Lewiston law firm Berman & Simmons filed the civil suit Jan. 8 at Aroostook County Superior Court in Caribou. The firm has handled multiple sex abuse cases brought against the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland and is also representing some families and victims of the deadly Lewiston shooting rampage in October 2023.
The 24-page document accuses elders David Ezzy and Ernest Fyans and church member Daniel Plourde of multiple acts of sexual abuse against Simendinger when she was a minor. The suit alleges that the Fort Kent congregation and the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York Inc. were negligent, failed to keep her from harm and caused her emotional distress.
“It left me vulnerable. It left me scared,” Simendinger said in an interview on Wednesday, in which she was joined by her attorney, Mike Bigos. “It made me feel like I was responsible for what happened to me. I was intimidated.”
It is the second recent case against the Fort Kent Jehovah’s Witnesses. In October 2023, Fyans was found guilty of sexually assaulting two children in the early 1990s.
Simendinger is coming forward now because she feels safe and is no longer intimidated by anyone in the church, Bigos said. He and his client want a jury trial.
“We want to ask a jury to find damages for the health that was taken from Shannon as a result of the abuse that she experienced, that we believe the evidence will show was enabled by the Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses and the institutional betrayal she experienced once she notified them,” Bigos said.
Simendinger shared the alleged abuse with her mother at the time, and her mother notified the police, she said. The church allegedly punished her mother for going to law enforcement. Simendinger did not state what the alleged punishment was.
She hopes the legal process will help others and aid her own healing.
The lawsuit contains seven counts. The first, sexual assault, charges that Ezzy, Fyans and/or Plourde abused and assaulted Simendinger while acting in their church roles, according to the document.
Other alleged violations include negligence and breach of fiduciary duty — given the protection the church should have been providing to children — as well as actual or implied malice, and inflicting emotional distress. The lawsuit seeks damages, punishments, costs and other relief.
The attorneys representing the church — Brad Patershall of Portland and Joel Taylor of Brewster, New York — did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Simendinger is not intimidated anymore and wants the church and its members to be held accountable for what she went through, she said.
“Other people are going to be harmed if I just sit back,” she said. “The main goal for me is healing, helping others, and for them to be accountable for letting this stuff happen.”
