What the Watchtower Doesn’t Want You to Know with Australian whistleblower Lara Kaput: Child labor, financial fraud, and eight types of modern slavery inside the Jehovah’s Witnesses

When Lara Kaput was eight years old, she was required to clean bricks on Jehovah’s Witness building sites. She helped her father road-build on the church construction projects. She did cleaning, and gardening, and her childhood friends did this, and cleaning child-minding too. None of it paid, none very little of it optional. She did not recognize it as child labor at the time. Most children raised inside authoritarian groups do not. That is how it works.

I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Lara on Cults, Culture & Coercion, and what she brought to this conversation is the kind of ground-level, decade-long investigative knowledge that is genuinely rare. Lara is a prominent Australian activist and whistleblower, a co-founder of the advocacy group Say Sorry (saysorry.org), and a former vice president of the Secular Association of New South Wales. For nine years she has provided testimony and submissions to governments, law enforcement, and royal commissions across approximately 10 countries, specifically concerning the Watchtower Society, theone of the legal names for the organization known publicly as the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Lara has made approximately 30 or more submissions to governments across roughly 10 countries around the globe. The allegations she has documented and reported fall into several categories, and she was careful throughout our conversation to frame these as allegations, as the matters are either under investigation or have not yet been adjudicated. They include: aiding and abetting child sexual abuse, high rates of domestic violence, intentional contract breaches, document forgery, evidence and records destruction, interference with members’ democratic rights, phoenixing of businesses (the deliberate voluntary dissolution of one company to restart another, shedding liabilities while preserving assets and customers), multi-billion-dollar global property liquidation she alleges constitutes financial fraud, modern slavery, and manipulation of privacy law, and perverting the course of justice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices