For years, rumors about Scott Merritt and the underage girls in a Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses on the Kenai Peninsula hovered over the congregation.
As far back as the 1990s, members remember hearing it said that Merritt, a well-liked young leader based in Kenai, spent too much time with young girls. That he acted strangely with them.
More than one former member said they told congregation elders that Merritt was sexually abusing adolescent and younger girls.
An official silence prevailed: The abuse was not reported to police until 2002, the same year Merritt was excommunicated. Even then, there was no criminal prosecution. Years passed. Then decades.
The girls who say they grew up being abused by the man they knew as “Scotty” became adults. Some left the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Some moved out of Alaska.
The Kenai Kingdom Hall itself, a squat, khaki-colored building with few windows on Kiana Lane, closed and became a yoga studio, and later a tribal office.
Now, a painful reckoning about what happened in the 1990s and early 2000s is taking place.
Last month, state prosecutors charged Merritt with 20 counts of child sexual abuse involving four victims, all of whom were members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses hall in Kenai.
Court documents describe the abuse as happening between the years of 1998 and 2002. The victims say it goes back even further, to the mid-1990s.
One girl said she was abused starting at age 5.
Merritt and his attorney could not be reached for this story. He pleaded not guilty in court and is being held at the Anchorage jail, according to court records. He would have been 18 or 19 when the accusations described in the indictment began. He is now 45.
In a statement, the Jehovah’s Witnesses organization said Merritt “was removed as one of Jehovah’s Witnesses in 2002 and has never been reinstated as a congregant.”
“We are not aware of any concerns about his conduct being raised with congregation elders other than those reported at the same time to law enforcement in 2002 when he was removed from the Kenai congregation,” the organization’s statement said.
The Daily News spoke with several people who were members of Kenai Peninsula Jehovah’s Witness churches in the 1990s and 2000s, including two women who are among the victims in the criminal case against Merritt.
They say they either directly reported or witnessed someone telling elders about the abuse years earlier.
A doctrine of separation
The Jehovah’s Witnesses organization has about 9 million adherents internationally, and estimates there are around 6,000 members in 31 congregations in Alaska, according to the Association of Religion Data Archives.
Jehovah’s Witnesses are known for their door-to-door proselytizing, as well as remaining “separate from the world,” according to the Watchtower, a publication of the organization. That includes not serving in the military, participating in politics or voting, or working jobs — such as law enforcement roles — that involve carrying deadly weapons. Witnesses don’t celebrate most religious and state holidays, and are supposed to adhere to a moral code that bars smoking, drinking, drugs, premarital sex and blood transfusions, among other activities.
In recent years, several high-profile child sex abuse cases and lawsuits have pointed an uncomfortable spotlight on the church’s handling of abuse allegations.
In one case in Montana, a court found that the Jehovah’s Witnesses church failed to report a child sexual abuser to police, allowing him to continue abusing a different child. A jury awarded the plaintiff $35 million, but the Montana Supreme Court reversed the judgment, saying religious authorities weren’t always obligated to report such abuse under a Montana law exemption.
An organization spokesperson said that “Jehovah’s Witnesses recognize that the authorities are responsible for addressing crimes such as child sexual abuse and do not shield perpetrators of such crimes from the authorities.”
To understand the organization’s internal handling of sex abuse allegations, you have to understand the core tenets of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, said Irwin Zalkin, the founding partner of the Zalkin Law Firm, a national firm that focuses on civil sex abuse lawsuits.
The firm has litigated more than 50 cases against the Jehovah’s Witnesses church, Zalkin said.
In the Jehovah’s Witnesses belief system, the worldly influences outside of the organization are “corrupted” by sin, Zalkin said.
When dealing with allegations as serious as child abuse, the perspective is, “why would you go to corrupted civil authorities when you have righteous elders who’ve dealt with the problem?” Zalkin said.
A revered servant
The first thing you have to know to understand how the abuse at the center of the new Alaska criminal case went on for so long, the survivors say, is how deeply enfolded they were in the faith.
Back in the 1990s, the Jehovah’s Witnesses Kingdom Hall in Kenai was the nucleus of almost every aspect of life for them, said J.O., one of the named victims in the criminal case. The Daily News generally does not identify victims of sexual abuse, and is using J.O.’s initials with her permission.
There were at least two services per week. Members went out to proselytize door to door. Social activities, meals, extended family — everything was part of the church’s domain.
“Jehovah’s Witnesses, they don’t tend to hang out with anybody from outside,” J.O. said. “Everything inside the religion.”
In the church, the young man known as “Scotty” Merritt was revered at first. He had been picked by church elders to become what is called a ministerial servant: a junior leader in the church called on to do things like read Bible testimonials and help with services. Ministerial servants were considered upstanding young men on a track to become full-fledged elders. Merritt’s father was on the powerful council of elders, which ran the Kingdom Hall.
J.O. said she was an 11-year-old who loved dance classes and Disney movies when Merritt started abusing her.
At first, the attention from Merritt, then about 20, felt flattering. But J.O. said she knew what he was doing to her was wrong, even though she didn’t have the vocabulary to say why.
“I didn’t understand it at 11 years old,” she said.
Merritt abused her for between six and eight months in the year 2000, she said. It ended abruptly after he touched her in front of an onlooker.
“He did it right in front of another person,” she said. “That other person happened to be an adult, and stopped it.”
The adult told other adults. The news reached her family.
J.O.’s grandfather questioned her about what happened, she said. He was an elder of the church.
Though the abuse wasn’t described in explicit detail, she believes her grandfather understood the severity — that much more had happened than the milder but still forbidden touching seen by the adult. He also would have known she wasn’t the first, J.O. said.
As an elder, she said, “my grandfather would have known about the prior victims to me.”
She said she doesn’t know if her grandfather took the information that his granddaughter had been sexually touched by an adult man to the other elders, but she was never asked to describe the abuse to the council.
“He chose to tell me never to speak about it again,” J.O. said.
At the time, J.O. wondered if she was the one who’d done something wrong, and if she’d be in trouble with church leadership. The threat that hung over her was the most severe consequence for Jehovah’s Witnesses: Being disfellowshipped, a form of shunning that cuts off ex-members from family and friends.
Merritt was told to stay away from her but wasn’t otherwise punished, she said. To her knowledge, the police were not informed at the time, J.O. said.
The viewpoint she grew up with was that “we never talk about these things,” J.O. said. “Because it brings reproach against Jehovah and his organization.”
By the accounts of others and by dates included in the Kenai grand jury indictment filed last month, Merritt had been abusing other girls in the church for years by the time the abuse described by J.O. began.
She believes Merritt’s status as a ministerial servant — and the fact his father was an elder — helped keep him under the radar and free from consequences for years.
‘You weren’t protected’
Zalkin, the attorney, says in his experience suing the Jehovah’s Witness organization, local churches deal with allegations of abuse with an initial investigation by elders, and then a judicial council of elders weighing in on the contentions. Three outcomes can result: A member can be reproved privately, reproved publicly or, the most extreme result, disfellowship.
Everything is considered confidential. No reason is given.
“The congregation under any of those scenarios would not know they had a perpetrator in their midst,” he said.
[Previous coverage: Anchorage police say they witnessed a sexual assault in public. It took seven years for the case to go to trial.]
In a statement, the Jehovah’s Witness organization said that elders “assure victims and their parents and others with knowledge of the matter that they are free to report an allegation of abuse to the secular authorities.”
“If elders become aware of an allegation, they will immediately comply with reporting laws,” the organization said.
Under Alaska law, the elders of the church wouldn’t be bound by mandatory reporting laws to disclose abuse of children to law enforcement.
Alaska statute says members of the clergy are among those considered mandatory reporters of suspected abuse of vulnerable adults. But there is no mention of clergy in the separate law governing the people who in their occupational duties must report abuse of children.
The Jehovah’s Witness organization has also argued that elders, who are unpaid volunteers, can’t be considered “clergy,” Zalkin said.
As she became a teenager, J.O. remembers feeling increasingly enraged about what had happened to her. In her early 20s, separated from the church, it boiled over. She had nightmares and panic attacks, and even tried to end her life once.
“It was the feeling that you weren’t protected” as a child, she said. “That you weren’t valuable enough to be protected.”
The ‘two witness rule’
Naomi Hagelund was a member of the Kenai church in the 1990s, part of a big pack of kids who hung out together. She was never abused by Merritt, she said. But it was no secret that something was wrong with him.
“It was very well known that he was a pedophile,” she said.
In the year 2000, when she was about 16, Hagelund said she attended an elders meeting with her best friend who wanted to disclose Merritt’s abuse. The girl’s abuse had happened in her early teens, Hagelund said.
During the meeting, a wall of silence and disbelief came down around the teenage girls, Hagelund said.
“It was all very, ‘What did you do to try and get out of it? And was there anybody who saw it?’ And then they finished the conversation by reading us Scripture about needing two witnesses,” she said.
Jehovah’s Witnesses base the “two witness rule” on a passage of Deuteronomy that says “no single witness may convict another for any error or any sin that he may commit. On the testimony of two witnesses or on the testimony of three witnesses the matter should be established.”
The Scripture is used in abuse investigations to determine whether a complaint should move forward, said Zalkin, the attorney. Without a confession or the corroborating testimony of two witnesses, elders are told to leave the matter alone, he said.
The organization says that’s not true.
“Elders will report an allegation of child abuse to the authorities as required by law regardless of how many people may be witnesses to the alleged crime,” the Jehovah’s Witnesses organization said in a statement.
That meeting 25 years ago concluded with the girls being told that there was no proof Merritt had done anything, and that they needed to be careful of their words about him, Hagelund said.
She was later disfellowshipped from the church herself, and wrote publicly on her blog about the incident and the “two witness rule” in 2015 — years before Kenai police again investigated Merritt.
Punish the man, not the institution
K.H., one of the victims in the current criminal case, said she started being abused by Merritt when she was just 7 years old.
At the time, she was in about second grade and interested in things like playing at the swimming pool with her siblings and spending time with her ailing grandmother. She was a member of the Soldotna Kingdom Hall, but hung around with people from the Kenai congregation through family.
The abuse continued until she was 14 years old, she said in an interview. “My whole childhood, basically.”
Her version of how the leadership responded is different from some of the other victims.
K.H. said she finally told her best friend of the abuse on Feb. 3, 2002 — a date she remembers precisely because the Super Bowl was happening. Together, they told the friend’s father, who was an elder. He told her mom. Her mom told the council of elders. At the time, K.H. was anxious about her secret coming out: She looked up definitions of “molestation” and “rape” to be sure she was being precise in her words.
Then a process within the congregation began. The 14-year-old K.H. told her story to a council of three elders. And then again, with Merritt there.
“You have the right to face your accuser,” she said. “I had to declare my accusation in front of him, so he had the opportunity to admit it or deny it.”
Merritt said again and again that he “didn’t recall” the abuse, she said. Merritt’s parents contested some of the dates and timelines she struggled to remember from years earlier. The meetings lasted for two months, through February and March.
“One of the other victims heard about it,” K.H. said. “Her friends knew her circumstance and were like, you gotta say something.”
When the second victim came forward, it fulfilled the two-witness rule and moved the investigation forward, K.H. said.
About two months later, around May of 2002, Merritt was “disfellowshipped” from the congregation, she said. No reason was given publicly.
People disagree about what really happened: K.H. and her family believe it was a direct result of the report of abuse she made. Others interviewed for this story say it was for unrelated reasons, such as Merritt’s sexual relationship with an adult non-church member.
In April of that year, K.H. and her mom had gone to the Kenai police. The elders didn’t try to stop them and said it was a personal choice, according to K.H. But there too, she ran up against a familiar response: It was her word against his. There was no physical evidence.
“Realistically, that’s kind of the judicial system too,” she said. “If it’s word versus word with no evidence, you have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt.”
No charges were filed.
In an October 2025 statement after Merritt was indicted, the Alaska Department of Law said “investigators were unable to compile sufficient evidence to support prosecution” in 2002. “New information and evidence, including additional victim reports, led to the case being reopened and investigated by the Kenai Police Department in 2021.”
In a statement, the Kenai Police Department said the case “is the result of persistence and determination by our investigators” and thanked victims for the “patience, strength, and willingness to come forward even decades later.”
K.H. remains a Jehovah’s Witness, and is not as critical about the response to the abuse as the other women involved.
Merritt is the one who abused her, not the Jehovah’s Witness organization, she said.
To focus otherwise is to “remove the weight of his crime and put it on others,” K.H. said.
In social media comment sections, the women involved have disagreed publicly about what happened, and the apportionment of blame. It has been painful, she said.
“I don’t want to minimize or reduce the experience that they had,” K.H. said. “I don’t feel that organizationally or even as an entire (body of elders) that they all had an agenda of wrongdoing.”
That’s not to say that all the church’s elders handled the abuse correctly. Some people, she said, did not take the words of girls saying they’d been hurt seriously enough.
“Those people, in my opinion, whether it’s in this life or another, are going to be held accountable for that,” she said.
This story was originally published by the Anchorage Daily News and is republished here with permission.