Ernest Fyans will serve 20 years in prison for sexually assaulting two children at the Kingdom Hall of Jehovah's Witnesses in Fort Kent in the 90s.
Former Jehovah's Witness elder found guilty of sexually assaulting Maine children
by Ariana St Pierre, WGME
Tue, October 3rd 2023 at 6:17 AM
CARIBOU, Maine (WGME) -- A former Jehovah’s Witness elder in northern Maine has been found guilty of sexually assaulting young children.
According to the Bangor Daily News, a jury found Ernest Fyans guilty of gross sexual assault and unlawful sexual contact.
Fyans reportedly sexually abused two children, who were under the age of 12 at the time, in the early 1990s.
The victims' families were members of Kingdom Hall Jehovah’s Witness in Fort Kent where Fyans was an elder.
One victim was 16 when she first reported the abuse in 2002, but by then the statute of limitations on sex crimes prevented prosecution.
Maine has since removed the statute of limitations on prosecuting sex crimes. According to the BDN, the state revisited that victim’s allegations in 2020 and indicted Fyans in 2021.
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"Though they wanted to eventually leak redacted versions of every document involving a criminal act, they decided to start with one big story: the case of a Witness man from the Palmer Congregation in Brimfield, Massachusetts, who allegedly abused his two daughters and another young girl.
The story plays out across 33 letters—69 pages in all—between the congregation and Watchtower headquarters. One of the man’s daughters said he had tied her down and molested her; the other said he had raped her repeatedly for nine years. He allegedly took one of his daughters into the woods and showed her where he would bury each of her body parts if she told. The girl who wasn’t his daughter said he raped her in his neighbor’s mobile home when she was 4.
At first, the elders took only nominal action because one of the sisters refused to accuse her father in person. In 2003, the elders finally disfellowshipped the man after he confessed to molesting one daughter. But he was reinstated a year later, partly because the daughter who had accused him of years of rape refused to answer new questions from the elders, who expressed disapproval in the letters that she and her husband had alerted civil authorities."
