In 2017, after Millar's public shaming and separation from her husband, her mother disowned her. "And that's really when my faith began to unravel … I began to think there's no love here." 'Disloyalty to Jehovah' "I was increasingly ostracised by the congregation, by people who I'd called friends, by people who I believed I was going to live forever with. "They basically told the whole congregation everything that had been going on and then said that people were allowed to decide if they still wanted to associate with me," Millar says. They decided she could, but she would not go unpunished. Millar says the elders remained at her house for several hours, questioning her and deliberating about whether she could remain as a Witness.
I was conditioned to believe I did need to answer them." "At no stage did I think, 'I don't need to answer these'. And the questions were really, really intimate," she says. "They questioned me about that with my husband present. When her husband became suspicious, he alerted the Witness elders, three of whom came to Millar's home. He also referred to international international human rights cases, such as a 2010 Russian case, recognising the right of Jehovah’s Witnesses to practise their religion, and questioned the reliability of former members' perceptions of religions they have left. There is no basis for this," the spokesperson said. "We commonly encounter the false allegation that Jehovah's Witnesses 'control' various aspects of a congregant's life. He also denied that women are discouraged from further education, stating: "Enrolling in a post secondary education course is a personal decision completely unrelated to a person's gender, age or race". Our organisation does not list which styles of clothing are acceptable and which are objectionable." In a statement to the ABC, Jehovah's Witnesses Australasian spokesperson Tom Pecipajkovski denied that the religious group controls what women wear, stating: "Each individual Jehovah's Witness has the freedom to choose what type of clothing to wear. And the structure and the system which they live inside is deeply, deeply coercive." "People think, 'Oh, these are nice people' … but their beliefs aren't.
"What they wear is tightly controlled," she says. If women pray in public, they have to have head coverings on … Women aren't allowed to wear trousers to the meetings or on field service. She says that in the community she grew up in, "Women aren't allowed to lead in any kind of worship.