Apologia Church Sues Former Parishioner for Defamation

Church attendee says church breached her confidentiality and shared private details about her life.

This article was updated on 1/21/2026 with information about the anti-SLAPP motion filed in the case.

An elder from Apologia Church has removed himself as a plaintiff in a lawsuit filed against a former parishioner who made videos about the church’s “mishandling of confidential marriage counseling information” by church leadership.

Apologia Church was started in 2010 in Mesa, Arizona, and boasts that its ministry reaches over a million people per month either in person or online. It is led by Pastor Jeff Durbin.

Elder Zachary Morgan entered and was granted a notice of dismissal against the defendants this week as part of the ongoing litigation.

Apologia Elder Zack Morgan / Photo via Apologia Church

In October, Apologia Church filed a defamation lawsuit against former church attendee Hailey Merris and her husband Cameron and against blogger Sarah Leann Young and her husband Joe. Young operates the Check My Church website and reported Merris’s story there. The Check My Church mission is to “expose churches that exhibit red flags of abuse” and “to encourage good, healthy, and safe churches and ministries to continue doing what they’re doing.”

The complaint alleges that Merris, through her Tik Tok videos, defamed the church when she criticized its leadership for publicly discussing her private affairs, namely marital difficulties she and her husband were experiencing.

“This case is about whether or not I have the right to criticize the church leaders’ actions,” Merris told MinistryWatch, adding that nothing she has released publicly is false.

Young reported about Merris’ story and the alleged breach of confidentiality she felt the Apologia leadership engaged in. Young told MinistryWatch that she gave Apologia a chance to comment and respond before publishing the story.

According to Young’s reporting, Merris had suffered trauma and abuse at the hands of her previous husband. When she and her current husband began to have conflict, they sought help and counseling from the Apologia leaders. At one point, a conflict rose to the level of calling the police in July 2024.

Apologia Church Pastor Jeff Durbin / Video screenshot)

Merris shared details about the police incident with the church elders. Shortly thereafter, Merris said that Pastor Jeff Durbin’s daughter — Saylor Perez — allegedly shared that Merris’s husband had been jailed as a result of the police call and claimed that Merris had pulled a gun on her husband. Screenshots of what appear to be Perez’s text messages are on Young’s website.

Merris had not told Perez anything about the incident, and she believes Perez learned about the incident through a breach of confidentiality by the church leadership.

Merris also says that Perez’s retelling of the incident was inaccurate and slanderous because the police report confirms that she never pointed the gun at anyone.

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Merris said she and her husband were essentially excommunicated from the church even after Merris said she was open to counseling and was repentant for the part she played in the marital troubles.

A few months after being “excommunicated,” Merris learned about the text communications by Perez and began to share via Tik Tok her belief that the church had breached its duty of confidentiality regarding her marital counseling and had slandered her as well.

Merris took the video down and reached out to Durbin to suggest a conversation about her concerns. In his response — seen in screenshots on Young’s website — Durbin accused her of spreading lies and misinformation.

Apologia claims that Young defamed the church in her post about Merris’ story by saying that Apologia church has a “a cultic pattern of dishonesty, spiritual abuse, gossip, slander, breaching confidentiality, and more” and other statements it says are slanderous. However, Young’s story actually says that Merris’s Tik Tok videos “suggest” such a pattern.

Apologia and its leaders claim they never “inappropriately shared or spread false, untruthful, protected, or confidential information.”

The lawsuit claims that Apologia’s pastors and elders have suffered harm to their reputations, emotional distress, mental anguish, and humiliation as a result of the alleged defamatory statements.

The church is seeking a temporary restraining order to keep the Youngs and the Merrises from posting or commenting about the plaintiffs on social media or on the blog. The court held a hearing on the temporary restraining order, but has not made a decision and has ordered briefs to be filed by the parties over the next couple of weeks.

Merris and Young also filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit last week claiming that the defendants’ criticisms of Apologia Church and its leadership are not facts, but statements of opinion, which cannot be proven true or false. Nor did the plaintiffs assert that the defendants made their statements with actual malice, a required element for defamation against a public figure.

The motion also asserts that the Youngs are not subject to the jurisdiction of the court in Maricopa County, Arizona, because they are residents of Montana.

Both Young and Merris are being represented by Gregg Leslie at the First Amendment Clinic at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University.

“Victims of abusive power dynamics are often intimidated into silence, but their voices are essential to preventing further harm. When institutions of any kind use legal or other threats to suppress truthful speech, silence becomes a tool of abuse,” Merris told MinistryWatch in an emailed statement. “Speaking truthfully, even under intense pressure or retaliation by critics, protects others. Public accountability is how cycles of abuse are exposed, disrupted, and prevented from being repeated. Public accountability is a safeguard against abuse.”

Young doesn’t believe there is any merit to the allegations in the lawsuit because she is “very careful about what she publishes.” She said in a press release, “Regardless of what happens, we remain fully committed to reporting the truth to protect the sheep, advocate for survivors, and push for transparency and accountability in Christian ministries.”

Update: The defendants filed an additional motion to dismiss on Jan. 20, claiming that the plaintiffs’ suit was “substantially motivated by a desire to deter and retaliate against lawful speech by the defendants” in violation of Arizona law. The motion, is based on an anti-SLAPP (strategic lawsuits against public participation) law — laws intended to prevent people from using courts and lawsuits to intimidate people who are exercising their First Amendment rights.

The defendants argue that Merris’s Tik Tok videos telling her view of events and Young’s blog posts are both protected speech under the First Amendment, and that Apologia Church and other plaintiffs are attempting to retaliate against them for their publications. The defendants claim that they gave Apologia Church leaders an opportunity to respond to the allegations made and provide any corrections or clarifications before publication. However, the plaintiffs allegedly refused to take advantage of those opportunities, instead threatening litigation.

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