A defamation lawsuit filed by Apologia Church against a former parishioner and a watchdog blogger will move forward after a judge rejected most of the defendants’ arguments in their motion to dismiss.
Apologia Church Pastor Jeff Durbin / Video screenshot
In October 2025, Apologia Church Pastor Jeffrey Durbin 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 runs the Check My Church blog.
The complaint alleged 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. The complaint said Merris’s videos wrongly accused church leadership of gossip, abusive behavior, slander, breaches of confidentiality, and implied that leadership “lied to and misled church members.”
It also alleged that Young reported about Merris’ story and the breach of confidentiality she felt Apologia’s leadership had engaged in. The church argued that Young’s article included defamatory statements accusing church leaders of “a cultic pattern of dishonesty, spiritual abuse, gossip, slander, breaching confidentiality, and more.”
Young told MinistryWatch in January that she gave Apologia a chance to comment before publishing.
The defendants argued their statements about Apologia Church were “opinions, rhetorical hyperbole, and otherwise not provable as true or false.” They also argued that church leaders are “public figures” — a distinction that matters legally because defamation claims involving public figures must include evidence that the alleged defamatory statements were made with “actual malice,” meaning the speaker knew the statements were false or acted with reckless disregard for the truth.
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Merris and Young also challenged the church’s invasion of privacy claim, which alleged that their statements portrayed church leaders in a false light. The court allowed that claim to move forward for further development.
Cushner did dismiss Joe Young, Sarah’s husband, from the lawsuit, finding that the complaint did not allege he had made any of the defamatory statements or authored the article in question.
The defendants also moved to dismiss the case under Arizona’s anti-SLAPP statute — a law designed to protect citizens from Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation, which are suits filed to silence or intimidate critics rather than to remedy genuine legal harm. The defendants argued that Apologia’s lawsuit was “motivated by a desire to deter, retaliate against, or prevent the lawful exercise of a constitutional right,” including the right to free speech.
The court found, however, that the defendants had not presented sufficient proof that the lawsuit was motivated by a desire to suppress their speech rather than to address legitimate defamation claims.
The case will now proceed to further litigation.
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