Anglican Leader Sues Breakaway Rival For Defamation
The interim head of the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) has filed a defamation suit against the leader of the breakaway Anglican Reformed Catholic Church.
Bishop Julian Dobbs, who was appointed acting archbishop of the ACNA in November while Archbishop Steve Wood is under investigation, says accusations he misappropriated $47,862 are false and malicious.
Dobbs submitted evidence to the U.S. federal court in Northern Alabama showing the disputed sum is actually $3,750. The money was put into the wrong bank account in 2019 but, according to a letter from a certified accountant, properly tracked in the church’s bookkeeping and spent as intended.
Dobbs said that the “many-years-old and previously investigated allegations” were “gratuitously resurfaced” in a Dec. 30, 2025, Washington Post article to destroy his reputation and discredit the ACNA.
He asked the court on Feb. 17 to order Bishop Derek Jones, who announced he was forming a new church “characterized by clear leadership accountability” in December, to pay compensatory and punitive damages.
Dobbs told the court that the attacks are nothing more than “character assassination.” He said they caused him great distress and “harmed the relationship of trust between the Bishop and his flock.” He also asked for a full retraction of all of Jones’ “defamatory statements.”
Video call
Jones first made the allegations of financial misconduct last fall in a long video-conference call with more than 120 Anglican chaplains. He was defending himself against claims he mistreated clergy under his supervision, calling the complaints evidence of “woke U.S.A.” and the church’s investigation a “witch hunt.”
Jones said the real cause of the dispute was not his leadership but ongoing disagreements over the status of the Jurisdiction of the Armed Forces and Chaplaincy, which he founded in 2014. He said Anglican leaders had promised the chaplaincy endorsing agency would become an independent diocese. They didn’t follow through, allegedly because they were attempting to marginalize conservative voices in the growing 1,000-congregation denomination.
According to Jones, the proceedings against him were obviously malicious, because the ACNA panel reviewing the allegations included Dobbs.
‘It’s going to be a bombshell’
“I’m going to talk about Bishop Dobbs here in just a moment,” Jones said in a video the chaplaincy organization later uploaded to the internet, “and it’s going to be a bombshell.”
The “bombshell” was not included in the part of the call posted online, but Jones repeated the allegations in a federal lawsuit, accusing the ACNA of trademark infringement and unfair commercial competition. They were repeated again in the Post interview.
Jones claimed when Dobbs was head of the Convocation of Anglicans in North America (CANA), a now-dissolved precursor to ACNA, he “absconded with approximately $48,000.”
Jones did not explain where that figure came from. Court records show that in 2019, he wrote a letter claiming $3,750 was improperly “redirected” into another account and $11,250 did not appear on end-of-the-year financial statements.
A certified public accountant reviewed the CANA books and concluded that all the funds were “appropriately received and allocated.” Several checks did go into an account for CANA East, instead of CANA HQ. But this was a clerical error that didn’t impact how the money was spent.
“The particular bank account into which your checks were deposited … was irrelevant to the designation and use of the monies,” an Anglican lawyer who reviewed the accounting wrote at the time. “No CANA HQ money was used for CANA East.”
Dobbs wrote apology
Dobbs wrote a letter apologizing for the accounting “confusion,” after both he and Jones had moved from CANA to ACNA. Jones agreed to sign a letter that would “indemnify and hold harmless” the bishop and other church authorities, according to a March 2021 email that Dobbs submitted as evidence.
Nearly five years later, Jones was calling Dobbs “felonious” and claiming tens of thousands of dollars just disappeared.
Foley Beach, a former archbishop of the ACNA, dismissed the allegations in a letter to the church’s bishops.
“These matters were fully and comprehensively investigated,” Beach said. “There was no financial impropriety, misappropriation of funds, or misuse of designated gifts.
The lawsuit claims that Jones not only knew the allegations against Dobbs were false, he lied maliciously to hurt Dobbs and the ACNA.
Jones has not yet filed a response with the court.
This article was originally published by The Roys Report.
Daniel Silliman is senior reporter/editor at The Roys Report. He began his two decades in journalism covering crime in Atlanta and has since led major investigations into abuse and misconduct in Christian contexts. Daniel and his wife live in Johnson City, Tennessee.