Removed and Deleted: What Happened to Anthony Morris III in 2023

On February 22, 2023, the organization behind Jehovah's Witnesses told its worldwide staff that a sitting member of its highest leadership body was gone. The statement was one sentence long. It gave no reason.

Anthony Morris III, appointed to the Governing Body in September 2005, "is no longer serving as a member of the Governing Body of Jehovah's Witnesses," the organization said in a brief item posted to its news service, as reported by multiple outlets that captured it before it disappeared.^[1] Within days, the announcement itself was pulled from the newsroom. Over the following weeks, decades of Morris's recorded talks, broadcast segments, and convention material were deleted from jw.org and its backing storage.^[2]

The removal is significant for a plain reason of scope: the organization almost never publicly confirms that a Governing Body member has left, and it virtually never does so mid-term. The last comparable announced removal was Raymond Franz in 1980 — a gap of roughly 43 years.^[3] What the organization confirmed in 2023 was the fact of Morris's departure. It confirmed nothing about why. Every explanation now circulating originates with ex-member forums and advocacy sites, not the organization, and remains unverified.

What the Governing Body is

The Governing Body is described as the ruling council of Jehovah's Witnesses. In its modern form it was established in October 1971. It is a small, all-male council — roughly eight to eleven members in the mid-2020s — based at the organization's headquarters in Warwick, New York.^[4]

Its authority is broad. The body formulates doctrine, oversees the movement's publications and conventions, and directs worldwide operations. It meets weekly in closed session. New members are selected by the existing ones; there is no congregational vote and no public nomination process.^[4] Against that backdrop, a publicly acknowledged departure is not a routine personnel note. It is a rare disruption to a body whose membership changes slowly and whose internal decisions are seldom disclosed.

The announcement

The wording that reached the public was spare. According to reports that preserved the item, the organization stated only that "Brother Anthony Morris III is no longer serving as a member of the Governing Body of Jehovah's Witnesses."^[1] No live jw.org archive capture of the news item has been confirmed, so the exact phrasing here is presented as reported by secondary outlets rather than as a verified verbatim quotation from the organization.

Advocacy sites that track the organization documented small edits in the days that followed. The announcement text was minorly revised — reportedly a comma inserted — around February 25, and an accompanying audio clip was updated to match.^[5] The item was then removed from the jw.org newsroom within days of first appearing; reports describe it as live for roughly four days before it came down.^[2]

What did not appear, at any stage, was a stated cause. The organization did not say whether Morris resigned, was asked to step aside, or was removed for cause. It offered no health explanation, no disciplinary explanation, and no successor announcement tied to the departure. That silence is the central verified fact about motive: there is none on the public record from the organization itself.

Explanations have nonetheless spread. Ex-member forums and advocacy blogs have floated theories ranging from alleged personal misconduct to speculative links with unrelated litigation.^[6] None has been confirmed, and the organization has addressed none of them. This piece does not repeat those specific allegations as fact, and readers should treat any stated "reason" for Morris's removal — from any source — as unverified speculation unless and until the organization or a primary record establishes it.

The scrubbing

If the announcement was brief, the erasure that followed was thorough and can be traced by date. The earliest documented sign came on February 20, 2023, two days before the announcement, when the lead image on a jw.org page about the Governing Body was changed.^[7] On February 22, Morris's name was removed from the Governing Body member list the same day the departure was announced.^[7]

The deletion of his recorded output came later. On March 30, 2023, Morning Worship videos featuring Morris were removed from jw.org.^[8] On April 6, 2023, the associated video links were removed from the organization's Amazon Web Services storage — meaning the files were not merely delisted from the public site but pulled from the backing storage that served them.^[9]

The net effect was that Morris's decades-long media footprint — talks, broadcasts, convention segments — was de-published. Ex-members who catalog such removals describe it as a familiar "deleted content" pattern, consistent with how the organization has handled the media of individuals after prior leadership departures.^[10] The organization has not commented on the removals.

Morris had drawn outside attention before, including a widely mocked 2014 talk about clothing and grooming, covered separately by JW Files.

Why this is rare

To understand why observers treated a one-sentence notice as news, it helps to weigh how seldom the organization publicizes a leadership exit.

The last comparable announced removal of a sitting Governing Body member was Raymond Franz, forced to resign on May 22, 1980 and later disfellowshipped.^[3] Between Franz and Morris sit more than four decades in which the body's membership turned over through death and quiet addition, without the organization publicly confirming that a specific serving member had been removed.

Other historical exits are documented but were quiet resignations rather than publicized removals, and their details are contested. Ex-member sources point to Ewart Chitty, said to have resigned in the late 1970s or early 1980s, and Leo Greenlees, reported to have left the headquarters staff in the mid-1980s.^[11] Sources conflict on the dates and circumstances of both, and the organization gave no public reasons in either case; those specifics should be treated as unverified. What sets Morris apart is not that a member left, but that the organization said so at all.

The wider 2023 pattern

Morris's disappearance from jw.org did not happen in isolation. Across 2023, observers documented other quiet content removals, and they occurred against a backdrop of legal pressure in Europe.

At the 2023 regional convention, a Saturday-afternoon talk by Corey Wadlington of the organization's Service Department reportedly included two scripted dramatizations. In them, a young Witness woman — called "Elsa" in the script — receives phone calls from her disfellowshipped mother and chooses not to answer, modeling the practice of shunning a family member who has left the faith.^[12] The two dramatizations were quietly removed from the streamed version of the convention; independent observers documented the segment shrinking from roughly twelve minutes to about nine, with no explanation offered.^[13] The clips had been captured and re-uploaded before deletion, which is how the change became public.^[13]

The removals coincided with intensifying legal and media scrutiny of shunning in Europe. In Norway, the county governor removed the organization's registration as a religious community on December 22, 2022, over practices including the disfellowshipping of baptized minors and enforced shunning; an Oslo court granted a temporary injunction on December 30, 2022, then revoked it on April 26, 2023, with the loss of state grants and marriage-solemnizing authority at stake.^[14] In Belgium, the Ghent Criminal Court convicted the Belgian association in March 2021 of inciting discrimination against ex-members over shunning and fined it €96,000; the Ghent Court of Appeal acquitted in June 2022, and the Court of Cassation upheld that acquittal on December 19, 2023.^[15]

Whether that scrutiny caused the content removals is an inference drawn by critics, not a link the organization has stated. The organization gave no reason for pulling the dramatizations, just as it gave none for Morris's departure. The pattern observers describe is one of quiet de-publishing during a period of external pressure; the causal reading remains interpretation.

What is confirmed, and what is not

Two facts are established on the public record. Anthony Morris III no longer serves on the Governing Body, and a large body of his recorded material was removed from the organization's platforms across February through April 2023. Both were documented — the first by the organization's own brief and short-lived announcement, the second by dated screenshots and archived copies gathered by ex-member observers.

Beyond that, the record is silent. The organization did not say why Morris left, did not explain the deletions, and did not address the theories that filled the vacuum. In a movement whose leadership changes are rarely announced at all, the most notable thing about February 22, 2023 may be that it was announced — and that the sentence stopped where it did.