James Huntsman’s Tithing Fraud Case: The En Banc Ruling and Fallout

James Huntsman’s tithing fraud lawsuit against the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints ended on January 31, 2025, when an eleven-judge en banc panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously ruled for the Church. The court found that the Church had truthfully told members it would not use tithing principal to build the City Creek Center in Salt Lake City, and that investment earnings on invested reserves, which the Church used instead, were not the same thing as tithing funds.¹

Who Filed the Suit and What He Wanted Back

James Huntsman is the son of the late industrialist Jon Huntsman Sr. and the brother of former Utah governor Jon Huntsman Jr. He was a committed member of the Church for decades, paying the ten percent tithe the faith requires, before resigning his membership in 2020.²³

Huntsman filed his fraud suit on March 22, 2021, in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.⁴¹⁵

What He Alleged

Huntsman claimed the Church “repeatedly and publicly lied” about how it spent tithing funds. The lawsuit focused on two commercial projects.

The first and central allegation involved the City Creek Center, a retail and residential development near Temple Square. The Church spent over $1.4 billion on the project, and every dollar came through Ensign Peak Advisors, the Church’s investment arm. Huntsman pointed to five statements between 2003 and 2012 in which Church officials or publications said tithing funds were not paying for the mall, and argued those assurances were false.⁶

The second allegation was that $600 million had gone from Ensign Peak to bail out Beneficial Life, a Church-affiliated insurance company.⁵

The Whistleblower Behind the Case

The suit grew out of revelations from David Nielsen, a former senior portfolio manager at Ensign Peak. In December 2019, the Washington Post reported that Nielsen had filed an IRS whistleblower complaint alleging the Church had accumulated roughly $100 billion in accounts ostensibly meant for charity, and had used that money to prop up businesses with Church ties.⁷

Nielsen also provided a sworn declaration for Huntsman’s case. He said Ensign Peak staff during his 2010–2019 tenure routinely called all managed money “tithing money,” drawing no line between principal and investment earnings. He described a March 2013 meeting in which Ensign Peak president Roger Clarke displayed a slide showing $1.4 billion withdrawn for City Creek and $600 million for Beneficial Life; when Nielsen asked how that squared with the Church’s public assurances, he said Clarke responded that the money had been routed through other Church-affiliated entities so that “people would not know that Ensign Peak was the source of the funds.”⁶

The Question the Case Turned On

Behind the fraud allegation sat one narrow, technical question: when Church leaders promised tithing funds would not pay for City Creek, did that promise cover investment earnings generated by tithing money too?

In April 2003, Church President Gordon B. Hinckley told members that “tithing funds have not and will not be used” for the project, and that “earnings of invested reserve funds” would pay for it instead. Huntsman argued that ordinary members would hear “tithing funds” as including anything earned by investing tithes, and that Hinckley never explained that the reserve funds were themselves built up from tithes over time. The Church argued the opposite: that it had always distinguished principal from earnings, and that Hinckley’s statement did the distinguishing on its face.⁶

How the Case Moved Through the Courts

U.S. District Judge Stephen V. Wilson granted summary judgment to the Church, holding that no reasonable juror could find the Church had made a misrepresentation. The court read Hinckley’s statement as distinguishing between principal and earnings, and found the evidence supported the Church’s account of what it spent.⁸

Huntsman appealed. On August 7, 2023, a three-judge Ninth Circuit panel partially reversed. Writing for the majority, Judge William A. Fletcher held that a genuine dispute of fact existed over whether members would understand “tithing funds” to include investment earnings, and over whether the Church had adequately clarified the difference. The panel rejected the Church’s argument that the ecclesiastical abstention doctrine barred a court from hearing the case at all, calling the fraud claims secular. It did affirm summary judgment for the Church on the Beneficial Life allegation. Judge Edward R. Korman dissented on the City Creek claim.⁹

The Church sought rehearing before the full court. The Ninth Circuit granted it, and an eleven-judge en banc panel heard arguments on September 25, 2024. Former U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement argued for the Church.¹⁰

The En Banc Ruling

All eleven judges voted to affirm summary judgment for the Church, reversing the 2023 panel decision. They split into three separate opinions on the reasoning.¹¹

Judge Michelle T. Friedland wrote the majority opinion, joined by Chief Judge Murguia and Judges Owens, Sung, Sanchez, and de Alba. The majority concluded that no reasonable juror could find fraudulent misrepresentation under California law. President Hinckley’s 2003 statement, the court held, explicitly separated “tithing funds” from “earnings of invested reserve funds,” and the Church had long explained that the reserves themselves were built from tithes. Ensign Peak held enough earnings on those invested reserves to cover the entire $1.4 billion City Creek expenditure without touching principal.⁸

The majority also addressed Nielsen’s declaration. Even accepting his account as true, the court said, it did not show that principal tithing funds were used, because Nielsen’s testimony itself did not distinguish between principal and earnings. The Beneficial Life claim failed for a different reason: Huntsman could not identify any specific Church statement about the source of funds for that entity. As for the church autonomy doctrine, the majority said it had no bearing on the outcome because deciding the case did not require the court to reach into questions of Church doctrine or policy.

The Concurrences

Four judges thought the case should have ended earlier and on constitutional grounds. Judge Daniel Bress, joined by Judges Milan Smith Jr., Jacqueline Nguyen, and Lawrence VanDyke, wrote that defining what counts as “tithing” is an inherently religious question, and that “religious disputes restated in the elements of a fraud claim do not lose their inevitably religious character.”⁸

Judge Patrick Bumatay went further in a solo concurrence, calling church autonomy a “threshold structural bar” that the court had to address before touching the merits. On his view, the case should have been dismissed at the outset without any inquiry into what the Church said or spent.

What the Ruling Means

The en banc decision creates binding Ninth Circuit precedent that investment earnings on tithed money are not the same as tithing principal, and that a religious organization’s use of such earnings, consistent with its public statements, is not fraud. Five of the eleven judges would have gone further and held that courts are constitutionally barred from hearing this kind of dispute at all.¹¹

Religious organizations welcomed the outcome. Gene Schaerr, who represented eleven denominations in an amicus brief, called it a “complete victory” for religious liberty. Becket Fund attorney Eric Baxter described the ruling as a “message that other courts should be paying attention to.” Some legal commentators sympathetic to the concurrences argued the majority erred by reaching the merits, contending that it effectively took a side in a religious dispute while claiming not to.¹²¹³

Related Litigation and Where Things Stand

Huntsman’s was one of several suits filed against the Church after the Ensign Peak revelations. A separate civil RICO case brought by Laura Gaddy, Leanne Harris, and Lyle Small was dismissed by the District of Utah, and the Tenth Circuit declined to hear an appeal. As of late 2025, plaintiffs’ counsel Kay Burningham was preparing a Supreme Court petition, with Justice Gorsuch extending the filing deadline to January 29, 2026.¹⁴

No publicly available record shows that Huntsman himself petitioned the Supreme Court for review of the en banc ruling, and the ninety-day window to do so would have closed in spring 2025.

1
Deseret News. Huntsman Tithing Lawsuit Dismissed by 9th Circuit Panel
2
The Washington Post. He Was Mormon Royalty. Now His Lawsuit Against the Church Is a Rallying Cry
3
ABC4. Brother of Former Gov. Huntsman Files Lawsuit, Accuses the Church of Fraud
4
CourtListener. James Huntsman v. Corporation of the President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
5
KJZZ. Huntsman LDS Church Lawsuit
6
FindLaw. Huntsman v. Corporation of the President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints
7
The Washington Post. Mormon Church Has Misled Members on $100 Billion Tax-Exempt Investment Fund, Whistleblower Alleges
8
U.S. Courts. Huntsman v. Corporation of the President, No. 21-56056
9
U.S. Courts. Huntsman v. Corporation of the President, No. 21-56056 (Panel Opinion)
10
Deseret News. 9th Circuit Judges Pepper Attorneys With Questions on Both Sides of Huntsman Tithing Lawsuit
11
Courthouse News Service. En Banc Ninth Circuit Sides With Mormon Church in Dispute Over Tithes
12
Deseret News. Other Religions Cheer Latter-day Saint Court Victory in Huntsman Tithing Case
13
The Federalist Society. Huntsman v. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: Church Autonomy Is a Threshold Structural Bar
14
Supreme Court of the United States. Laura Gaddy, et al. v. The Corporation of the President, No. 25A716