Tension within the Society's leadership came to a head in 1894 and 1895, when Olcott and the prominent theosophist Annie Besant accused William Quan Judge, head of the American Section, of forging letters purportedly from the Mahatmas, the hidden spiritual teachers Blavatsky claimed had guided her work. Judge denied the charges and, at the American Section's 1895 convention, led the great majority of American lodges to vote for independence from the Adyar leadership; Olcott responded by revoking their charters, and the American body reorganized itself as a separate society under Judge, later evolving into what is now the Theosophical Society Pasadena.
The body that retained the original name and Adyar headquarters continued under Olcott until his death in 1907, when Annie Besant, already a leading figure in the Society and in Indian nationalist politics, succeeded him as president and led the organization through its period of greatest public visibility, including its controversial promotion of the young Jiddu Krishnamurti as a coming World Teacher, a project Krishnamurti himself repudiated in 1929. The Adyar Society survived Besant's death in 1933 and the loss of Krishnamurti's movement, and it remains today the larger of the two organizations descended from the 1875 founding, maintaining the Adyar estate, its library and archive, and national sections in dozens of countries.