A former campaign staffer took over former Chattanooga mayoral candidate Monty Bruell’s campaign social media account, using it to accuse Bruell of stiffing her and other staffers for work done during his 2021 campaign.
Alix Thornhill, 23, a student at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, worked as Bruell’s communications director from September 2020 until his campaign ended after the March 2 mayoral general election. In that time, she said, she went from small assignments to working full time, doing everything from social media and news releases to coordinating lists of donors, volunteers and endorsements for the candidate for anywhere from two to 12 hours a day.
According to Thornhill, Bruell in October “agreed to a rate of $25 an hour, and he said ‘keep timetables of your work, and submit them to me when the campaign is over.'”
Thornhill, who now works for Nathaniel Doss’s congressional campaign and serves as vice president of the Tennesee College Democrats, said that she didn’t receive a penny for the work.
“Like I almost had a mental breakdown at one point on the campaign because I had not done laundry in like three or four months, and I had no time because they were – everybody was asking me to do things,” she said.