Chattanooga developer John “Thunder” Thornton, owner of Thunder Air Inc., has filed a libel suit against two Marion County neighbors of his 7,500-acre mountaintop development, River Gorge Ranch, over negative remarks they allegedly made about the project on social media.
Thunder Air’s libel suit against residents Ronnie Kennedy and Joe E. Blevins Jr. describes what it calls false statements about dangers posed to potential homeowners by abandoned coal mines that left behind shafts going as deep as a mile into Aetna Mountain. The suit was filed March 15 in Marion County Chancery Court.
Both Blevins and Kennedy live at the bottom of Aetna Mountain.
At the Marion County Commission’s February meeting, Kennedy told commissioners that residents around Aetna Mountain describe the underground mines as a “Swiss cheese” of abandoned shafts and that Thornton’s potential buyers should be aware of them.
Before the matter was raised before the commission in February, the “Swiss cheese” characterization appeared online in a response to a River Gorge Ranch Facebook post, according to the suit.