In 2018, the Nashville Fire Department (NFD) introduced special-edition Pride-themed T-shirts and announced the proceeds would be donated to the Tennessee Equality Project (TEP), a leftist advocacy organization that works to advance the LGBTQ+ agenda in Tennessee through legislative efforts and community programs.
When 65-year-old Captain Tracy Turner expressed his disagreement with the policy, he didn’t think it would ignite a firestorm of scrutiny, internal conflict, and a series of unjust disciplinary actions against him. But Turner soon found himself embroiled in a years-long battle within the department and later against the city itself.
According to Turner, the pro-LGBT effort by the Nashville Fire Department was spearheaded by Joseph Pleasant, a public information officer, community manager, and former investigative reporter hired by NFD in 2017. Pleasant reportedly encouraged firefighters to to sell the LGBT shirts while on duty, in uniform, and even inside gay bars throughout Pride month. Turner, a captain at the time, opposed the initiative, arguing the department should not be involved in promoting any particular social or political cause.
During a discussion among captains, Turner voiced his concerns to Pleasant.
“I said, ‘I don’t have anything against gay people—I have gay people in my family,’” Turner recalled in an exclusive interview with IW Features, “but I don’t understand why the Nashville Fire Department is promoting someone’s sexual preference when we don’t promote anybody else’s.”
“I just stated my opinion, and no more,” he added. “Nothing more was said about it.”
Turner soon faced increased scrutiny from department leadership. Commander Jerry Tomlinson, allegedly warned him that officials “downtown,” including Pleasant, were monitoring him. According to a December 2021 deposition, Pleasant admitted to monitoring Turner’s Facebook posts after they were flagged for him by CB Cotton, a WKRN reporter and Pleasant’s former colleague.
Although the Pride shirt controversy itself did not result in direct disciplinary action, Turner said it marked the beginning of a pattern of retaliation against him that ultimately led to his demotion in 2020 over his Facebook posts about Black Lives Matter.
As Black Lives Matter protests roiled the nation that summer, Turner said it became clear only one side of the debate was being presented and accepted, especially by public officials. But Turner had no illusions about the true nature of the BLM protests in Nashville—because he had seen it with his own eyes.
“I’d been down there when they tried to burn down the courthouse, and that was a bad deal,” he said. “In Nashville, they called us in on the courthouse, but BLM had—well, the mayor’s the one that marched the BLM group down there. And then after he left, they started busting windows and trying to catch the courthouse on fire. And they did. They were successful in catching it. But it was funny that the mayor marched them down there to burn down his own courthouse.”
While Turner and his fellow firefighters were kept on standby, watching the destruction unfold, he couldn’t help but notice the double standard at play. The same city officials who condemned certain political views had seemingly encouraged chaos when it suited their narrative, he said.
Meanwhile, the surveillance of Turner’s social media continued.
“It got so bad that the district chief came to me,” Turner recalled. “I said, ‘Chief, tell me which post is bombing them; I’ll quit. I’ll quit putting them up, or I’ll stop on that topic.’”
Turner never received an answer to his question.
A few months later, Turner received an unexpected call from Commander Tomlinson. The issue? A Patriot Post article he had shared on Facebook, titled “BLM’s Roots Are Tied to Racists.” The article compared the Black Lives Matter movement to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and Marxism, highlighting the self-proclaimed Marxist ideology of BLM’s founders.
Turner recalled being surprised by the information in the article, particularly the movement’s stance against the nuclear family.
“It kind of astonished me because I had no idea that they were against, you know, the nuclear family and all that kind of stuff,” he said. “And I thought it was interesting information.”
Commander Tomlinson, however, did not see it the same way.
“He calls and tells me, ‘Tracy, I need you to take that post down, and take it down right now,’” Turner said.
Turner complied, but he asked for clarification: “I said, ‘I’ll be glad to, but can you tell me what was wrong with that post? Because it was just information.”
Instead of a clear answer, Turner received a second call. This time, he was ordered to report to the “Gold Room” at 7:30 a.m. the next morning.
The Gold Room was a disciplinary meeting space—one Turner had never been called into before in his 25 years of service, despite working in some of Nashville’s most challenging areas. In fact, he’d never received a poor mark on any professional evaluation.
“Always have,” he said of taking the tough assignments. “It’s where the people in poverty need us more than anybody else does.”
The First Meeting: The Struggle Session
When he arrived at the meeting the morning of July 23, 2020, Turner was greeted by colleagues Commander Tomlinson, District Chief Tim Moyers, and Union President Mark Young.
“Tracy, do you know why you’re here?” asked Commander Tomlinson.
“Not really, Chief. I do not know why I’m here,” Turner responded.
“It’s because of the post,” the commander quickly clarified, according to Turner.
Seated in the room was Joseph Pleasant, the public information officer with whom Turner had clashed back in 2018. His presence was unusual—Pleasant was not in Turner’s chain of command and had no formal role in disciplinary proceedings. Nonetheless, he took control of the meeting, according to Turner, accusing Turner of racial bias.
“He commenced by saying every one of my posts had racial overtones,” Turner said.
That’s all they could throw at him, though, since “they were having trouble saying I wasn’t doing my job,” Turner continued.
Turner realized that it wasn’t just the Patriot Post article under scrutiny—his entire online presence was being dissected. Among the posts used against him was one about Christianity: “I put a post up that said, ‘If we listen to Jesus more than we do these biased newscasters, I think everybody would get along a lot better.’”
As Pleasant and the other officials blasted Turner over his posts, Turner pushed back. He turned to Tomlinson, a man he had worked alongside for 14 years. “Have you ever seen me treat anybody different — patient or employee?” Turner said he asked Tomlinson.
The room was silent. “I saw where I was, then,” Turner recalled. “The cake was already baked.”
Turner was suspended for seven days with pay. But behind the scenes, it became clear that his case had gone beyond internal NFD matters. Pleasant allegedly contacted Metro Council officials as well, working to frame Turner as a problem.
But officials knew they couldn’t take action against Turner on accusations of racism. In fact, during their review of Turner’s social media posts, investigators allegedly found a comment from Turner in which he emphatically rejected the endorsement of violence against others and argued blaming one race for unrest was wrong.
So instead, officials charged him with failing to set his Facebook to private—an obscure policy violation Turner said he had been unaware of.
And Turner wasn’t the only one punished for posting dissenting political views. He said he later learned that two department officials had been actively searching for conservative employees to discipline. Eight others in the NFD allegedly received minor punishments for political posts as well.
The Second Meeting: A Staged Punishment
On July 30, 2020, Turner was called into another closed-door meeting — this time with EMS Chief Kapu Deshpande, District Chief Timothy (Chris) Downing, Commander Montrell Toney, HR Head Jamie Summers, and Union President Mark Young.
With backing from the mayor’s office, Turner said Commander Toney drove the case against him, using five posts as evidence of misconduct, along with failure to make his Facebook profile private. Turner was especially shocked by this betrayal: he’d once saved Commander Toney’s life in a house fire.
“He got about 10 feet in and the floor gave way,” Turner recalled. ”He went through — we tried to get him out of the hole.” He and Smokey, a colleague, stayed with him through the ordeal.
Turner’s most controversial post, according to the officials, read: “It’s not that Antifa and BLM thugs are so strong; it’s that Democratic mayors are so weak as to let it happen.”
Opinions on the panel were shockingly one-sided, Turner said. Chief Kapu allegedly pushed for Turner’s firing, citing a Facebook post questioning mask effectiveness against COVID-19. Commander Toney, once a close friend, also sided against him. HR Head Jamie Summers and Union President Mark Young remained largely silent, Turner said.
The only objection arose from Chief Downing, who stated that there had been no policy violation, according to Turner.
The Third Meeting: Silencing the Question
At the final disciplinary meeting a few weeks later, Fire Chief Will Swann, a longtime colleague of Turner’s, announced Turner’s punishment: a six-month demotion from captain to firefighter — the lowest rank — and a two-year ban on bidding for a new station.
The charges were vague: Turner had violated “written rules, policies or procedures of the department,” acted in a manner which reflects “discredit upon himself and the department,” and conducted himself in a manner “unbecoming” of an employee of the Metro Government, officials alleged.
After announcing the punishment, Swann allegedly claimed he had intervened to prevent Turner’s termination after the mayor pushed for his firing. But even Union President Mark Young was unconvinced. He asked a simple, crucial question, according to Turner: “Which specific post violated policy?”
The response was immediate—and explosive. Chief Swann erupted into a shouting fit, according to Turner, angrily ranting before storming out of the room without ever providing an answer.
Five years later, Turner still hasn’t been told which specific post triggered his punishment.
After the meeting, two chiefs privately told Turner to “keep his head down” and that things would return to normal. However, they also allegedly issued a warning: “If you fight this, we’ll make your life hell.”
They kept their word. On the same day, the Nashville Fire Department released a statement, signed by Director Chief William Swann, reading:
“Statement from Director Chief William Swann:
“Every member of the Nashville Fire Department is an ambassador for our department to the residents and visitors we serve. The social media posts made by Captain Tracy Turner do not represent the core values of our department. Anything that calls into question the ability of our department to serve everyone without prejudice or bias will be addressed and when needed discipline will be administered. I met with Captain Turner Monday morning and informed him of his demotion from Captain to Firefighter. He will be required to take sensitivity training and training on how social media activity impacts the community we serve. We have the utmost respect for every person we serve without regard to their sex, race, gender identity, religious beliefs or sexual orientation.”
The statement was sent in an email to the Nashville firefighting community and 131 media members. It was later discovered that the statement had actually been written and released by Joseph Pleasant, Turner said.
“Pleasant sent it to every fireman, everybody I worked with, from the chief down to the lowest person and all the ambulance people,” Turner recalled. “And not only did he put that out, he put more things, like I had something against gay people — things that had nothing to do with my case.”
A media blitz quickly followed. Local news outlets ran nearly identical reports, echoing claims from city officials. State Rep. Jeff Preptit even accused Turner of being so racist that he would abandon black firefighters or families in burning buildings—a claim then uncritically repeated across news broadcasts, Turner said.
“It was like they were all reading from the same script,” he said. “The media ran with it, saying I was attacking black protesters—when the word ‘black’ never even came up. I used the word ‘thug’ to describe those destroying cities, but they twisted it to mean something else. In reality, BLM had just as many white college students involved as anyone else.”
Turner sought legal counsel and retained Larry L. Crain, a highly regarded constitutional lawyer. He took the case to federal court, arguing that his First Amendment rights had been violated.
“They went back four years through my Facebook,” Turner recalled. “They found a picture of me at my grandson’s football game wearing a t-shirt and claimed that proved I was [advertising myself as] a firefighter. I never even put that I was a firefighter anywhere on my profile. I think I jokingly listed myself as a busboy.”
Bolstering Turner’s case was the fact that Joshua Lipscomb, a black firefighter for NFD, was met with support by the department while battling the same charges in 2022. That year, Lipscomb posted on his social media, “…the majority of Nashville city council is white supremacists. I know its [syc] boring by millennials [syc] have to start caring about local elections.” Lipscomb added, “These folks want us dead”.
The Metropolitan Council sent a letter of support for Lipscomb to Fire Chief Swann, reading in part, “In this instance, we ask that you consider that Mr. Lipsomb’s expression of his opinion on a local issue was only that: his opinion.”
Their letter continued: “As you deliberate on the appeal, we respectfully request you affirm Mr. Lipscomb’s right to share his opinions – whether we agree with them or disagree with them – in a manner that respects those you serve for their sex, race, ethnicity, gender identity, and sexual orientation.”
Lipscomb’s legal process was resolved in under a year with a $450,000 settlement.
Turner’s legal battle, on the other hand, dragged on for nearly four years.
“They stalled it for two or three years,” he said. “They even went to the judge to try and get a summary judgment.”
But the judge refused, reportedly telling both sides, “Y’all need to get together and settle.”
Exhausted by the process and facing ongoing tension at work, Turner agreed. “I was shunned by the upper chiefs. I didn’t get time off, didn’t miss anything. So I said, let’s just sign.”
Ultimately, he agreed to settle with the city for $105,000.
A few days after the settlement agreement, however, the Metro Council held a vote—one that would make Nashville history. Despite their lawyers’ advice to approve the settlement, the council rejected it in a unanimous 31-0 vote, with three abstentions.
“This had never happened before,” Turner said. “We were all kind of shocked. You can even see it on YouTube—Metro Legal was begging them, saying, ‘Hey, we gave him all we had, and we told you to settle. If you don’t, we’re going back to the same judge.’”
Turner believes political pressure played a role in the council’s decision.
“A friend of mine, who’s a big hacker, intercepted a letter from the mayor’s office—sent to every council member—telling them to vote it down. And they did,” Turner said.
The Trial
With the settlement rejected, the case went to trial. During testimony, Metro officials, including the fire chief, the head of HR, and Commander Montrell Toney, were called to the stand. Turner recalled one of the most damning moments involving Joseph Pleasant.
Turner’s attorney confronted Pleasant about the origins of the controversy, revealing that Pleasant had personally found and reported a Facebook post to HR. When pressed, Pleasant admitted he discovered the post in the group “Black People on the Rise,” which had around 47,000 members.
Turner’s attorney pointed out the unlikely coincidence that the flagged post was written by Nicole Jordan Rucker, the wife of Captain Reggie Rucker and a personal acquaintance of Pleasant. This revelation suggested the case had been orchestrated, reinforcing Turner’s belief that he had been deliberately targeted.
The Just Verdict: “Something Quite Amazing”
Originally, Turner expected a judgment close to the $105,000 settlement he had initially agreed to. However, the jury—clearly frustrated by the deception uncovered during the trial—delivered a far more stunning verdict: $1.7 million in damages, plus attorney’s fees.
“They saw through all of it,” Turner said. “The chiefs, Pleasant, all of them, were caught in lies. And the jury wasn’t having it. It was something quite amazing.”
With the settlement behind him, Turner said he longs for normalcy.
“All of the reporting said I was a former firefighter. I’m still working — I worked yesterday as a matter of fact,” he said. “I’ve always enjoyed helping people, and it’s the kind of job where you can do that—a lot of adventure, a lot of adrenaline rushes, and it’s perfect for me. And I love it. I enjoy it. I would pay them to work there, to tell you the truth.”
Normalcy, to Turner, means free expression not just for himself, but for those he serves alongside as well.
“There’s so many firemen that have been hurt and given days and punished for having a political opinion,” he said. “But the tide is turning.”
“Firemen are starting to get a little more … verbal,” Turner said with a chuckle, adding that one of his union officials, Addis Kendall, has received calls from other unions all over the country since Turner’s legal win. “They’re ready to start changing rules.”
Grace Bydalek is a writer, performer, and administrator based on New York’s Upper West Side. She is the director of the Dissident Project and a visiting fellow at Independent Women’s Forum.
Instagram: @grace_daley
Published in Independent Women’s Forum on March 17th, 2025.