When three of the five members of the Orange Beach City Council signed an ethics complaint against their own mayor in May, the two who did not sign had their own reasons — and only now are both stories fully told. Councilman Jack Robertson says he wanted no part of taking sides. Councilman Jerry Johnson, it turns out, was simply not there: dealing with a family health crisis that soon drove him to resign his seat entirely.
The complaint, filed May 1 with the Alabama Ethics Commission, accuses Mayor Tony Kennon of unethically inserting himself into a federal lawsuit against the city and of pressuring council members who wanted to release police body camera footage from a 2024 Labor Day incident at a city building. Kennon denies assaulting anyone that night but has acknowledged being in the building, and says he will not comment beyond respecting the ethics process.
‘I want all of this hate to STOP’
Days after news broke that a majority of the council had filed the complaint, Councilman Jack Robertson took to Facebook to explain his absence from it — sort of. In a June 19 post, he confirmed that he had watched the body camera footage at the center of the controversy, and said he was simply done with the fighting.
“I want all of this hate to STOP,” Robertson wrote. “It’s not doing any good, only embarrassing the town I love. I’m sick of ethics complaints and lawsuits, most brought on by one person … I don’t side with the mayor or the council. My only concern is for the city. Did I see the video? Yes. Will I comment on it? No, because it’s a legal matter.”
When contacted afterward to elaborate, Robertson declined. He said a third party — not the news organization that published the story — had inaccurately represented statements he made in a separate post, and that he would not risk compounding the problem. “It didn’t look good, and so I just have no comment,” he said.
His colleagues’ read: peacemaker
The two council members who did sign the complaint — Ginger Harrelson, Jeff Silvers and Robert Stuart among them — said Robertson had told them weeks earlier, in late April, exactly what his position would be. His only interest, he told them, was keeping the peace between the council, the mayor and city administrators.
“He wanted to be a peacemaker,” Stuart said. “I think it was just an individual decision. I don’t think any less of Jack. We’ve all been put into this real crappy situation, right? … That’s a decision [we all have to make], and we all have to go to sleep at night and wake up in the morning. He just decided that he didn’t want to be involved with that part of this.”
Stuart’s framing — sympathy without judgment — appeared to reflect the council’s collective mood: five people elected to run a small city, split down an institutional fault line neither they nor their constituents wanted.
The absent signature
The second missing name had a simpler explanation. Jerry Johnson resigned from the Orange Beach City Council on June 2, citing an ongoing family health situation that had left him unable to perform his duties.
Harrelson said Johnson had been dealing with that situation — caring for his grandson — for some time, and that he was not present for the meetings at which councilors say Kennon blocked the release of the body camera footage and later threatened members who pushed for it.
“He wasn’t participating in any of the meetings,” Harrelson said. “We didn’t ask him because we felt like he was dealing with trying to take care of his grandson and do the best that he could do for his family.”
Johnson did not respond to several requests for comment. His absence from the signature line, in other words, was not a statement about the mayor at all — it was the byproduct of a family emergency that eventually cost him his seat.
What the complaint actually says
The May 1 complaint asks the Alabama Ethics Commission to investigate a series of allegations, the most serious of which involve Kennon’s handling of the body camera footage from the early hours of Labor Day 2024, when police responded to a 911 call at the Coastal Resources Building after 1 a.m.
At the heart of it is a federal lawsuit the city is defending against attorney C.C. Dixon Moreno. According to the complaint, council members floated the idea of releasing the body camera footage during an April 1 executive session — reasoning that transparency might help the city settle or limit the litigation. Kennon allegedly became visibly upset and pushed back. During a second executive session on April 21, after Harrelson sought separate legal representation for the council, the complaint says the mayor threatened members with lawsuits, political revenge and even hinted at physical assault.
“The Mayor, as the executive of the City, had a personal interest in matters related to the underlying incident and the potential release of the footage,” the complaint reads. “The City Council, as the legislative body, was responsible for making decisions regarding litigation strategy and related policy matters.”
The complaint also faults city administrators. City Administrator Ford Handley and City Clerk Renee Emberly knew of the Labor Day incident within about a day, the complaint states, but did not attempt to preserve the building’s security footage — which, reporters were later told, was taped over every 30 days. Had anything that night been caught on the building’s own cameras, that record was likely destroyed.
The complaint further alleges that an Orange Beach police investigator, Lisa Johnson, later called Paula Kennon to check on her well-being, but that a police investigation was never completed and Paula Kennon was never formally interviewed. Kennon has repeatedly denied assaulting his wife on September 2, 2024, while acknowledging he was in the building — a space he told officers on the scene was “our getaway on the weekends.” He has said he will not comment on the ethics complaint out of respect for the investigation.
The council, the mayor, and a year of turmoil
None of this happened in a vacuum. The story began in July 2025, when the body camera footage and an audio recording first surfaced showing police responding to the Coastal Resources Building after 1 a.m. on Labor Day 2024. An employee of a nearby bar had reported seeing a naked man on the building’s balcony, striking a woman and screaming at her. When officers arrived, they found the mayor inside an office near the water; he said his wife, Paula, was with him and could speak to them. She never did.
Subsequent reporting established that the city had launched — and, per the complaint, never completed — an internal investigation into the incident, and that Kennon had been using the Coastal Resources Building as a personal office space while other city officials said they rarely used it. Kennon has repeatedly and emphatically denied assaulting his wife that night.
The ethics complaint, in other words, is the civic system catching up to a story that police never formally closed. And it is moving: the Baldwin County District Attorney’s Office has confirmed it has been in contact with the Alabama Ethics Commission regarding the complaint, which now appears on the commission’s docket for a hearing in October.
A council divided by choice, not by scandal
The story of the two absent signatures is, in the end, a study in how differently people absorb the same crisis. Robertson watched the same footage his colleagues watched and reached the opposite conclusion about what to do with what he saw: say nothing, publicly and repeatedly, and hope the machinery of the ethics process — not a councilman’s signature — decides the matter.
Johnson’s absence requires no interpretation at all. He was caring for his grandson, missing the meetings where the footage was shown and the complaint was drafted, and within a month he was gone from the council altogether.
What remains is a three-member complainant bloc, a mayor under investigation by the state’s ethics commission, a federal lawsuit still pending against the city, and a September council seat to fill following Johnson’s resignation. Whether the Ethics Commission finds probable cause, whether the footage is ever released, and whether Orange Beach’s government can find its way back to something quieter are questions the coming months will answer. Robertson, for one, has already said what he hopes for. It is written in capital letters, in his own hand, on his own Facebook page: STOP.