Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | Celebrity | September 4, 2026
Earlier this week, the Wheel of Fortune announcer Jim Thornton was suspended for suspiciously vague reasons. A passenger on a flight registered a complaint about Thornton, the pilot called ahead to have authorities meet Thornton when they landed, and beyond that, no one was saying much of anything except that Thornton was wearing his Wheel of Fortune jacket. According to his lawyer, he was briefly questioned by police but no charges were filed against him. But whatever it was, it was bad enough that not only did Wheel of Fortune suspend him pending an investigation, but they recast him and edited his voice out of previously recorded episodes that had not yet aired.
And now we know that it was all completely warranted. What the passenger who registered the complaint saw, according to TMZ, is Jim Thornton allegedly hanging out in a chatroom for grown men attracted to children young enough to be their grandchildren. One of the messages the passenger saw read, “Couple of cute boys and a hot little girl.” Another read, “All-you-can-eat Boyfett.”
You get the picture.
Ironically, one of the screenshots the passenger took contained a conversation about how people shouldn’t be looking at CP in public places.
But the context lines up now: He wasn’t arrested because the chatroom didn’t actually contain CP. They just talked about it.
Jim Thornton’s lawyer, however, is selling quite the tale about how Thornton frequently visits suicide prevention websites to offer support to people struggling with suicidal ideation, owing to losing a family member to suicide a couple of years prior. Typically, he goes to chat.988lifeline.org, a chatroom for people with suicidal thoughts, but he was sent a link to lifeline.chat, which is a chatroom for people with pedophilic thoughts. Thornton claims that as soon as he figured it out, he left the chatroom, although the timestamps on the images show that he was in there for nearly an hour. On a flight. Wearing his Wheel of Fortune jacket.
I don’t think Jim Thornton is going to get his job back.
