Bristol building owners continue to fight legal battle against abortion clinic

BRISTOL — The Southwest Virginia landlords who spent two years trying to force an abortion clinic out of their commercial building are carrying the fight to the Court of Appeals of Virginia, even as the clinic’s owner asks appellate judges to throw the appeal out as premature.

Attorneys for brothers Chase King and Chadwick King filed a notice of appeal on Oct. 25 challenging Bristol Circuit Judge Sage Johnson’s September decision dismissing their lawsuit against Diane Derzis, owner of Bristol Women’s Health. The notice does not spell out the legal theories the Kings intend to press on appeal. Derzis has denied their claims. The brothers have said they oppose abortion on moral grounds and that abortions performed in the building caused them professional and personal harm.

Judge Johnson dismissed the suit after finding the Kings waited too long to file and behaved as if the lease remained a binding contract — including by cashing rent checks from the clinic and discussing property improvements and upkeep. The commercial lease was signed June 20, 2022; the lawsuit did not land until about six months later, according to court reporting on the case.

Derzis’s attorney, Alexis Tahinci, moved on Dec. 6 to dismiss the appeal. The motion argues the appeal is premature because part of the underlying case is still unresolved. Johnson has not ruled on a counterclaim Tahinci filed after the building owners sent an April 30 letter giving the clinic 30 days’ notice that the lease would be terminated. That counterclaim sought an injunction to keep the clinic from being removed; a temporary injunction has been granted, leaving the clinic in place while the litigation continues.

The dispute sits on a uniquely charged map. Bristol straddles the Virginia-Tennessee line. Abortions remain legal in Virginia under state restrictions, while Tennessee has enacted near-total bans since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022. That geography has made the Osborne Street clinic a regional destination for patients from states with tighter laws — and a regular site for protesters. Derzis, who lives in Alabama, has said the clinic continues to operate and serve women from the Bristol area and surrounding states. She previously owned the Jackson, Mississippi, clinic at the center of the Supreme Court case that ended the federal constitutional right to abortion.

Derzis has said she is not shopping for a new location and remains committed to Bristol. The lease on the Osborne Street building was structured as a one-year term with options to renew for another year and then two subsequent three-year options — a commercial arrangement that, in the trial court’s view, the landlords continued to honor in practice even as they later sought to eject the tenant on moral and contractual theories.

State Del. Terry Kilgore, whose district includes nearby Scott County, did not return calls seeking comment when the appeal was reported. Local political silence does not reduce the case’s visibility: Bristol’s split jurisdiction has drawn national attention precisely because a short drive can mean the difference between access and a near-ban.

Legally, the next chapter turns on timing and finality. If the Court of Appeals agrees the Kings’ appeal jumped the gun while the counterclaim and injunction issues remain live, the case could bounce back to circuit court before any appellate review of Johnson’s dismissal. If the appeal proceeds, judges will confront whether delay and continued acceptance of rent barred the landlords’ claims regardless of their stated moral objections.

For patients and clinic staff, the temporary injunction is the immediate fact on the ground: services continue while lawyers argue about leases, notices, and appellate jurisdiction. For the Kings, the appeal is a bid to reopen a door the circuit court closed. For Bristol, the litigation is another reminder that the city’s Main Street economy and its place on the abortion map are now intertwined — and that commercial landlord-tenant paperwork can become the vehicle for a much larger cultural fight.

Whatever the Court of Appeals does with Tahinci’s dismissal motion, the underlying conflict over who controls the Osborne Street space is not finished. The temporary injunction keeps the clinic open for now; the appeal keeps the landlords’ challenge alive on paper. Southwest Virginia’s only widely known abortion clinic remains, for the moment, both a medical provider and a litigant in a case that started as a lease dispute and became something larger.

Bristol is an independent city in Southwest Virginia.

Scott County is a county in Southwest Virginia. Its county seat is Gate City.