October 24, 2025
Weaver addressed the continuing receivership battle on the ‘Inc. 5000 Convention’ on Oct. 24.
Uncle Nearest founder and CEO Fawn Weaver is denouncing what she calls a “smear marketing campaign” in her firm’s ongoing receivership case.
Weaver addressed the continuing receivership battle throughout a hearth chat titled “Reclaiming Your Firm in Turbulent Occasions” on the “Inc. 5000 Convention” on Oct. 24, discussing the corporate’s reported default on $108 million in loans to Kentucky lender Farm Credit score.
“Martha’s Winery was a smear marketing campaign tactic,” Weaver stated, as captured by Inc. “Their hope was that the choose would see it, would settle for the smear, and would flip over keys of my firm to them.”
Earlier this month, receiver Phillip Younger requested a choose to rule on whether or not extra property tied to the Uncle Nearest distillery—together with the whiskey, a restaurant and leisure venue in Shelbyville, Tennessee, and a Martha’s Winery property bought by the Weavers in 2023—must be included within the receivership.
On Oct. 21, Weaver, who based the corporate along with her husband, Keith, filed a response opposing the receiver’s request to carry 10 extra companies beneath courtroom management. The receiver had sought “clarification” on whether or not to incorporate these entities, citing the obvious intermingling of funds with the distillery positioned in receivership in September.
Of their submitting, the Weavers argued that the entities are separate from the distillery and never liable for its money owed, warning that putting them beneath the receiver’s management would strip them and others of their monetary pursuits. The movement additionally claims that Uncle Nearest will not be bancrupt and has sufficient property to cowl the defaulted loans with out involving different companies.
“If you may get the choose to consider that we misappropriated funds to purchase a property, a trip residence—let’s be clear, I’m from California, what I’m not going to do is purchase a trip residence that’s not on the water in a city that isn’t sunny 9 months out of the 12 months,” Weaver stated on the convention.
Weaver’s newest submitting follows an August movement asserting that Farm Credit score’s receivership request “ignores important context” and that the lender did not take correct authorized steps to safe its declare on the property as collateral within the occasion of a mortgage default, some extent Weaver reiterated in the course of the convention.
“They didn’t have safety over any of our collateral. And the query turns into, why not? Why did you not ask to excellent seven of our eight items of actual property? Martha’s Winery is only one of them,” Weaver stated.
Nearest Inexperienced Distillery and Uncle Nearest whiskey have been positioned beneath a receiver’s management final month. Celebrated because the second-best-selling Tennessee whiskey in the US after Jack Daniel’s, the model has earned quite a few awards and sustained gross sales progress regardless of a post-pandemic downturn in alcohol consumption.
However the distillery is amongst a number of dealing with monetary challenges as Individuals drink much less and exports decline amid commerce tensions from President Donald Trump’s tariff warfare. Regardless of the receivership, Weaver stays dedicated to the corporate she based, viewing the struggles as a part of the dangers inherent in entrepreneurship.
“Each entrepreneur goes to have a second in time the place it appears to be like like all is misplaced,” Weaver stated. “The one distinction between those that have been probably the most profitable entrepreneurs in American historical past and those that have failed are those that gave up within the in between.”
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