Ball State University reached a $225,000 settlement with a former employee who said the school retaliated against her for criticizing conservative activist Charlie Kirk in a Facebook post, her attorneys said Tuesday.
The ACLU said the agreement resolves a federal lawsuit it filed last year on behalf of Suzanne Swierc, who had worked as director of health promotion and advocacy at Ball State in Muncie, Indiana, before she was dismissed last September.
Ball State said at the time that Swierc’s private Facebook post was the sole reason for her termination, arguing it caused “significant disruption” to the campus, according to the ACLU’s account of the dispute.
Swierc’s attorneys said the firing violated her First Amendment rights because she was “speaking as a private citizen on a matter of public concern,” said Stevie Pactor, an ACLU attorney in Indiana.
In a statement provided to campus leaders and shared with The Associated Press, Ball State President Geoffrey Mearns defended the decision, saying backlash over the post threatened the school’s enrollment and fundraising. Mearns also argued that the “modest monetary payment” in the settlement was substantially less than the costs of continuing to fight the lawsuit.
The disagreement also centered on what the post expressed and how widely it circulated. In the Facebook post, Swierc referred to Kirk’s death as a “tragedy,” but she also described it as reflecting “the violence, fear, and hatred he sowed,” and she wrote, “If you think Charlie Kirk was a wonderful person, we can’t be friends.”
The ACLU said Swierc’s privacy settings limited her posts from the general public, but that someone captured a screenshot of her comments that was then shared widely online.
According to Mearns, the reaction to Swierc’s post included an influx of outraged phone calls and emails to the university, with some people warning they would withhold donations and one parent saying they planned to withdraw their children. Mearns also said some callers threatened violence.
The settlement comes after a string of legal disputes involving workers fired over social media posts related to Kirk following his killing last September. Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, was killed by a gunman Sept. 10 on the campus of a Utah university, where he was credited with helping galvanize conservative youth turnout for President Donald Trump’s re-election.
The ACLU and related reporting on similar cases have pointed to multiple lawsuits in which workers alleged they were punished for online comments or reposts connected to Kirk, with outcomes that have included settlements and, in some instances, reinstatements. Earlier this month, a Florida state agency agreed to pay $485,000 to settle a lawsuit by a former state biologist who was fired after she reposted a meme. In January, Austin Peay State University in Tennessee reinstated a professor and paid him a $500,000 settlement after he sued over his firing for posting a 2023 headline about Kirk and school shootings.
Still, lawsuits by other fired workers in Kirk-related cases have remained pending, according to the reporting.